With a class action lawsuit, the lawyers will get millions while the rest of us will get a coupon for a free upgrade to windows as settlement.
The lawsuits take a lot of work, they only get paid if they win, and they don't always win.
I'm sure there are class action lawyers who are in it for the money, but most lawyers who are in it for the money would go into corporate law, not class action.
A small payout could be due to greedy class action lawyers, but it could be due to the corporate lawyers successfully arguing damages down to nearly nothing (compared to the size of the class). The second one sounds more likely to me.
In the cases I've heard about, the corporate team had orders of magnitude more resources than the class action lawyers (think 3 lawyers working part time on the case vs. the corporation having an expert prepare for 2 years to appear once in court. I am not making this up.)
I'm biased though, the few class action lawyers I know are good guys, it's possible most aren't. I havn't looked at the field in general, and IANAL, so take that with generous salt.
"Regulatory capture" is also an example of this idea but I think there's a larger pattern.