I have a lawsuit (on-going) and my attorney suggested possibly expanding this into a class action suit. I objected thinking that my suit was more valuable to me as a single suit.
Is this the case? Is the initial suit in a class action suit more valuable than the cases/suits that are subsequently added?
I am really irritated at the company I am suing and really wouldn’t mind seeing them pay for their bullshit actions?
(Also, I already know my lawyer will do better with a class action)
IANAL but I think once a class is formed in a lawsuit then you get your percentage (however it is calculated) the same as everyone else. Being ‘first’ doesn’t net you anything except possibly getting your attorney fees till that point covered or at least mitigated by spreading the cost to those in the class.
Attornies are generally the only ones who win in a class action suit. There are plenty of cases where the people in a class get (as an example) $15 each as an award. If there were a million people in the class then the attorney gets 1/3 of $15 million or a $5 million payday. As a result a company facing a class action suit is more likely to try and settle which is also usually fine with the attorney. If the class action suit makes the payday large enough for the plaintiffs they can bankrupt the company in which case you get your payday tied up in bankruptcy court for a long time and then may only get a fraction on the dollar of what you were ‘supposed’ to get.
For you I’d say it comes down to whether you want the money and screw anyone else in the same boat as you (i.e. let them get their own attornies and sue) or if you instead want to send a message to the corporation and hurt them for their bad behavior…in that case a class action suit will do the trick much better.
Thanks, your reply is what I thought when I objected to my attorney’s suggestion to move forward on a class action - then I heard somewhere that the 1st case got some sort of advantage.
To clarify: I said I am not a lawyer so wait till a proper attorney comes along with the real answer. What I said is an educated guess based on many discussions with my father (who is an attorney) and never hearing about this being the case (grnated the question never came up like that but we did have discussions about class action suits many times and I never heard this suggested). I certainly could be wrong on this but I don’t think so.
Understand though that different people in the same class can get different amounts…it’s not always an even distribution. Maybe you get a return for each record album you bought at higher than normal price. You get (say) $1 back for each album. If one person bought ten and another a hundred they get different amounts of money. In short the payout can be structured just about anyway you can imagine. In some cases all the money doesn’t even go to the plaintiffs but is donated to a non-profit instead. I think the recent CD price fixing case had something to that effect in there (the companies would pay a minimum amount in damages…if enough people didn’t collect to reach that minimum the remaining amount would be donated…this of course mostly meant the attornies set the minimum amount they would collect).
Thinking on this more I suppose you could recover any direct costs you incurred in getting the case to court (filing fees, paying investigators, etc.). If any of that came out of your pocket I don’t see why you couldn’t get that back so in this respect you might get more money being the ‘first’ but you are only recouping what you already paid anyway.
I seem to remember that sometimes the name plaintiff can get extra compensation – a “bounty”, a “consulting fee”, or whatever.
Here’s a link I found:
http://www.krislovlaw.com/cnotes2.htm
If your case really does merit class-action treatment, you might (politely) remind your attorney that he or she has an obligation to communicate all settlement offers to you promptly.
Oh, and << standard disclaimer about legal advice>>
All information is appreciated whether factual or opinion.
No disrespect intended for anyone but I would not base any decision in a legal matter on information received in this or any other “message board” forum.
I certainly would not hold anyone liable for posting a response for a question I posed. (I would also hope not to be accountable for anything erroneous I might have posted)
“I certainly would not hold anyone liable…”
Until you realized you could possibly make a lot of money by suing them for practicing law w/out a license, giving incompetent legal advice, etc.
No, I wouldn’t - I can’t speak for you or others & certainly don’t need you speaking for me, particularly when it is insulting.