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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

Class actions are broken and rarely actually directly benefit the consumers. At best you can say it is a large club that can be wielded on behalf of consumers to force large corporations to behave responsibly. At worst it's a total racket where attorneys can get very very rich by "representing" consumers and shaking down large corporations, which will eventually end up being paid for by the consumers who were meant to be protected in the first place.

I think the USA needs stronger regulators who can actually enforce the laws using fines and lawsuits rather than the legal system which does not work.

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From what I have read stuff like this is also high risk for the lawyers who may be working on this for years without getting paid. I agree that regulators should go after these companies and also prosecutors instead of putting people in jail for years for possession of marijuana.

What about the Equifax case or the Zappos case is high risk? Or even low risk?

1) regulators don't lock people up for marijuana use. 2) We would save Lawyers the risk of not getting paid if they didn't have the chance of getting paid. Expressed with less sarcasm, there is no shortage of lawyers coming out of the woodwork to start class action suits when something happens. Every time anything big happens there is a half dozen class actions that get filed straight away, then there is lots of overhead figuring out who's class action is the correct one and combining lawsuits, and all this "work" is only to the benefit of the attorneys filing the lawsuits not to the actual people they are claiming to represent. Anyway, it's rotten to the core.

Apparently over 50 different law firms decided that Equifax was worth the risk. https://money.com/equifax-data-breach-lawsuits/

But why a preset percentage? Why not costs + a 10% profit? Once you do a certain amount of work, why does the amount of profit rise when you can extract more from the defendant?

Under this scheme, the only way to make more money as a law firm would be to increase your costs, so this creates an incentive to prosecute the case as expensively as possible.

The eventual endgame of this system would be that law firms’ costs should rise to eat as much of the settlement as possible, which leaves as little as possible for the actual victims.

A fixed percentage system creates an incentive to maximize the settlement (on behalf of the victims) and leaves the law firm to pay its own costs.

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