From ATRA's Darren McKinney
Satisfied and loyal Toyota customer Jonathan Sourbeer rightly sees the absurdity of the tiny sum he received as a class member, in largely meritless litigation against the car maker, when it’s compared with the economy-undermining quarter-billion-dollar wealth transfer from future auto-buyers to plaintiffs lawyers in the case (“A Close Reading of My $20.91 Settlement Check,” op-ed, Nov. 24).
But he’s wrong to assume that “juries - are granting [such] payouts, seemingly thinking that the money will be deducted from a CEO’s paycheck or otherwise conjured without consequences for anyone outside the corporate suite.”
In fact, it is only very rarely that a jury plays any role in a class-action lawsuit. That’s because once plaintiffs lawyers convince judges to certify their class actions, very few corporate defendants are willing to risk potentially catastrophic trial verdicts and instead seek negotiated settlements.
Occasionally, however, when a courageous defendant decides to fight a preposterous class action all the way to trial, common-sense jurors will reward that courage. For instance, in October federal jurors in Ohio took less than three hours to return a defense verdict for Whirlpool in a class action claiming that poorly maintained front-loader washing machines could develop musty odors and thus weren’t quite worth what millions of happy consumers had paid for them. With a Midwestern appreciation for the importance of a thriving manufacturing sector, perhaps, the jury laudably refused to make multimillionaires out of the parasitic lawyers who’d concocted the case.
In recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has raised the bar for certification of class actions, but insurrectionist lower courts continue to ignore those precedents. So until the high court more aggressively and explicitly asserts itself, lower-court judges, more so than juries, will likely keep letting class-action lawyers get rich at everyone else’s expense.
Satisfied and loyal Toyota customer Jonathan Sourbeer rightly sees the absurdity of the tiny sum he received as a class member, in largely meritless litigation against the car maker, when it’s compared with the economy-undermining quarter-billion-dollar wealth transfer from future auto-buyers to plaintiffs lawyers in the case (“A Close Reading of My $20.91 Settlement Check,” op-ed, Nov. 24).
But he’s wrong to assume that “juries - are granting [such] payouts, seemingly thinking that the money will be deducted from a CEO’s paycheck or otherwise conjured without consequences for anyone outside the corporate suite.”
In fact, it is only very rarely that a jury plays any role in a class-action lawsuit. That’s because once plaintiffs lawyers convince judges to certify their class actions, very few corporate defendants are willing to risk potentially catastrophic trial verdicts and instead seek negotiated settlements.
Occasionally, however, when a courageous defendant decides to fight a preposterous class action all the way to trial, common-sense jurors will reward that courage. For instance, in October federal jurors in Ohio took less than three hours to return a defense verdict for Whirlpool in a class action claiming that poorly maintained front-loader washing machines could develop musty odors and thus weren’t quite worth what millions of happy consumers had paid for them. With a Midwestern appreciation for the importance of a thriving manufacturing sector, perhaps, the jury laudably refused to make multimillionaires out of the parasitic lawyers who’d concocted the case.
In recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has raised the bar for certification of class actions, but insurrectionist lower courts continue to ignore those precedents. So until the high court more aggressively and explicitly asserts itself, lower-court judges, more so than juries, will likely keep letting class-action lawyers get rich at everyone else’s expense.