After a class settlement agreement was made, but before it was approved, the settling defendant’s insurers moved to intervene, hoping to persuade the district court to delay approval of the settlement pending a state-court determination of whether they owed the settling defendant coverage, and, if so, to challenge the settlement as collusive and unreasonable. “From the get-go the insurers had reason to believe that the class action could well harm their interests” and Rule 24 requires that a motion to intervene be timely. “It was not in this case, which had dragged on for years and would be doomed to drag on for additional years were the motion to be granted. A prospective intervenor must move to intervene as soon as it ‘knows or has reason to know that [its] interests might be adversely affected by the outcome of the litigation.’ The insurers’ motion to intervene in the federal litigation was untimely and therefore rightly denied.” CE Design v. King Supply Company, 791 F.3d 722 (7th Cir. 2015).
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