The clock is ticking for a court to approve a settlement that will pay blogger Nikki Finke $80,000 and Hollywood lawyer Neville Johnson $1.8 million for the lucky mistake of having a telephone conversation between Finke and an E-Trade employee recorded without telling her.

The pain to the online stock trading company is far worse than that: $7.5 million to get rid of the class-action lawsuit, filed by Johnson [1] with Finke as lead plaintiff, which seems to define the term frivolous. (Read the settlement here [2]; the class closes at the end of September.)

Oddly, the lawsuit has gone unnoticed in Hollywood, which reveals a web of relationships that may affect coverage on Finke’s widely read blog. Johnson gets rosy coverage, as has been pointed out before [3], for his work on behalf of plaintiffs like Jack Klugman suing for residuals.

And what now? Presuming the settlement is approved in October, Johnson will owe Finke a great deal for the chance to have made a large pile of hassle-free cash.

Still, it’s no wonder neither side wants to talk about this. E-Trade is clearly embarrassed that it was caught in, at best, a rookie mistake:  recording phone conversations without the simple notification that goes with just about any service-oriented company (“This call may be recorded …” etc.).

And Finke and Johnson have little to crow about, since the "injustice" being corrected in no way required a lawsuit, nor does the complaint detail any actual injury. (The surreptitious recording “was highly offensive to plaintiff Greenberg and would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” reads the complaint with no further detail. Greenberg is Finke’s former name, which she uses in lawsuits.)

Here’s where it’s worth paying attention: Johnson has filed civil suits for wiretapping against convicted Hollywood private investigator Antony Pellicano and others related to that mess, including Chris Rock, Kirk Kerkorian and Terry Christensen. That’s a topic Finke has written a great deal about. 

She was dinged last year by the New York Observe [3]r for failing to disclose her relationship with Johnson.

But there’s more.

Johnson and his associate Paul Kiesel -- who also signed the E-Trade settlement papers -- lead a class-action lawsuit against the Writers Guild for unclaimed foreign levy payments. Finke has written almost nothing about this.

(Waxword has written extensively on this mess, which involves three guilds -- writers, directors and actors. Read more here [4] and here [5].)

So here’s the irony: The lead plaintiff in Johnson’s class-action lawsuit against the  WGA, Bill Richert, is being investigated by the Los Angeles police for having recorded a central witness in the case, Teri Mial, without her knowledge.

This may sound so twisted as to be true, and it is! Richert, a loose cannon if ever there was one, sent an email on June 11, 2008, in which he writes, after a discussion of the content of his conversation with Mial: “First I gotta figure out the technology to send it since the recorder is a PC and I have a Mac.”

Then he adds, clearly aware that he recorded her without her consent: “(Writing this it occurs to me that Teri would be extremely upset if she not only found her lawyer’s gossip on the Internet, but heard her own voice as well; I have told her nothing is confidential with me -- until the new lawyers take over the case.)”

Mial subsequently filed a police complaint, which led to an investigation over illegal taping.

I asked Johnson about this, but didn’t get a response by my deadline.

In a recent New York Times profile Finke called the E-Trade lawsuit a "private matter," which is a funny -- nay, hilarious -- way to talk about a class action. (The settlement was mentioned in the New York Times but got Finke’s compensation wrong. [6])

It’s of a piece with Finke’s penchant for suing and threatening to sue companies large and small, mostly when she was out of work and out of money.

There’s a lawsuit dating back to 1988 against Santa Monica Import Motors, a settlement with her condo company for $36,000 and a much larger but undisclosed award from News Corp and the Walt Disney Company over losing a freelance contract with the New York Post during the Eisner-Ovitz wars.

Once I remember she squeezed some money out of a hotel where she got food poisoning.

But she isn’t out of work or out of money anymore.

Memo to Jay Penske, Finke/Greenberg’s new owner: keep your finger off the Record button.