Oh, so you cashed it then? ;o)

<snip>

There is a way to put a stop to this stupidity.  Looser pays all legal
fees. No exceptions.  All it would take is appropriate action by the
lawyer-dominated legislature.  Like that will happen.

Austin

Mark: Let me express a different view. And if we disagree on this,
that's cool. I only hope we can do so without flaming each other.
I should say at the top that I am not a lawyer, am not married to one and am
not the son or the father of a lawyer.
Yes, I agree that it would be nice if the people who are in the class-action
suit benefited more from it. I don't know the law very well, but I think it
is the case that if you feel you have been victimized by the company in the
same way that members of the class feel they have been victimized, you can
sue on your own as long as you agree that you do not want to be a member of
the class and will not benefit from whatever settlement the class gets.
In other words, you hire your own lawyer, you put on your own case and you
reach your own settlement. That's always an option, but it's unlikely that
anyone will bother to do that simply because, say, the BMG record club was
misleading in its advertising or if Netflix was intentionally slow in
sending out the next DVD on your list. In cases like that, if there's not a
small monetary settlement, there's usually one in the form of free services
(like a
month of Netflix membership for free).
So people are unlikely to sue on their own.
Going through the group means I get a small settlement, but then all I
have to do to get it is go to a website and make myself a member of the
class.
So small results, but the effort on my part was miniscule.

If a company winds up having to pay 50 million in damages, and 45
million of that is in fees to the plaintiffs attorneys and the other 5
million goes to the small settlements (free CDs, 37-cent checks etc) of the
members of the class, the suit has still accomplished something. It has
punished the company for doing something it shouldn't have done -- some kind
of action that shortchanged its customers -- and presumably will deter that
company from doing the same thing again. So, although the settlement for me
is small, the actions of the suit are big in terms of getting companies to
adhere to the law.

I'm talking only about small consumer-inconvenience cases like the
examples of Netflix or the one from a few years back concerning price fixing
in the CD market.  If we were talking about major health hazards, like
asbestos, then obviously results like those above would not be desired. You
would want the victim themselves to be getting millions of dollars in
payouts, not the lawyers.

But here I think is the more important point. Part of the criticism seems
to be that lawyers are only out to make money.
If that's true, so what? Isn't that how the game is played here in the USA?
Isn't the beauty of capitalism the idea that people seeking after their own
self-interest drive innovation and in the process move civilization forward?
If it means that a lawyer seeking to line his own pockets manages to get
industry to adhere to the law, isn't that the very epitome of capitalism?
Through his own search for riches, the lawyer has managed to improve the lot
of a class of people (the customers who sued) and has managed to get the
company (the defendant) to adhere to the rules. Seems like that's the way
the system is supposed to work.

Also, people who don't adhere to the rules should be punished. That's what
class action suits do. They punish those who ignore the rules.

Your next door neighbor sounds like a shyster. But I don't think his actions
should tarnish the entire class-action consumer-protection concept.

-dp