This topic is aimed mostly at U.S. users: as far as I know U.S. is recognized as the main country using Class Action (CA from now on). If the country you live in offers a mechanism which you understand to be similar, I'm interested in your opinion as well.

Now the real introduction.
A couple of year ago, my country introduced a "class action" mechanism. Because of the high level of bureaucratic BS involved and a mix of socio-economical factors, I was very skeptic about this since the start. I am sorry to say, I was right in my predictions: the mechanism remained largely unused despite an extreme amount of candidate cases. This is apparently in contrast to me with the rationale of the CA system in the us where people can viably try to sue Sony for removing Linux from PS3[size="1"]{1}.

Some days ago, I was faced with the opportunity to join a CA[size="1"]{2}. Since the start, this felt somewhat weird. Those guys had not produced a single clear statement on what they would have tried to achieve. The contested decision was not even set in stone until yesterday. I spent some hours reading the details of this decision to be contested and while I agree that it's a bad thing for a variety of reasons, the direct implications on my current business is minimal. It causes inconvenience mostly and some additional slight economic turmoil. I'm still running the numbers to quantify this, it will likely take the whole day to analyze the mid-to-long time frame implications.
Anyway, as the decision was being set in stone yesterday, I've had a chance to meet the organization backing up the CA. I sympathized with the idea since the start ("to pack a punch") but meeting them completely changed my opinion. In fact, they actually tried to convince me of their reasons without listening to mine, using statements which are borderline to misinformation. Furthermore, I developed a feeling I couldn't quite understand (I will elaborate this today as well), something seems to be not fitting the picture. It seems clear that this CA could eventually not cover the type of damage I am experiencing.
Furthermore, a "bad" decision in this case is still better than no decision at all. At least now the rules are set, the game can start again.

Anyway, I figure out I've never truly understood this topic in detail. I've got some very broad assessments about this but I am truly not sure what Class Action is supposed to be. Mind sharing some thoughts? Have you ever joined a CA? What's the rationale? Do you have some data or other references[size="1"]{3}?
My main problem is that I don't really know how to drive google in finding what I want to know mainly, but if you can contribute personal experience, that would be better.


[font="Franklin Gothic Medium"]{1} As a side note, I don't really know how this ended, I don't care about this particular issue but the broad topic interests me. Yes, I know it's fairly more complicated than that.[/font]
[font="Franklin Gothic Medium"]{2} I'd rather not elaborate on the details but if needed, I suppose I could handle some data some hours from now.[/font]
[font="Franklin Gothic Medium"]{3} Preferably in a format I can read and understand in less than half a day.[/font]

The purpose of a class action lawsuit is to organize compaints in an efficient way. The best example that comes to my mind is lawsuits agains tobacco companies over the last 15 years or so. The allegation of the lawsuit was that the tobacco company caused harm to a lot of people through the same action/set of actions, and that many of the people harmed had a valid complaint against the company.

If each potential plaintiff sued the company for damages individually, a couple of things would happen. First, the tobacco company would have to defend against thousands of essentially identical lawsuits concurrently. This would be very expensive for them, and very slow for the plaintiffs. Additionally, the cost would be extremely high for each plaintiff, and no one plaintiff would have the financial resources to mount any kind of legal challenge against the massive, wealthy company. A class action suit pools together those similar complaints as well as the resources of the plaintiffs, to mount a single and more solid/well funded legal challenge. It also allows the company to deal with that challenge in such a way that it isn't bankrupted by trying to defend against 10,000 smaller suits. Additionally, a class action removes much the burden of weeding out frivolous lawsuits from the company itself, requiring the plaintiffs' representation to avoid taking shaky clients or risk tanking everybody's case.

The mechanisms of class action suits are strange sometimes. You have a lot of potential plaintiffs who can't be added to the case despite having valid complaints for technical reasons (such as not having quite the same type/degree of damage of the other plaintiffs, or the damage not being verifiable to a sufficient degree). There are also a lot of shyster law firms that spam ads for class actions to get as many people as possible to try and join in, even on dubious cases. It's also difficult (or impossible) to apportion any award any way other than equally among the plaintiffs, even if their situations might suggest a different distribution.

I don't have any personal experience with class actions myself. But there are plenty of well documented cases, if only because the damages asked for/awarded tend to be massive, and they also tend to involve scandalously bad conduct by companies. Google the Phillip Morris settlement for one example. Or if you like movies, you can watch Erin Brokovitch or A Civil Action, which while fluffy compared to the actual specifics of the stories at least cover class actions more or less accurately.

Thank you Khaiy for your reply. This is pretty much what I had in mind, You also given some answers to my doubts.
Now I've surfed the net a while for more references but more importantly, I've mangled the data at my disposal to better understand the implications. I was expecting some surprises but the results were beyond my imagination.

What they are promoting is an action to protect no more than 0.03% of the cases, we're talking about 50 initiatives according to hard real-world data at my disposal - and those companies have probably got at least a million euro each (so they could easily pay all the expenses themselves). Signing this is complete nonsense for my size.
Those guys are 1) not having a clue on what they're talking about OR 2) trying to get bigger consensus for political reasons OR 3) trying to screw me as you mentioned.

At this point, I have no more any faith in this initiative. I won't sign.

PS: I'd also thank OpenOffice.org for making simple .csv import something that I will dream about long time - in 2011.

To add to what was already said, there's usually three types of plaintiffs in the case.

There's the core group, who are the founders of the grievance and their situations are usually relied on heavily throughout the case.

Then for the rest of the people involved in the class action lawsuit they usually divide them into two groups. People who just want to get pooled in with the leftover cash, and people who want to spend the time documenting their grievance for a slightly higher share.

I can recall about 4 class actions I've been involved in, I always just joined the group that pooled the cash together, because the difference was going to be 2-3x the initial amount but involved a major amount of proof (receipts, signed affidavits, etc.). All but one of the class action suits I was involved with offered the manual route for getting a higher amount ( I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement).

I don't think I ever got a payout higher than $25 FYI. Usually the "consumer" in these cases gets the shaft and the core group and lawyers are the ones who make out like bandits.

Uhm, thank you ChurchSkiz, this is very interesting and fairly bad news.
Given the state of the law in my country I'd actually be extremely surprised if I could get 25 USD out of this!

Uhm, thank you ChurchSkiz, this is very interesting and fairly bad news.
Given the state of the law in my country I'd actually be extremely surprised if I could get 25 USD out of this!

You shouldn't join a CA to make money (it really doesn't work), you should however join in order to stand up for your rights, a CA is a good way to keep dishonest business practices from being far more profitable than the honest practices.

That's for sure.
However this case is fairly different. In line of concept the CA aims at removing a national law signed a couple of weeks ago which caused some serious market perturbation.
Problem is, even if we manage to get this cancelled, we will cause another change. Not to mention this is not a "true" CA against a company. I cannot understand the legalese fully but I'm fairly sure this would be a first-of-a-kind initiative.
In the meanwhile, I've re-read the law and I must say that while it is just hateful, it might eventually make life slightly harder for big competitors.
Perhaps it is just better to leave everything as is and keep playing by the new rules, anyway this is a bit beyond topic.
Thank you all for the replies.

Khaiy covered one common case, but there are more.

* Consolidation of multiple cases that are caused by a single action. (What Khaiy described)
* Consolidation of multiple minor infractions where each one individually is too small for regular court claims
* Consolidation of multiple infractions where individually they may not be easy to prove, but collectively there is overwhelming evidence.
* Other consolidation of a large number of cases.

Whatever else happens, before they are allowed you need to prove there are lots of people harmed. The courts can easily handle ten or twenty or more plaintiffs without making a class action; class actions generally involve many thousands of plaintiffs in a class. They must demonstrate commonality, that they are actually a common issue and not separate issues. You need to demonstrate adequacy that the claims are typical of every injured party, and you must demonstrate adequate counsel, that your lawyers understand how to run a case that can potentially involve thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people and businesses.

Like most corporate law suits, class actions are generally settled out of court at some point in the process. Several steps along the legal process require evidence that you have attempted to work it out, and generally it becomes clear partway through the process which way the trial will go. In either case it becomes easier and cheaper to work out the difference out of court once you have seen all the evidence collected by the court.