A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.
Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.
This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.
So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.
Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.
That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".
Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.
Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE
This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.
"This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many."
All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.
Political dysfunction aside, of course.
I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.
Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.
In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.
>>seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers. ...Political dysfunction aside, of course.
And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted.
For all of warts of class actions, that is an overwhelming benefit — a private class action, or latent threat thereof, can bring pressure where an AG or regulator will choose not to, or just lacks the budget and/or bandwidth to pursue.
And yes, making it easier to 'pierce the corporate veil' and create a stronger direct liability, including jail time, for officers, directors, and shareholders for intentional actions and omissions could do a lot to reduce harm of corporations.
"And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted"
Private litigators also have some political leaning, often as much or more as the AG, but ignoring that for a second, the limited resources part is very fixable.
Additionally, they are accountable to the people that vote for them (directly in some states, indirectly otherwise), ignorant or not, whereas private litigators are not. This is a feature and not a bug.
Instead we are optimizing or deoptimizing (depending on the state and viewpoint) for private litigation.
IE either they cap it or they uncap it, or ....
Also, as a general rule, if you have way too many cases with merit, the problem is probably not resources, but something else.
IE if you have tens of thousands of murders you can't prosecute due to lack of resources, you actually have a bigger, and different problem, than "we don't have the resources to prosecute all these murders". You won't actually get much of anywhere by having the resources to prosecute them all because you won't be solving the bigger, different problem causing you to have tens of thousands of prosecutable murders in the first place.
The same is true of most of these consumer class action cases.
Infinite lawsuits have not caused lots of behavior change, all told.
It is very hard for me to believe that 10x infinite lawsuits will somehow do it.
