"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Spehro Pefhany wrote:

A reasonable compromise is to allow juries to award punitive or pain
and suffering damages but cap them at some reasonable multiple of
compensatory damages (say treble or four times) and perhaps also
impose an absolute amount cap (such as $1M).

I think much could be done by limiting class action suits. Many of these
are just fishing expeditions for the attorneys who know what it will
cost the companies to go to trial and submit an offer of settlement that
is right around that.

The last 4 class action suits I have been involved in, I got an
average of $3.00 and the attorneys got an average of just over $ 35
million in fees.

You're in the wrong classes. I got a free new phone with many accessories
from Sprint when they decided to change systems and obsolete the old phones.
Got $100 for IBM selling me bad Deskstar hard drives. Sometimes, class
actions bring very reasonable results for the members of the class as well
as the attorneys. In the IBM case, discovery revealed that IBM knew they
had serious quality control problems but shipped the drives anyway. There's
not much you can do when your own emails "indict" you.

I've been invited to join other class actions, but reading the fine print
revealed the "payout" was a discount on MORE crap made by the same vendor,
so I opted out. In fact, I suspect that some of these supposed class
actions were actually scams to dupe people into giving up personal
information because the rewards were ridiculously low - less than it would
cost a vendor them to gain customers through advertising.

--
Bobby G.