Monday, August 07, 2006

NWU Members to Leadership: Fire 'Our' Lawyers

Some National Writers Union members are asking the NWU leadership to fire their lawyers for misconduct, and support the objectors' appeal and oppose the settlement. This has become an issue in the current NWU elections.

We earlier noted language in the settlement agreement binding the associational plaintiffs (Authors Guild and American Society of Journalists and Authors, as well as NWU) to support of the settlement. But at least at the NWU, people are talking openly, if still internally, about what than really means in the context of the parties' misleading filings about the supposed practical impossibility of the C Reduction (now acknowledged by the parties to be a possibility, and asserted by us objectors to be a high probability).

(For background, see the recent information on this blog. For deeper background on dissatisfaction with class counsel, see Edward Hasbrouck's September 2005 blog post, http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000812.html#more, which we referred to at the time here, "EDWARD HASBROUCK: LIES FROM 'MY' LAWYERS," http://freelancerights.blogspot.com/2005/09/edward-hasbrouck-lies-from-my-lawyers.html.)

The position of these NWU members (with which I obviously sympathize) is that the associations' decisions to remain supporters of the settlement, and retain current counsel, are continuing ones that could be changed at any time. The dissidents are asking, among other things, if their organizations could be held liable for the misconduct of their counsel, especially if the orgs are aware of it and fail to take corrective action.

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