A large, powerful company has deceived or cheated you and the injury you’ve suffered doesn’t involve a large amount of money. Is the company too big to fight? Will it cost you more to fight back than you lost in the first place?
Don’t believe it.
The perpetrators of fraudulent schemes and other unfair business practices often count on such concerns as a way to avoid being held accountable. Some companies actually engage in unlawful activity precisely because they believe the odds of reaping a profit are greater than the prospect of getting caught, because prosecuting a lawsuit can be extraordinarily expensive and poses too great a risk for individual consumers to undertake on their own.
But that strategy can backfire when large numbers of aggrieved individuals band together to bring a class action, the cost of which is borne by the attorneys who prosecute the case — and recover those costs only if they succeed with the prosecution. In a class action, the relatively small loss one person has incurred can be quite substantial when combined with the losses of all the others who have been the targets of the same conduct. The total can amount to millions — and, with increasing frequency, billions — of dollars.
This is why big business interests and those that support them have expended so many resources to convince people that class actions that offer a solution are actually the problem.
A good illustration of large business interests’ efforts to diminish the ability to prosecute consumer-protection class actions is Proposition 64, a ballot measure that was presented to California voters in 2004. To establish the need for the ballot measure, the promoters of Proposition 64 pointed to the Trevor Law Group, a law firm that had filed baseless lawsuits against small businesses under what was then one of the most powerful consumer-protection statutes in the nation: California’s Unfair Competition Law. According to its promoters, Proposition 64 would do nothing more than protect small businesses from frivolous, predatory lawsuits while preserving all the rights accorded by the Unfair Competition Law. What rational person could argue with that?
In actuality, the biggest promoters of Proposition 64 were some of the largest corporations in the world, not small businesses, and enforcement of existing law by the California Attorney General had already resulted in the disbarment of the Trevor Law Group attorneys. And although voters were promised that their right to bring valid claims under the Unfair Competition Law would be preserved, the promoters forgot that promise shortly after the ballot measured was approved by the electorate. Mega-corporations, including tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, immediately sought the dismissal of valid claims on the ground that Proposition 64 prohibited consumers from bringing consumer-fraud class actions under the Unfair Competition Law — regardless of the merits of those claims.
Lower courts agreed with these arguments, finding that the technical language of the ballot measure required the dismissal of several major cases, but the California Supreme Court reversed those decisions in In re Tobacco II Cases. In that case, the court recognized that voters were told that Proposition 64 would prevent frivolous lawsuits while preserving their rights, but that it was actually being used to prevent consumers from bringing valid claims — in direct contradiction to official voter materials and the text of Proposition 64 itself, and undermining the strong public policy favoring consumer class actions.
The California Supreme Court explained the basis for that policy nearly four decades ago:
Protection of unwary consumers from being duped by unscrupulous sellers is an exigency of the utmost priority incontemporary society… . A class action by consumers produces several salutary by-products, including a therapeutic effect upon those sellers who indulge in fraudulent practices, aid to legitimate business enterprises by curtailing illegitimate competition, and avoidance to the judicial process of the burden of multiple litigation involving identical claims. The benefit to the parties and the courts would, in many circumstances, be substantial.
Vasquez v. Superior Court, 4 Cal. 3d 800, 808 (1971).
Initiating or Joining a Class Action
If you have been the victim of a business practice that has affected others in the same way,tell us about it. Your complaint might be suitable for class-action treatment, and it could make a substantial difference, not only to you but to literally millions of others who are seeking justice. If we agree to prosecute the case, we will do so on a contingent-fee (or mixed-billing) basis, and we’ll advance all fees and costs in the matter. If you don’t recover, neither will we.
Like any other case, class actions must be brought by a person who has been harmed by one or more defendants who have violated the law. Because a plaintiff who brings a class action must be approved by the court to represent others who have been affected by the same conduct, however, there is no need to “join” an ongoing case.
In other words, once a case is underway, others may actively participate in it by joining the case as a named plaintiff, but they do not need to join the case to have their claims adjudicated. The claims of “absent class members” — those who are not specifically named in the complaint as plaintiffs and do not actively participate in the prosecution of the lawsuit — will be litigated by the named plaintiff(s) who serve class representative(s).
Once the court certifies the case to proceed as a class action, absent class members are normally given an opportunity to “opt out” of the class if they do not wish to be included in the case. Those who do not opt out are deemed to be members of the class, and they will be bound by the judgment. If the case is dismissed after the class is certified, all class members’ claims will be barred. If the case is resolved in favor of the class (by a settlement or by a verdict after a trial), absent class members will be notified about the outcome and what they must do to obtain their share of the benefits.
(In relatively rare situations, a case is certified as an “opt-in” class action. In those cases, class members must respond to the notice they receive by affirmatively stating that they wish to be part of the class.)
This, of course, is a very brief and necessarily under-inclusive summary of this area of the law. A wealth of information about class actions is available on the internet. For example, Wikipedia contains information about class actions in state and federal courts in the United States, as well as in other countries. Other sources include Class Action Litigation Information, The Legal Information Institute (of Cornell University Law School) and Lawyers.com.
Fazio | Micheletti LLP specializes in class actions. We have served as lead counsel for plaintiffs in class actions that have included tens of millions of members who reside in California, throughout the United States, and even other parts of the world.
We have an extraordinarily good track record — we have yet to lose a single case in nearly 15 years of prosecuting these cases on behalf of plaintiffs, and we have resolved them in a manner that benefits those we represent, not just the attorneys. In short, we won’t compromise the public interest for private gain, which is why national consumer groups have supported the cases we have prosecuted, as well as the manner in which we have resolved them.
If you believe you have a claim that would qualify as a class action, let us know about it by clicking here.