The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently threw out the class-action settlement involving sandwich chain giant Subway, calling the settlement "utterly worthless."
 
The lawsuit began nearly five years ago when an Australian teenager posted a photo on Facebook of a footlong sandwich he had recently purchased at Subway, which measured shy of twelve inches. That prompted a class action lawsuit against Doctor's Associates Inc, the operator of more than 44,000 Subway locations worldwide. The lawsuit alleged that the Subway chain deceived customers by selling "Footlong" subs that were less than a foot.
 
A settlement approved last year by a Wisconsin federal judge required Subway to adopt quality control measures to ensure its sandwiches met the advertised lengths. According to news reports, the parties settled the case with an award of $520,000 to the class action lawyers, plus $5,000 of "incentive" awards to ten plaintiffs for settling.
 
"A class action that seeks only worthless benefits for the class and yields only fees for class counsel is no better than a racket and should be dismissed out of hand," wrote Circuit Judge Diane Sykes for the three-judge panel. "That's an apt description of this case."
 
Judge Sykes further noted in her opinion that "short" sandwiches contained the same amount of food by weight.
 
"The settlement acknowledges as much when it says that uniformity in bread length is impossible due to the natural variability of the bread-baking process," Sykes added.
 
—Source: foxbusiness.com