Court Approves $5M EyeMed Data Breach Settlement; Claims Closed

On September 18, 2026, Judge Douglas R. Cole of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio granted final approval of a $5,000,000 non-reversionary class settlement with EyeMed Vision Care over a June 2020 email breach, and awarded fees, costs and service awards out of the fund.

Information last verified on September 24, 2026.

Status: Final approval was granted on September 18, 2026. The claim deadline passed on December 11, 2025 and did not reopen. No new claims can be filed.

Jurisdiction scope: This is a federal order from the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, in a nationwide class action. It binds the certified class of people to whom EyeMed issued notice of the 2020 data incident, wherever they live, and it resolves only this case. It is not a ruling about any other breach, company or settlement.

What Happened

EyeMed Vision Care is a vision benefits administrator. According to the consolidated complaint described in the court's order, unknown attackers accessed an EyeMed email account on June 24, 2020, and EyeMed did not discover the intrusion until July 1, 2020. The account held members' names, contact information, dates of birth, vision insurance account numbers, Medicaid or Medicare numbers, Social Security numbers and medical histories.

The New York Attorney General, which reached a separate $600,000 agreement with EyeMed in 2022, put the nationwide reach of the underlying breach at approximately 2.1 million consumers, including 98,632 New Yorkers. The class certified in this federal case is narrower. It covers the people to whom EyeMed issued notice of the data incident, which the settlement administrator counted as 679,524 individuals.

The plaintiffs pleaded seven counts, including negligence, negligence per se, breach of implied contract, unjust enrichment and several California consumer protection and medical privacy claims. The court dismissed all of them except the traditional negligence claim. After mediation and more than a year of negotiation, the parties reached the settlement that the court preliminarily approved on July 29, 2025.

That preliminary approval order set the claim deadline. Class members had "until December 11, 2025, to submit settlement claims, in the manner prescribed by the settlement agreement." That date has passed. Final approval is the court's decision that the deal already struck is fair. It does not create a new filing opportunity.

Notice reached the class before the deadline. Kroll mailed the short notice to 679,524 unique class members and, after re-mailing to updated addresses, estimated a 97.48% reach rate. It received a little under 51,000 claims, five opt-out requests and no objections.

What the Order Awards

The order's operative paragraph reads:

"For the reasons discussed above, the Court GRANTS Plaintiffs' Unopposed Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement (Doc. 50) and ACCEPTS the proposed settlement agreement. Finally, the Court GRANTS Plaintiffs' Unopposed Motion for Attorney's Fees, Expenses, and Class Representative Service Awards (Doc. 49) as well as their request for settlement administration costs [citation omitted]. Specifically, the Court AWARDS class counsel attorneys' fees of $1,666,666.67 and 38,822.40 in costs and expenses, AWARDS $2,500 each to Chandra Tate, Barbara Whittom, and Alexus Wynn, and AWARDS $775,265.70 in settlement administration costs to Kroll Settlement Administration, LLC. Finally, the Court DIRECTS the Clerk to enter judgment and to TERMINATE this case on its docket."

Opinion and Order, Tate v. EyeMed Vision Care, LLC, No. 1:21-cv-00036-DRC, Doc. 56 at 42 (S.D. Ohio Sept. 18, 2026), PAGEID #1034.

Two details in that passage are worth flagging for anyone quoting it. The conclusion prints the expenses figure as "38,822.40" without a dollar sign, while the body of the order describes the same award as "$38,822.40 in litigation expenses." And the order's opening paragraph states the fee as "one-third of the common fund, $1,666,666.66," one cent below the figure in the conclusion. The awards themselves are not in doubt, but the printed cents differ between page 1 and page 42.

The rest of the fund is governed by the settlement agreement's five-step waterfall, which the order describes. Taxes on the fund are paid first. Administration costs, service awards and attorneys' fees and expenses come next. Then documented out-of-pocket loss claims and lost-time claims are paid, with lost time reimbursed at $25 per hour for up to four hours and the two categories together capped at $10,000 per class member. Remaining money is distributed pro rata to everyone who filed a valid claim. The court wrote that the pro rata share is now about $35, rather than the roughly $50 projected earlier, because more claims came in than expected.

If money is still left over, the agreement calls for a second pro rata redistribution, then payment to state unclaimed property funds, and only as a last resort a cy pres donation subject to court approval. The parties proposed the Electronic Privacy Information Center as the cy pres recipient.

What the Law Actually Says

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e)(2) is the standard the judge applied. A court may approve a class settlement "only after a hearing and only on finding that it is fair, reasonable, and adequate," considering whether the class representatives and class counsel adequately represented the class, whether the proposal was negotiated at arm's length, whether the relief is adequate, and whether the proposal treats class members equitably relative to each other. The adequacy inquiry under Rule 23(e)(2)(C) looks at the costs, risks and delay of trial and appeal, the effectiveness of the distribution method, the terms of any fee award including timing of payment, and any side agreement identified under Rule 23(e)(3).

The Sixth Circuit adds four overlapping considerations: likelihood of success on the merits, the complexity and expense of litigation, the opinions of class members and counsel, and the risk of collusion. The court worked through all eight and found the settlement fair, reasonable and adequate.

Rule 23(h) is the fee authority. In a certified class action a court "may award reasonable attorney's fees and nontaxable costs that are authorized by law or by the parties' agreement," on a motion, with notice to the class and an opportunity for class members to object. Here no class member objected.

"Non-reversionary" is the term class members should understand. It means the $5,000,000 does not go back to EyeMed. There is no clause returning unclaimed money to the defendant. Whatever is not spent on approved fees, costs and claims gets redistributed within the class, sent to state unclaimed property funds, or given to a court-approved charitable recipient. In a reversionary settlement, low claim rates benefit the defendant. In this one, they do not.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

A final approval order is often reported as if it were the end of a case, and in a sense it is: the court directed the Clerk to enter judgment and terminate the docket. But what it actually settles is narrower than the headline. It settles that the deal is fair, that the release binds the class, and that specified sums come out of the fund. It does not settle when anyone is paid.

The fee arithmetic in this order is the part worth reading closely, because it is unusually transparent about where a data breach fund goes. The court approved 33.33% of the fund as fees and then ran a lodestar cross-check: class counsel reported roughly 2,101 hours and a lodestar of $1,792,561.50, which makes the multiplier about 0.93. That is a negative multiplier, meaning the percentage award is slightly less than counsel's own hourly math would support. Judges treat that as strong evidence the fee is not a windfall, and this one did.

Administration is the line that deserves more attention than it usually gets. At $775,265.70, Kroll's costs are about 15.5% of the entire fund, about 103 times the total service awards and nearly twenty times the litigation expenses. The judge called the figure "rather eye-catching" and approved it anyway, attributing it to the size of the class and the documentation requirement for out-of-pocket claims. Adding fees, expenses, administration and service awards together, roughly $2.49 million of the $5 million is spoken for before taxes, leaving a bit over half the fund for class payments. That is arithmetic on the order's own numbers, not a criticism of the result, and it is close to typical for a mid-size data breach fund.

The other number that tells a story is participation. Just under 51,000 claims from a class of 679,524 is about 7.5%, and that was enough to push the projected per-person payment down from about $50 to about $35. Notice worked, by the court's own finding, at a 97.48% reach rate. Most people who received notice simply did not file. That gap between reach and response is the ordinary condition of consumer class actions, and it is why a per-person figure quoted at preliminary approval is a projection rather than a promise.

What Happens Next

The order directs the Clerk to enter judgment and terminate the case. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1)(A), the notice of appeal in a civil case where the United States is not a party must be filed within 30 days after entry of the judgment or order appealed from. No class member objected to this settlement, which removes the most common source of an appeal from a final approval order.

If no appeal is taken and the judgment becomes final, the administrator works through the distribution waterfall described in the settlement agreement. The order does not set a distribution timetable, and this article will not guess at one. Class members who already filed a valid claim should watch for communications from the court-appointed administrator and should be skeptical of anyone else contacting them about this settlement.

This article is news reporting about a court order and is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship and it does not address any individual's situation. If a data breach has affected you, consult a licensed attorney in your state.

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Last updated: 2026-09-24. Details verified as of 2026-09-24.