TERRIFIC NEW REUTERS ARTICLE ON CLASS ACTION NOTICES

Maybe because of inertia, maybe because it is easy, maybe because we simply don’t put 2 & 2 together, folks do things the same old way, even if that way is not the best way. This past Friday, Felix Salmon, at Reuters, posted this blog post:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/19/can-legal-due-process-move-online/It seems that almost every day in USA Today, there are several Class Action notices, filled with way too much, and too little information about a Class Action. It’s like the old Pogo cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”.A Class Action is a procedural device to permit usually small claims to be litigated together so that small wrongs, sometimes called “small frauds” can be vindicated. Felix Salmon’s blog post, in turn, links to this terrific Caveat Emptor blog post:http://caveatemptorblog.com/class-action-attorneys-give-up-over-1-billion-in-claims-for-20000/Class Action lawyers have a fiduciary duty to the members of the class, both named class members as well as unnamed class members. We take that duty very seriously. It’s always better to do things the right way, even if it may be, in the short term, less profitable.