class action lawsuits

Class action lawsuits are broken. This is all I can conclude from a spate of recent lawsuits I should have benefited from. The first was the lawsuit against credit cards for secretly charging fees when you bought something in a foreign currency. The settlement page instructed you to dig up all your financial records for the last ten years. Then today comes the Seagate hard drive settlement, which will require that "A separate claim must be issued for each individual hard drive purchased and will require a documentary proof of purchase, the specified hard drive name and model number, the amount paid, the date of purchase and the name of the merchant." So now I'm keeping receipts for every individual item I've purchased for the last ten years, just in case there's a lawsuit? I doubt it.

I love the class action lawsuit thing. Do you guys have the commercials that go... "have you or a loved one been injured or killed after experiencing this obscure hospital procedure??? If so, you are entitled to monetary compensation..." They are on every morning as I get ready for work. It makes me just want to sue somebody...

All i can say, is that as a member of the Insurance Industry, I HATE classaction and most other types of consumer law suits. With the very few exceptions (like maybe one brough by a community against an industry that polluted their water table or something) all they do is bog down the system, and eat up dollars, which in turn makes premium go up. I work in construction insurance, and I cannot even begin to count the number of law suits my clients have been served with. These suits are typically, third party suits. Where a person sues say a General Contractor, who in turn sues all the people they ever hired to work on a job, and so on and so forth. Its nasty business. Coburn

Some guy who's personal information was lost by the same company who lost my personal information is trying to coordinate a class action (there are a lot of us unlucky souls). He's apparently pretty angry, according to his blog. In fact, he left a message on my blog along the lines of "It's great that you can be so humorous about such a serious issue." I do wonder if his efforts are going to go anywhere.

I wonder with class action lawsuits if the plaintiffs end up getting much benefit, given the penalty payment is spread around potentially thousands of people. I was part of one with HP due to owning a printer that periodically double-fed pages because of a defect. The result was that I was given a coupon for $40 worth of HP goods. :/ IIRC the suit against the record labels for price fixing on CDs was such that anyone who made a claim got only about $5 off another CD. Maybe it is significant en mass to the companies, but not so much to the individual consumer.

Right, Erik. And how much paperwork did you have to do to get your five dollars or whatever? I especially like the suits where the giveaway is in company product. It lets them value it retail, but costs them wholesale, and I bet many people never use it at all. Or end up spending more money, thus negating the 'penalty' aspect.