If you’ve been wronged and you look around and you can see some friends or neighbors or others who’ve been similarly affected, then you may have a potential class action lawsuit on your hands. What you would want to do in that case is, you know, approach experienced class action lawyers and express, you know, essentially what happened. Joining a class action lawsuit is quite easy, and what that looks like is reaching out to the law firm who is representing that the class of people and letting them know your story.
In Canada, class action lawsuits have to be given the green light by the courts. Simply because you file a class action lawsuit doesn’t make it a class action lawsuit. The court has to certify it as such. The onus is on the party seeking for it to be a class action to convince the court that it should be a class action. There’s five criteria generally dictated by legislation that a representative plaintiff party seeking to certify a class action has to meet. They have to convince the court that there’s a plausible case, that there are causes of actions at the root of the case, that it’s not frivolous and doomed to fail. They have to convince the court that there’s a representative plaintiff that is capable of advancing the interests of the class. They have to provide evidence to the court that that class has issues in common with each other that can be answered for the benefit of everybody at one trial. They have to show the court that class action is the preferable process for the resolution of the dispute underlying everybody’s claim. And the final criteria that a representative plaintiff has to establish is that there’s an identifiable class of two or more people with a legitimate interest in advancing the common issues.
