While “strength in numbers” may be a cliché, it helps when dealing with California litigation. For this reason, there are class action attorneys Los Angeles able to help with many types of claims that can be brought by class action.
A class action lawsuit is generally appropriate when there are multiple people with like claims against similar parties that arise out of a consistent set of facts. In such a case, a lawsuit may be filed on behalf of a group (or “class”) of people by just a few named plaintiffs. Class sizes can be anywhere from a couple of people to hundreds of thousands.
When seeking out class action attorneys Los Angeles, make sure they inform you of the positives and negatives of the class action suit. On the beneficial side, courts often prefer class actions to multiple individual actions because (a) there will be one consistent result instead of the possibility of many different results, (b) it is far more efficient to handle one large case as opposed to thousands of individual claims and (c) there will be less likelihood of clogging up the Court’s calendars with multiple lawsuits when there is just one pending.
Litigants and their attorneys also prefer class actions because it creates one avenue by which they will request discovery, make copies, retain expert witnesses, and prepare for trial, as opposed to having to do it multiple times. This reduces time and costs for the attorneys, and, ultimately, the client pays less.
On an efficiency level, class action attorneys know that class actions are more likely to settle, for reasons including (i) even though there is just one lawsuit, many individual claims will have to be analyzed and defended, (ii) the likelihood of large verdicts at trial is higher when a jury hears many victims of a defendant’s wrongdoing as opposed to just a few and (iii) a large company does not want the publicity of a trial where the complaints of many victims will be aired.
As such, class action lawsuits may be a powerful tool in your case and are appropriate in cases such as (i) an automobile manufacturer sold cars with a defective part that damaged tens of thousands of cars, so there are tens of thousands of plaintiffs with like claims or (ii) a community suffers damages due to contaminated waters created by a manufacturer’s spill or (iii) a construction company causes severe vibration that damages dozens of homes in a nearby neighborhood.
These types of cases are appropriate for the class action vehicle and are likely to result in a more efficient, cleaner result than each individual bringing claims on their own behalf.