I literally never thought about this before - couldn’t there just be a revolving door where legal teams sue and settle for basically nothing, then get lucrative contracts from the company they settled against while the company can’t be sued again?
It depends. The law firm sues on behalf of a class of affected individuals/entities (i.e. customers who were wronged) but they can’t do that without your permission. Sometimes this permission is implied if you don’t respond to a notice, so it’s opt-out. Sometimes it is opt-in. Not sure about this one, but you do have a choice to decline representation and theoretically pursue your own legal claim since you wouldn’t be bound by the settlement. But in practice, you aren’t gonna be able to successfully sue a large corporation on your own. That’s the point of class-action lawsuits.
I guess in theory a corporation could set up these flimsy settlements as a sort of inoculation against later claims, but I think that wouldn’t really work in practice. They would have to do this for every possible line of complaint, which is near infinite for a sufficiently large organization.
A settlement means the issue is put to rest and the claimant can’t sue them again
I literally never thought about this before - couldn’t there just be a revolving door where legal teams sue and settle for basically nothing, then get lucrative contracts from the company they settled against while the company can’t be sued again?
It depends. The law firm sues on behalf of a class of affected individuals/entities (i.e. customers who were wronged) but they can’t do that without your permission. Sometimes this permission is implied if you don’t respond to a notice, so it’s opt-out. Sometimes it is opt-in. Not sure about this one, but you do have a choice to decline representation and theoretically pursue your own legal claim since you wouldn’t be bound by the settlement. But in practice, you aren’t gonna be able to successfully sue a large corporation on your own. That’s the point of class-action lawsuits.
I guess in theory a corporation could set up these flimsy settlements as a sort of inoculation against later claims, but I think that wouldn’t really work in practice. They would have to do this for every possible line of complaint, which is near infinite for a sufficiently large organization.
Cool, thanks for the info!