Hacker News Reader

Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

I have a high school buddy that is a big class action lawyer. When he posts about winning a big case I’m always holding back from commenting asking how much he got paid vs the folks that were actually harmed.

View on HN

On one hand, yes, it's a shame that the victims rarely get anything. On the other hand, anyone is allowed to opt out and sue on their own if they want to. The problem is that very few will because it's not worth your time or money to sue someone for, say, $1000. As someone who wasn't going to take Equifax to court, I prefer an outcome where some lawyer gets rich, I get $5, and Equifax gets a $500 million dollar fine plus a commitment to spend $1 billion on overhauling their security. The alternative was Equifax getting away with a few small-scale lawsuits that would have had total payouts in the low millions.

In a more just world, Equifax would go out of business and the assets would be divided among the affected parties. The fact that that won't happen isn't your buddy's fault. At the end of the day, sure, he gets high fees, but if the lawyers in the equifax case were to distribute their fees to victims, maybe I would have gotten $6 instead of $5? My point is, I'm mad at Equifax a lot more so than your buddy.

Maybe you can bring it up in a way that appears guileless rather than accusatory? “Nice job dude! I bet you really helped out the victims — how much did you get them?”

He would reply with big numbers: $100, $500 million, and so on. They don’t really communicate publicly in terms of the payout per capita although they do negotiate hard to increase the per capita payout (otherwise the total would be small.)

It's typically 30% of the settlement, and that's why CA litigators are the rockstars of the legal world.

All of the class actions where I've gotten back $5 or whatever have a document listing how the money is spent. Usually at least a third of it goes to the lawyers.

The court awarded attorney fees of 20% of the overall (minimum) award in this case, which came to about $77 million. This is based off a $380.5 million minimum settlement fund (under certain conditions the fund can go up to $100-something million higher).

source: https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/admin/services/conne...

Right, so in such a case, if the lawyers decided to work for free and give ALL the money to the class members, you'd get back a whopping $7.50 instead of $5.00.

Really, these cases are mostly a way for lawyers to make money, because on a person-by-person basis there's just not enough money to be made in pursuing legal action, but with millions of class members, the aggregate amount is pretty high, and 20 or 33% of that for the lawyers ends up being a nice paycheck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com