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Who is paying to protect your rights? You might believe that a class action is where lawyers get paid a lot of money and the people who make up the class get a few dollars. Well sometimes that is what dishonest companies want you to believe. And it is that type of PR which makes protecting consumers rights more difficult. But that is not what a class action is about. Cases where consumers get paid several dollars and the lawyer gets paid several thousands of dollars usually arise from cases where the rip-off's were only about several dollars. All the person was ripped off may have been $5.00. For an individual person to sue over $5.00 is a waste of time, right? Well that is what the dishonest business is counting on, noone will waste time on a small $5.00 rip-off. However, the fact that the wrong was only over $5.00 does not make it right, does it? Add up all the $5.00 rip-offs and it could amount to millions of dollars. Dealing with a case worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars makes it worth while for a lawyer to act and spend his or her own money to protect the rights of thousands of persons. In other words spending a minimum of $75,000-$100,000.00 of his or her own time and money to take a case to trial becomes reasonable if the lawyer is seeking to stop a bad practice that affects thousands of people. Most people are not willing to spend their own money to protect their own rights even if their case is worth millions. Think about personal injury cases. A person is severely injured, when is the last time you heard an insurance company volunteer to pay the consumer what they were due? When is the last time you heard a consumer had to pay $20,000.00 for a lawyer to take the injured persons case? Without the lawyer bankrolling the fight, most consumers would be left with no options. The same is true regarding small claims regarding consumer rights. When made into a class action, all of the people who were ripped off are treated as one big client, not a bunch of little clients. So when you see the fees from the lawyer being compared to the recovery for a single class member you need to consider what the lawyer had to do to get the result for the class, the fact that the lawyer spent his own money to bring the case, took the risk by saying he or she believed in the case enough to spend hundreds of hours of his or her time to fight for someone else's rights when he or she might not end up with any money. Remember the movie "A Civil Action."
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