Judge Alsup calls ClaimsHero opt-out push 'a fraud of immense proportions'

The hearing in San Francisco on Thursday marked an unusual intervention by Judge Alsup into the marketing tactics surrounding a class-action settlement. According to Bloomberg Law, Alsup told ClaimsHero's counsel Devin Freedman of Freedman Normand Friedland LLP that he was 'disturbed' by the 'blatant attempt by your client to trick people into opting out' for a 'quick buck', and he called the marketing 'propaganda'. When asked about the firm's federal and state court experience, the judge spelled the answer out himself: 'Z-E-R-O'.

The settlement at issue covers nearly 500,000 books, and the ads run by ClaimsHero have urged authors to reject the roughly $3,000-per-work payout in favor of a separate suit promising up to $150,000 per book. Alsup's order gives the firm 48 hours to revise its website with an explicit acknowledgment of its lack of court experience, and the Nov. 25 evidentiary hearing will bring signed-up authors before the court for questioning. The case, Bartz v. Anthropic, is thus moving beyond the usual capability-and-capital beat into the plumbing of settlement administration, where claim aggregators tend to shadow large class actions.