Personally, I think it will cost you more to settle in the long run because settling makes patent trolling profitable, which means more companies will do it and you'll get hit more often.
In the long run it's in everyone's best interests to fight this but it's each individual member that risks the damage by losing so it goes on. It's not the group being sued it's just one member.
Maybe everyone should pool resources into an entity to take up defence of anyone. I don't think the legal system allows it though.
The inverse tragedy of the commons?
This would be inverse in the sense that there is no limited resource being depleted, but bad seeds being sown, choking the environment and making it unsustainable.
To me it seems like the same category of problem, but with the opposite kind of adversary and feedback loop, so I assumed it wasn't covered by that term.
But it's also very likely that this is just the sort of unproductive, needlessly detailed nitpicking which geeks are so very much famous for. I've been known to go down that road before :)
That is called a nonprofit patent lawfirm...I dont know if it exists though.