A litany of small claims court settlements would put more money in the hands of plaintiffs, not lawyers, and would be available in the news cycle for much longer than a class action lawsuit/settlement.
They will learn from this mistake. They just ran into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The way to handle this if you are AT&T is to pay the $850 and then ignore anything else he does and wait for it to go away.
We did year about it on the day the guy won his case. Yes, they are making more news out of a story they could have easily squashed, but it wasn't an unknown event that the guy won the initial case.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/at-and-t-los...
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/24/2822384/att-loses-data-thr...
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-850-for-everyone-what-hap...
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/att-throttling-cust...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mickeymeece/2012/02/25/throttle-...