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For those who don't know, this resulted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employe

• account-5 4y ago
  For the civil case it's true that only the lawyers made anything worth having.
  • pnw 4y ago
    Isn’t that almost always the case in a class action suit?
    • leetrout 4y ago
      I always felt like it was but apparently there is a real chance of me seeing several hundred dollars over buying the horrible 2018 mac air. Nothing close to the 1800 I shelled out for it which I could never recoup.
      • ineedasername 4y ago
        I just got an $80 check in the mail over a class action regarding the dishwasher (appliance) I had a few years back that broke long before what should have been it’s usable life. Roughly $1000 to replace it. $80 class action settlement. Class actions are a crappy way of extracting the actual cost or damages done by a corporation and then getting those damages into tha hands of people that were on the shit side of the stick in the transactions. But no, I have no grand answer for how to do it any better either.
        • selcuka 4y ago
          If $80 is enough to purchase, say, 2-3 years of extra warranty, then it's a fair amount.
          • ineedasername 4y ago
            That is a mostly reasonable comment but has one assumption and another important implication: 1) Assumption: Extended warranties are available for these appliances that would cover the expected usable lifetime of the dishwasher plus the extra purchase 2-3 year warranty. This assumption is incorrect. Lifespan for something like this would, formally, fall under the category of durable goods. In this case, the expected lifespan of a durable goods such as a dishwasher is 10 years. The manufacture warranty falls well short of that, And a 2 to 3 extension will still not covered that time span. Of course life span of 10 years in this case would assume some potential paid maintenance by the consumer. But would not assume maintenance due to errors that would be significant enough to warrant a class action lawsuit. As such, an extended warranty would not be a sufficient substitution for problems arising from an issue that would warrant a class action lawsuit. 2) Implication: The implication of your comment is that consumers should bear the cost of errors that are sufficient enough to warrant a class action lawsuit, and pay for such errors in the form of an extended warranty. I disagree with this. It does not seem to be a reasonable expectation as a cost the consumers should bear for systemic defects or negligence. If there’s an issue such that a class action is necessary to remedy for the issue, then a consumer should not be the one bearing the cost of that, even if it was an easy and simple matter of an extra purchase of a few dozen dollars, which as covered in the above assumption #1, would not be sufficient in any case. All of that aside, as a matter of consumer purchasing and economic implications, I believe that consumers should have a very transparent understanding of the manufacturers warranty presented to them on point of purchase. Options for an extended warranty are nice but not necessarily required. Beyond that though, if there is an issue with a product that should reasonably have been remedied, or something that was deliberately or negligent ignored, the standard terms of the warrantee are moot. Because the manufacturer has not acted and produced a product in good faith, Either by accident or actual knowledge of the issue. For example, a car may have a warranty that, as a standard from some manufacturers, last five years. That is the duration for which the manufacturer is obligated to correct things that went wrong during the manufacturing process. However, if there was a design flaw, and that design flaw perhaps for example rendered a car useless due to a bug in the software once the clock in the integrated circuit governing the electronic system hit a certain date, that would be a flaw that went into exceeded in terms of customer expectations and rates, boundaries of a standard warranty. We would hope such an issue would be easily rectified by some sort of software upgrade understand the age where those types of things are the norm. But if a manufacturer resisted that type of solution then I think something like a class action would be fully warranted to require the manufacturer to either render the product usable, or compensate the consumer for what might have been the remainder of the cars usable. Within reason. Cars can be maintained to run for 100 years! But I would not expect the Ford corporation to make good on a design bug found in a model T car designed more than 100 years ago. Exactly where the balance of time and liability may fall is probably not subject to a specific formula. It depends significantly on the type of good in the nature of the flaw that might be present in the knowledge of the manufacture in terms of how the flaw entered the product. These are not always, and probably almost always not, simple things to determine. This is where class action lawsuits enter the picture to support the collective rights of consumers, where individuals have significantly less power than the corporations producing the goods. The problem, as I have pretty much stated, is that class action lawsuits are a very poor vehicle for remedying this sort of issue. I am open to further discussion if you disagree with all or part of this, and may read any response, but I do have some thing of a short attention span and may not necessarily Replying to any response you were right, but I am probably likely to at least read it. Thank you for the discussion.
    • DannyBee 4y ago
      Yes - lawsuits have tremendous overhead, and class actions average out everything. In this case, it would have been hard to recover more overall as a class in a finite period of time - the values were calculated based on each individuals wages and expected earnings lost at various levels or something like that (it's been a while, sorry). The judge initially rejected the first settlement (which was 320 million i believe), and considered the final one to be much more reasonable (450 million or something). This was in front of Judge Koh, who is no slouch and has dealt with lots of complex tech litigation. She is also not viewed as "industry-friendly" in any way, shape, or form (look at the fight over her appointment to the 9th circuit for more details) If they fought it out in front of a jury, taken it through appeals, etc it would have taken 7-10 years to finalize it, for a max expected improvement of probably 3-5x. That probably would not be worth it to most people, so settlement seems reasonable. A particularly injured person may have been able to make out better in arbitration or something, but as a class, no. This kind of very large, complex case is also just incredibly expensive to litigate. Instead of looking at the plaintiff side, i'll look at the defendant side (since you don't have to deal with arguing about what reasonable profit margins are). This is just the cost of litigation itself. The average litigation cost for "major companies" - 50 of the fortune 200's, was 150 million a year each in 2010. It was doubling every 5 years or less before that (it was 60 million in 2005). It's at least doubled since then. This isn't just tech companies. On average, "major" (again, fortune X00) corporations in the US spend 0.3% of their revenue on litigation costs. So your 100 billion revenue a year tech company is probably spending 300+ million in litigation costs. A suit like this is a very large portion of those costs. The plaintiff lawyers in this particular case were also very good, well regarded complex antitrust lawsuit lawyers. Not the typical "file a thousand class action lawsuits against everything" type firms that you see.