News on Wal-Mart class action -- possible settlement nears?

Wal-Mart's hometown paper reports on settlement talks in the Wal-Mart sex discrimination class action -- involving a big-time mediator.

I normally wouldn't report such vague rumors, but this case is a story we have been following. So have all employment attorneys concerned about exposure to large class actions.

The story basically reports an impressive list of "no comments." This suggests perhaps something serious really is going on and nobody wants to mess it up by leaking any details.

I would like to see this settlement, should it occur, parallel an EEOC settlement:

Consent decree with lots of "best practices" and monitoring required as the most significant relief.

They say what they're really after is changing the company's practices -- I heard this out of the lead plaintiffs' lawyer's mouth in a tele-seminar -- so let them achieve this.

Relatively modest damages.

Using my favorite settlement measure -- the kind of car a plaintiff can buy with settlement money -- no class member should be able to afford much more than the cars that show up in the left margin ads when I read the story.

Remember, this is a class of non-hired, non-promoted persons who would have a very hard way to go individually proving that any discriminatory pattern and practice actually caused their personal negative employment result.

Damages for those that could prove such causation would primarily be relatively modest pay differentials between actual earnings and potential earnings.

Non-obscene attorneys' fees for the lawyers who claimed to be doing this for the greater good

I.e., actual hourly rates of less than $1,000! Say no more.

Here's the story: "Wal-Mart Reportedly In Settlement Talks" by Anita French in The Morning News