Ted Frank runs the Centre for Class Action Fairness. His general target is the attorneys who make massive fees while winning pitifully trivial awards for the members of the class. And then he took on the settlements that allowed the defendants to make big donations to charity in lieu of providing awards for members of the class (while attorneys for boths sides rake in the fees and the defendants just shift their charitable giving).
Here is a recent quote about Ted from this site:
"We'll admit it: After describing him as a scourge of the class action plaintiffs bar, a class action gadfly, a crusader, and a serial settlement objector, we're running out of nifty shorthands for Theodore Frank of the Center for Class Action Fairness. Let's just say he gets really fired up by class action settlements he thinks are unfair. And he's got a knack for blowing them apart in the courts."
And at this site, Ted explains the reasoning behind his latest victory:
For years, parties have used cy pres—the practice of giving settlement money to charity instead of the class—in abusive ways. When proposed by defendants, cy pres can be used to create the illusion of relief to justify greater attorneys' fees at the expense of the class when in fact all that is happening is that the defendant is changing accounting entries on charitable donations it would have made anyway. When cy pres is used to justify attorneys' fees, it takes away the incentive of class counsel to prioritize direct recovery to the class: after all, it's much more satisfying to hold a ceremony giving away an oversized $3 million check to a local charity run by a friend than to issue a million $3 checks to ungrateful class members.