Thursday, December 17, 2015

Feinberg to head VW Compensation Fund

Now that we know where the VW MDL will go (Northern District of California - cue if you're going to San Francisco...) and that Judge Charles Breyer will be in charge, VW has announced that Ken Feinberg will run their claims administration program.  You can find Danielle Ivory's New York Times article about the announcement here

As this Wall Street Journal article by Sara Randazzo points out, the highest concentration of affected cars (but not the highest concentration of cases) is in California.  But there were lots of reasons (which she lists) to pick other locations.

There are a number of ways that Feinberg can help resolve this litigation, but one very important question is how his work will interrelate with that of the many powerful plaintiffs firms now involved.  There are lots of ways to calculate the damages here that would seem fair, such as for example predicting based on past driving habits a given driver's likely use of the car and paying for the difference in gas mileage (since the cars complying with emissions standards will have lower gas mileage than promised), or calculating the value of the car on the secondary market and paying the difference of what it would have been worth had the representation been accurate (the "Edmonds/Kelly Bluebook approach").  It will be interesting to see what Feinberg does.

 

 

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/mass_tort_litigation/2015/12/feinberg-to-head-vw-compensation-fund-.html

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