Admin: Please note that I am not seeking legal advice, only factual answers about the process: Our community has been hit by a situation. A law firm is forming a class action suit. How this works seems nebulous to me. As I understand it, a definition of the affected class is filed in the Courts, and then these lawyers go about finding those they believe have been affected that fit the class definition. Am I understanding correctly? I am hoping some SD legal eagles can clarify the process. (Sounds a bit backwards to me.)
That sounds about right. Say a guy comes in and says his employer has been cheating all employees 15 cents per hour for three years. We would file suit on his behalf, “and all those similarly situated.” Then we would perform some discovery to find out the names of all the employees during that time period, get their pay records, and ask the court to certified them as a class.
Procrustus, the order in which you present things sounds more logical, but to be clear: In my situation, they (the lawyers) are asking us, if we wish, to sign a form to be represented by them. They have no idea if we actually have a claim or not. There is no deadline to sign. It sounds like during the lengthy Discovery period, they are hoping more and more people will sign the document. And yet? Signing does NOT mean you are in the Class. It only means you agree to be represented by this firm on matters concerning this incident. Again, this all sounds so backwards…and not REALLY about us, the victims.
Hard to tell without all the facts. I will say, there are some sleezy class action firms out there, but also some really professional ones. If there is enough money at stake, I’d try to find a lawyer in your area you could run you questions by, and see if they think this is legit and worth doing.
Of course, you sign the form! How else are you going to get that check for $1.18 twelve years from now?
What the OP does not know is where exactly the law firm is in the process of certifying the class. They need to do several things in no particular order:
- Recruit exactly 1 “poster child” to represent the class.
- Identify a bunch of other folks to be the class.
- Persuade the judge to certify the class as actually existing, if not fully determined and that the “poster child” will legally stand for the class.
- Find everybody who’s willing to sign up to “free-ride” on this class and receive their pro-rata pittance of the settlement or award.
Sounds like the OP is part of stage 2. Whether 1, 3, or 4 have happened yet is immaterial.
I believe signing the paperwork before anyone has investigated whether you in particular have a claim is pretty normal - my father was involved in a pretty big class action suit regarding his employer targeting certain plants for closing based on how many employees were near retirement age which violated a Federal law regulating pensions. They did not get into determining exactly which of the thousands of employees who joined the class had claims for exactly how much until later in the process. ( And this one was not the usual pittance - there were some six-figure payments )
Unless you’re talking about one of those Facebook ads I 've seen lately that say something like “NY law requires you to be paid ( some frequency). If you are an employee of ( Fill in some retail chain) and have not been paid ( with that frequency) call us.” The way it’s basically the same ad about different companies makes me think the lawyers do not have a “poster child” and are just assuming that any large retail chain will have messed up some percentage of the time.