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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

It looks about right. I've yet to see a class action suit where the individuals get any substantial money. I've heard of one where the settlement involved coupons for the product rather than cash.

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Keep in mind that class actions necessarily exist as a middle-ground mechanism. If the harm to each person were large enough, they would pursue individual claims. But in many cases, it is not worth people's time to pursue individual claims because the damage is relatively minor. A little bit of harm spread over a large enough population, however, becomes a large amount of harm in the aggregate, so class actions are a mechanism for holding companies accountable in those situations. So you would not expect individual members of the class to be getting huge payouts. But you expect that the company is held accountable for the aggregate harm in a way that, if not for class actions, they would likely never be held accountable for.

I would argue they have the opposite effect: They allow businesses a way to write off a crime with a minimal payout to some subset the harmed individuals, in exchange for the ability to be completely absolved of future lawsuits by people who were unaware at the time.

I got $397.00 from a Facebook biometrics class action settlement in Illinois, out of a $650M settlement. But yes, definitely the exception rather than the rule.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/heres-a-look-at-all-th...

about $30 from the Plaid class-action here.

I have a high school buddy that is a big class action lawyer. When he posts about winning a big case I’m always holding back from commenting asking how much he got paid vs the folks that were actually harmed.

Maybe you can bring it up in a way that appears guileless rather than accusatory? “Nice job dude! I bet you really helped out the victims — how much did you get them?”

He would reply with big numbers: $100, $500 million, and so on. They don’t really communicate publicly in terms of the payout per capita although they do negotiate hard to increase the per capita payout (otherwise the total would be small.)

On one hand, yes, it's a shame that the victims rarely get anything. On the other hand, anyone is allowed to opt out and sue on their own if they want to. The problem is that very few will because it's not worth your time or money to sue someone for, say, $1000. As someone who wasn't going to take Equifax to court, I prefer an outcome where some lawyer gets rich, I get $5, and Equifax gets a $500 million dollar fine plus a commitment to spend $1 billion on overhauling their security. The alternative was Equifax getting away with a few small-scale lawsuits that would have had total payouts in the low millions.

In a more just world, Equifax would go out of business and the assets would be divided among the affected parties. The fact that that won't happen isn't your buddy's fault. At the end of the day, sure, he gets high fees, but if the lawyers in the equifax case were to distribute their fees to victims, maybe I would have gotten $6 instead of $5? My point is, I'm mad at Equifax a lot more so than your buddy.

All of the class actions where I've gotten back $5 or whatever have a document listing how the money is spent. Usually at least a third of it goes to the lawyers.

The court awarded attorney fees of 20% of the overall (minimum) award in this case, which came to about $77 million. This is based off a $380.5 million minimum settlement fund (under certain conditions the fund can go up to $100-something million higher).

source: https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...

Right, so in such a case, if the lawyers decided to work for free and give ALL the money to the class members, you'd get back a whopping $7.50 instead of $5.00.

Really, these cases are mostly a way for lawyers to make money, because on a person-by-person basis there's just not enough money to be made in pursuing legal action, but with millions of class members, the aggregate amount is pretty high, and 20 or 33% of that for the lawyers ends up being a nice paycheck.

It's typically 30% of the settlement, and that's why CA litigators are the rockstars of the legal world.

I was recently in a settlement for something like $4 and looked into it.

My take is basically that in many class action suits there's limited proof of wrongdoing. So it might not make it to court, and if it did make it to court it might be thrown out. Companies pay out since they aren't sure either, but not for the full amount. The lawyers are investing in a suit with unstable ground.

Because it's so wishy-washy there just isn't much money in it, and in consequence the payouts are limited.

So I'm not sure there's a better way to do it. I do wish the lawyers were more upfront about the above in their messaging to class members (like, "we don't have enough definite evidence to get a conviction, but enough that it's risky for the company, so we can settle for a lower amount") as well as how much it will actually mean per individual, what consequences are likely for the company if the suit succeeds, etc.

Not a lawyer (obviously) so if anyone has better info I'd be interested.

My guess is that very sentence would be used as evidence in court - “see, even they don’t think they have enough to win!”

Leverage in court, so it’d be used to lessen payouts.

I was happy with the amount received from this one: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/08/27/apple-class-acti...

I got like $180 from Arco gas stations because they were charging 50 cents to pay at the pump with a debit card but weren't disclosing it.

I literally bought Arco gas ONCE, and it was only a couple gallons to top off a U-Haul after a short move.

I thought it was insane that the payout was so high.

It’s usually only 1 year of identity theft monitoring from some cheap under-equipped company to actually do anything about it!

Equifax comes to mind.

Apple Keyboard Settlement is targeting $300+ for people who had multiple repairs (free repairs) on their keyboards.

IIRC, there’s three different tiers on this settlement, most fall within Tiers 1 ($50) and 2 ($150) and fewer will get the $250-300.

I had a 2016 MacBook Pro that was repaired 4 times over 4 years (all free repairs) so I should get the full settlement.

In all cases, repairs were covered for the first 4 years so most of them should've been done for free, the settlement is purely for compensating time and effort.

Red bull

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