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Comment by scott00 | Hacker News Reader

It's not cost effective. In this case, it's looking like each arbitration proceeding will cost the employee that files it $400 in arbitration fees, and they will win at most ~$1000. Assuming $200/hour for lawyers (ha! if only), if they spend more than 3 hours dealing with it, they lose. The only reason they're going this route is because it will cost Chipotle even more: $1100 in filing fees, plus the hourly rate of the arbitrator (likely ~$1000/hour), plus their own legal fees. So it's a useful harassing tactic on the part of the class action lawyers.

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I'm assuming the total revenue for the lawyer should be similar to what they'd get in a class-action, assuming they actually gather a critical mass (for either case); and then if they treat it as a class-action, where most evidence is somewhat shared... then you could re-enact the scenario

Whats not clear to me is whether a class-action must be treated differently from 300 independent lawsuits, assuming a single lawyer/group handles all the cases, from the perspective of the lawyers. Ignoring I guess the cost of 300 independent filings, but I'm also assuming thats a rather small part of the overall cost.

I'm not an expert in this stuff, but my understanding is that the scope of discovery allowed in each individual arbitration is likely to be substantially less than that which would be allowed in a class action lawsuit. A class action would be able to demonstrate coordinated wrongdoing by presenting evidence from a representative subset of low-level employees, along with testimony from high level employees and huge troves of emails and internal documents. That type of evidence would be sufficient to generalize from what happened to the small subset of employees to what happened to all the class members. An individual arbitration however is likely going to be limited to gathering testimony of the specific low-level employees involved in the specific case under consideration. Without that evidence of centrally coordinated wrongdoing, the proof in one case is not likely to be useful in other individual arbitrations. And because of that, there's not nearly as much economy of scale in doing large numbers of individual cases as there is in class actions.

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