The ABC Legal Services Settlement Class Is 245,808 People, Not 39,965 — Six Times Bigger, Which Puts the $450 Ceiling Far Out of Reach. Claims Are Closed; the Final Approval Hearing Is October 26.

If you filed a claim in the ABC Legal Services settlement, nothing has been paid and nothing can be paid until the judge approves the deal and the approval becomes final. As of October 12, 2026, the official site at ABCDataSettlement.com lists all three deadlines as passed and the fairness hearing as October 26, 2026; the docket we checked shows no final approval order.

What has changed since our September 16 article is the size of the class. We wrote then that the class was reported at 39,965 people, a figure attributed to ABC Legal’s filing with the Maine Attorney General that we flagged as unverified, and we argued that such a small class made the $450 ceiling realistic. The court record says otherwise. In the motion for preliminary approval filed April 1, 2026 (Dkt. 46), class counsel wrote: “According to Defendant, there are 245,808 members of the Settlement Class spread across the United States.” We do not know why the two numbers differ; the settlement covers everyone on ABC Legal’s class list, and the court filing is the better source. We correct our earlier arithmetic below.

The payment terms themselves have not changed. The long-form notice says the no-proof cash payment is “estimated at $50, and may be increased or decreased based on the number of Approved Claims, up to $450,” and that claimants can add documented out-of-pocket losses of up to $5,000. Claimants could also pick two years of one-bureau credit monitoring from IDX with $1 million of identity theft insurance. One correction to our September piece: the notice ties monitoring to the claim form — “each Settlement Class Member who submits a valid and timely Claim Form may elect to receive two (2) years of one-bureau Credit Monitoring.” If you did not file, you do not get it.

Here is the order the settlement agreement sets. Out of the $2,500,000 come administration costs and taxes, then service awards, then attorneys’ fees and costs, then credit monitoring; what is left is the “Net Settlement Fund.” Documented-loss claims are paid from it first, but they cannot take more than 50 percent of it. The rest is split evenly among approved cash claims: “the amount remaining in the Net Settlement Fund shall be divided by the number of Settlement Class Members who submit Approved Claims for Pro Rata Cash Payments and allocated on a pro rata basis up to $450.00.” If there is not enough for $50 each, every cash payment is cut pro rata.

Our arithmetic, with the numbers on file. Class counsel may ask for up to one-third of the fund, $833,333.33, and the proposed final order attached to the agreement lists that amount “in total for attorneys’ fees, expenses and costs,” plus service awards of $3,500 each for the eight class representatives, $28,000 in total. That leaves about $1,638,667 before administration, notice and credit-monitoring costs, which are not public. That amount covers about 32,800 cash claims at $50, or about 13.3 percent of a 245,808-person class. At $450 it covers only about 3,640 claims, roughly 1.5 percent of the class. The cap is reached only if almost nobody claims; the estimate holds unless an unusually large share of the class claimed. The real figure depends on the claim count, which has not been published.

The timing comes straight from the agreement. The settlement only takes effect on the “Effective Date,” defined as “thirty-one (31) days after entry of the Final Approval Order and Judgment if no appeals are taken,” later if someone appeals. ABC Legal then pays the rest of the fund into the settlement account “not more than ten (10) days after the Effective Date.” Credit-monitoring activation codes go out “within fourteen (14) days of the Effective Date,” mostly by email. Cash payments are issued “as soon as practicable after the allocation and distribution of funds are determined by the Settlement Administrator following the Effective Date.” By our count, if Judge Whitehead signs on October 26 and nobody appeals, the earliest Effective Date is November 26, 2026, and the defendant’s deadline to fund is December 6, 2026. No payment date has been announced.

You get paid the way you chose on the claim form, electronically or by paper check. Checks “expire if not negotiated within sixty (60) days of their date of issue,” and so do reissued payments. If your address or email has changed, tell the administrator: the notice puts that responsibility on you.

The claim deadline was September 28, 2026, and the site’s own table now reads “Deadline passed” for claims, exclusions and objections. If you missed it, there is no late-claim procedure in the documents we read, and you are still bound by the release if the court approves the deal.

If you did file, there is nothing to do except keep your contact details current. The administrator is reachable at 1-844-482-2656, info@ABCDataSettlement.com, or ABC Legal Services Data Incident Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 668, Baton Rouge, LA 70821. The notice asks people not to call the court.

One thing worth knowing about the fee request. The preliminary approval order set the objection deadline and the fee filing deadline on different clocks: objections were due 60 days after the notice deadline (August 28), while the fee application was due 45 days before the hearing (September 11). The long-form notice promised that class counsel’s fee motion “will be made available on the Settlement Website … before the deadline for you to object to or opt out of the Settlement.” As of October 12, 2026, the court-documents page lists the settlement agreement, complaint, preliminary approval motion and declaration, and preliminary approval order, but no fee motion. The September 11 filings are on the court docket, but their text is not available free of charge, so we cannot report what was asked for. Whether the judge looks at that sequence is up to the court on October 26.

The case is real. The federal docket lists In re ABC Legal Services Data Security Litigation, No. 2:24-cv-02092, in the Western District of Washington before Judge Jamal N. Whitehead, and the preliminary approval order (Dkt. 50) was signed May 28, 2026. The settlement site’s footer names Eisner Advisory Group LLC, the administrator the court approved. Legitimate contact comes from that site, the 1-844-482-2656 number, or the Baton Rouge P.O. box. No document we read charges class members anything to file or to be paid, so anyone asking for a fee is not the administrator.

Mobile searches for this settlement also return AbsoluteDataSettlement.com, titled “Absolute Dental Data Incident.” That is a different company and a different case. The ABC Legal settlement is the one with case number 2:24-cv-02092 and the site ABCDataSettlement.com. If the case number on your notice is different, so is the settlement. The same goes for questions about the AT&T or T-Mobile breaches: they are separate cases with their own notices and administrators, and nothing on this page applies to them.

Searchers also ask “What are the current data breach settlements available?” This one is no longer taking claims. Our data breach settlement calculator shows how settlements that are still open usually pay.

In September we could not say what happens to money nobody claims or cashes. The agreement is explicit: “No portion of the Settlement Fund shall revert or be repaid to Defendant after the Effective Date.” Money left over more than 150 days after distribution, or 30 days after the last reissued checks expire, whichever comes later, goes “as required by state law or to the Non-Profit Residual Recipient,” which the agreement names as “the Legal Foundation of Washington, or a non-profit organization(s) otherwise approved by the Court.” Class counsel’s motion calls it a “non-reversionary settlement fund of $2,500,000.00.”

Separately from the fund, ABC Legal says it has made security changes “valued at approximately $775,000,” paid outside the settlement and attested in a confidential declaration. ABC Legal denies the allegations and all liability. The complaint’s account is an allegation: that “beginning on or around August 7, 2024, an unknown actor gained unauthorized access to ABC’s computer network.”

The motion compares the deal with other small common-fund breach settlements: $1.25 million for about 800,000 LinkedIn users and $2,625,000 for about 1.6 million people in the NCB Management case. Measured that way, about $10 per class member before costs is not unusual. What made this case look unusual in September was a class size that the court record does not support.