i’m watching a show (htgawm) and a character is filing (or making, idk) a class action lawsuit suit.
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When a large corporation does something that harms a large number of people in a small enough way, it doesn’t make sense for one person to hire a lawyer and sue the corporation. What does make sense is to get as many people who have been wronged together to hire lawyers.
Lets say a snack company lists their bags of candy as 100g. It turns out that they’ve been putting 95g of candy in their bags on purpose for years. It doesn’t make sense to sue them over one piece of candy, but if everyone who’s ever bought that candy gets together and sues the company over all the candy they lied about, it’s worth putting in the work to go to court.
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Say a company accidentally sprays a small town of 30k with chemicals. Everyone in the town needs to sue the company for damages. Instead of each person filing a lawsuit for a total of 30,000 lawsuits, they join together to become a “class” and they file a single lawsuit on behalf of everyone affected.
Saves everyone time and money, but as someone else mentioned, the lawyers typically walk away with the lion’s share of the money and each member of the class gets a few bucks.
A class action is an exception to the rule that litigation is conducted only on behalf of the litigants. It is a way for a plaintiff to argue that he/she should be able to sue on behalf of others who were harmed in a similar way.
Class actions are permitted because frequently each individual claim is too small to be worth suing over. But because a class action binds people who are not parties to the lawsuit and had no say in how the suit was conducted (if the plaintiff loses, they lose too), the court has to approve (“certify”) the class. That usually happens pretty far into the case, by which point the parties can usually evaluate the risks and rewards of going to trial and instead decide to settle. Because the class will also be bound by any settlement (defendants won’t pay much if they’re just going to get sued again by someone else), the court also has to approve any classwide settlement to make sure the plaintiffs’ lawyers aren’t getting all the money and leaving the class with nothing.
Some people complain that the lawyers do get everything and leave the class with nothing. Those people are ignorant. The attorneys bear all the risks, spending millions of dollars on a case that they may ultimately lose, and without them, the class would get nothing at all. The attorneys usually get 20-30%. Individuals feel like they get nothing because the remaining 70-80% is split among *so many people*, and their claims were so small to begin with (otherwise, a class action wouldn’t be needed).
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