Courts will design a process that will allow compensation, where appropriate, to fall into the hands of those impacted by the wrongdoing in a way that is efficient and yet fair to all sides. In a complex, let’s say, personal injury case where someone is alleging, you know, very serious wrongs resulting or very serious harms resulting from the conduct, then courts can design sort of mini trials, adjudicative procedures, in which, you know, claimants or class members can go before, let’s say, a panel or a mediator or an arbitrator in an efficient way and prove that the proven wrong caused their harms, and that an adjudicator would issue an amount of compensation that is payable to that class member.
In other cases, let’s say where the amount of compensation would be less, a price fixing case or an illegal banking charge, it wouldn’t necessarily be required for individual class members to go and go before an arbitrative type process with evidence and things like that. Cases like that, it would be more typical that those class members could fill in an online form for their $20 refund or credit or check. So it’s very difficult to say, you know, definitively what the compensation processes look like for class actions. They’re very much case specific, and resolution can look different depending on the class action. A lot of class actions do end up settling after they’ve been certified, but again, a settlement of a class action, you know, on average will take five years or so after the initial filing.
