For as long as three years, a handful of law firms and individuals have battled against the $75 million settlement of a suit over American Express’s fees for purchases its cardholders made in foreign currency.

Now the dissident group is retreating from the scene, after Amex agreed to pay it more than $3 million to drop appeals claiming that the deal shortchanged consumers.

Legal experts say the resolution highlights two potential abuses in class action litigation. Objecting lawyers can obtain legal fees by standing in the way of a settlement, whether or not their gripes about the deal have merit. And when a settlement is legally flawed, businesses can avoid having an appeals court review the matter simply by offering extra cash to those diligent enough to pursue an appeal.

“It’s the ugly underbelly of the system,” a plaintiffs’ attorney from Atlanta, Kenneth Canfield, said. “This is one of the largest ethical dilemmas in class action litigation.”

A Texas class action lawyer who led the charge against the Amex settlement, Michael Caddell of Caddell & Chapman in Houston, said the decision to abandon the challenge was not arrived at lightly.

“It was a tough decision,” Mr. Caddell told The New York Sun. “We feel strongly that the settlement was made without due consideration being given to some of these claims.”

Mr. Caddell said the decision to drop the objections was influenced by the odyssey the case has faced since it was appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit in late 2005 and early 2006. The case was scheduled for oral arguments on four occasions and postponed each time, sometimes at the last minute, because judges stepped aside.

“It’s been very frustrating for me and the attorneys,” a calendar clerk for the 11th Circuit, Matt Davidson, said. He declined to say what prompted the recusals, but an objecting class member, E.M. Selfe of Birmingham, Ala., said the problem was that the vast majority of judges were not eligible to hear the case because they held American Express cards or used them in the past.

“They had a very difficult time finding three judges who were not members of the class. That’s delayed this thing,” Mr. Selfe said.

The original $75 million settlement, advanced by a New York firm, Garwin, Bronzaft, Gerstein & Fisher, resolved a flurry of lawsuits filed against Amex over its handling of foreign currency charges. Amex was hit with the suits after a California judge ruled in 2003 that MasterCard and Visa failed to disclose percentage fees added to transactions made in foreign currency. The settlement touched off a pitched battle between attorneys who bought into the deal and those who did not. Two prominent San Francisco-based class action shops, Girard Gibbs and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, joined with Mr. Caddell to challenge the deal. They complained that the settlement focused only on the 1% to 2% fee that American Express charged on foreign transactions and did not take into account a variety of other ways the company allegedly manipulated its billing, such as using currency exchange rates that were artificially skewed in the company’s favor.

The objecting group also charged that the settlement was the product of a “reverse auction,” a process by which a defendant pits various groups of plaintiffs’ lawyers against each other in order to cut a deal that may be favorable to the defendant and the settling lawyers but not necessarily to the class.

The objectors hired a New York University law professor, Samuel Issacharoff, to opine against the deal. He told a federal judge in Miami, Cecilia Altonaga, that the negotiations were “whipsawed” and that the settling attorneys never even investigated the value of all the claims before agreeing to waive them as part of the settlement.

Nevertheless, Judge Altonaga approved the deal. In a December 2005 ruling, she called all of the suits “weak” and asserted that American Express had good defenses to many of the claims. “No law or contract has been cited that prohibits the making of profit on the buying or settling of currency,” she wrote.

Mr. Caddell and his allies appealed, complaining bitterly that the settlement was collusive and unfair to the class. However, now they are taking about $3 million in legal fees from the company they were targeting and leaving Amex customers with the same allegedly flawed deal.

“We’ve concluded it’s unlikely we will get the relief we really want, and what’s likely is that the whole settlement will be undone,” Mr. Caddell said. “There is clearly on the part of some courts an animus towards class actions.”

A lawyer whose appeal was rejected on technical grounds, John Pentz, said the risk of a ruling that could bar any settlement was evident from the outset. “If Caddell has cold feet now, he should have thought of that before he filed the appeal,” Mr. Pentz said.

However, the case’s unusual history at the 11th Circuit may have given the objecting lawyers new insight into who would eventually decide the matter. Two conservative judges, Gerald Tjoflat and William Pryor Jr., were listed on a recent order about the case.

A New York State judge who is the author of a treatise on class actions, Thomas Dickerson, said the 11th Circuit should not allow the appeals to be dropped without investigating their merits. “The court’s obligation really is to protect the court from lawyers on both sides who may or may not have reasons to shortchange the class,” he said.

Mr. Issacharoff called the latest developments “an interesting procedural twist.” He said many legal scholars take the position that the lawyers who have potential class action cases pending elsewhere have a duty to act in the class’s interest at all times, even when interceding in other cases.

Mr. Caddell said dropping the appeals was now in the interest of the class because the protracted delays were preventing any benefits from reaching consumers. Lawyers from Lieff Cabraser and Girard Gibbs were unavailable or failed to return messages seeking comment for this article. More than 800,000 customers and former customers of Amex asked to join in the settlement before a deadline in 2005. A spokeswoman for the company, Judy Tenzer, declined to comment on the payment to the objectors and said she could not estimate when customers might get the credits due under the settlement.

The settling lawyers also are waiting for the $11 million in fees and costs they have requested. Judge Altonaga deferred ruling on that until the appeals are resolved.

Amex may have had a financial incentive to end the appeals because it agreed to hold its fee for foreign charges at 2% while the case was pending. Most Visa and MasterCard issuers now charge 3%.