What is the point in class action lawsuits anyway?

[SeekerOfTruth007]

Nobody gets a significant amount of money even when they do get settled. My mother is getting money in stupid small payments ($5) because of collateral damage to my Great Uncle's property during the 1983 flood of the Tangipahoa River, because the government had accidentally caused a dam when building the Interstate Highway as the flood had happened. That is 43 years ago, and they are just now paying out payments on it. They previously got larger sums, but my extended family keeps getting small payments to adjust it, because they won in court claims that the government was previously refusing to pay out. It doesn't matter, because the original claimants have been dead for 30 years and they ultimately paid for the damages to their properties out of pocket, because neither the insurance nor the government paid for it. It makes no sense whatsoever that their survivors 43 years later get peanuts for damages that destroyed entire houses.

[NaultD]

You know how at a casino the house always wins because they have that statistical odds in there favor over everyone? The mega corporations have a similar thing going on if you had every person impacted go one by one.

They can also settle larger claims without going through the court system admitting fault so other cases without bigger lawyers enough to work with. United we bargain divided we beg kinda deal.

[egan3141]

If there weren't class action lawsuits, you wouldn't be able to as easily control their anger when big groups do bad things. "Look, they have to pay 10s of millions of dollars, so that's justice for the evil they did". The intended goal was to punish the loser, the actual reason now days is to pretend we are dissuading repeated bad actions.

[Spencer10]

Its about justice and making the defendant ( or other organizations or individuals) pay enough that they will maybe think twice about committing a similar crime or negligence. Its about setting a precedence.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

When the government is the original offender, they end up not paying anyway, so it doesn't matter.

[exitseven]

it is a way for a group of people to get a financial settlement for some incident that caused them some kind of harm.

[NathanDavis]

the point is to fine... not to get rich