The price of success
Colman Herman was always a great story -- even if he was mostly wrong.
Herman is the David who not only took on the retail Goliaths like Home Depot and Wal-Mart, but won. What started with a nasty exchange with a Home Depot manager in Quincy in 1999 over the price of an item turned into a five-year crusade to force retailers to comply with a Massachusetts law requiring most items to have a price on them.
Class-action lawsuits growing out of his campaign forced Home Depot to pay $3.8 million in 2002 and then Wal-Mart to spend $7.4 million over three years. You didn't have to agree with Herman on the need for a price sticker on every box of bolts in this Internet age -- and I did not -- to admire the lesson that one very persistent man can make a difference.
Now Herman, a freelance writer from Dorchester, has a new target: his class-action lawyer who helped win the huge settlements.
In a letter to Superior Court Judge Allan van Gestel, who heard the Home Depot case, Herman said he wants his lawyer, Robert Bonsignore, removed as class counsel. ''As the lead plaintiff, I am extremely displeased with the manner in which Mr. Bonsignore has handled the case this past year. I will not mince words: He is incompetent, inarticulate, extraordinarily disorganized, unable to focus, likes to fight with Home Depot just for the sake of fighting, and is more interested in his fees than in the needs of the class."
Responds Bonsignore: ''Mr. Herman has his positions where the settlements should go and the other class representatives have a different position. He decided to go off on his own. He is not the only person in the case."
For all the battles he won in court, Herman essentially lost the war for item pricing. When Herman and Bonsignore started bringing class-action suits against not only Home Depot and Wal-Mart, but Walgreens, Target, and Lowe's, too, the retailers started lobbying Attorney General Tom Reilly to change the rules, and they got what they wanted. Last summer, Reilly revised the regulations to allow retailers to stop marking prices on individual items if they install bar code scanners that print out self-adhesive price stickers. Bonsignore sees it as a reasonable compromise; Herman does not.
Now Herman and Bonsignore have split over something even more basic: money.
Herman, who estimates he put 2,000 hours into his campaign, did not want and did not get a dime from the class-action cases. But he is furious that the millions from the retailers that he says should have gone to consumer causes are instead going to worthy but unrelated charities like Habitat for Humanity. He also says it is Bonsignore and the other lawyers who are the real winners. Altogether the lawyers got half of the $3.8 million Home Depot settlement, $750,000 in the Wal-Mart settlement, and are in line for more in the other pending cases. Herman says he wanted to end the suits with Home Depot.
''It is all about the fees," Herman said.
Bonsignore said he took a high-risk case that no other lawyer would take. He points to a letter Herman recently wrote to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Wrote Herman: ''As to the lawyer's accusation that the attorneys' fees are 'huge,' they are commensurate with the voluminous amount of legal work that was required of my counsel. I was there; I know what went on." (Says Herman now: ''I said it to be a team player at the time.")
Herman is out of the class-action cases now. His efforts have had a perverse result. The law he sued to have enforced has been gutted because of his success. Money he helped win went to the attorney general's office, which had refused to enforce the item-pricing law. But if he lost the war, he is not defeated: He recently was back where he started, in small-claims session, bringing an item-pricing case on his own against OfficeMax.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
