What would you call a class action lawsuit that wound up giving each person who was a part of the lawsuit an average award of less than a penny? And what would you call it if you learned that their lawyers got a million dollars?
I’d call it robbery. But it actually happened, and these kinds of class action lawsuits are happening every day in our country.
In fact, there are so many frivolous lawsuits like this that the Center for Class Action Fairness can’t keep up with all of the requests it gets to help consumers who feel they’re being ripped off by their own lawyers.
Let’s be fair, there are legitimate class action lawsuits. But the courts today are filled with speculative class action lawsuits that seek meaningless changes and which bring about meaningless awards for consumers. Plaintiff lawyers bully companies into settling these lawsuits for millions of dollars in fees because the companies know they’ll have to pay their own lawyers more to fight the lawsuit. In too many cases, the lawyers get rich, and the rest of us get nothing.
Learn more about how class action lawsuits often hurt more people than they help. Go to our website at FoundationForFairCivilJustice.org.
Bob Dorigo Jones, who serves as Senior Fellow for the Foundation for Fair Civil Justice, is the author of the bestselling Remove Child Before Folding, The 101 Stupidest, Silliest and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever. He is the host of a new national radio/Internet commentary, “Let’s Be Fair.”