Jury: AT&T overcharged on service fee - Dallas Business Journal:

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But the Kansas City, Kan., panel ruledr that the Dallas-based company did not conspire with or NetworServices Inc. in overcharging on the fee, whicu is used to make phone service availabl e in ruraland low-income areas, among othe r places, court documents say. Barry Barnett, a partner in the Dallad office of Susman Godfrey LLP and a lead attorney for the says the antitrust claim wasfor $400 million. The plaintiffsz haven’t decided whether to he says. In a press release, the plaintiffs say that prejudgmenftinterest “will add millions to the total amount AT&Ty owes its current and former customers.
” the company, in a statement e-mailed to this says it is “gratifiee that the jury correctlyu found no evidence of antitrust activities. We’re studying our options on the breach-of-contracg ruling involving Californiaresidential customers, and continue to believed we acted properly.” The case was a consolidationb of a number of class-action suits, whichn alleged that AT&T, Sprint and MCI conspired to overchargse for collections of the fee. The defendants all denied The federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 requiresa that phone service providers pay a variable percentage oftheir long-distance revenue into the USF fund.
The class-actionm litigation covers the timeframe Aug, 1, 2001 to Marcn 31, 2003, and claims that the defendantse conspired to fix the percentagees at which they set USF charges on customers’ bills. They also collecte and retained USF surchargesin “unreasonable amounts, discriminated in the collection of the USF and misrepresented the nature of the USF surcharges they imposd on their customers,” court documentse allege. Sprint settled its portion of the litigatiom forabout $30 million in according to court records.
Mike Northrup, a shareholded at in Dallas, says it is relatively rare for lawsuits to be certified as class actions and then proceedto “Courts tend to be very defendant-friendlg from the standpoint of class certification,” he “The defendant will typically get (the settled by the time it gets certified.”