Let Consumers Sue Companies

You're completely misunderstanding the purpose of class actions, and are using an oft-repeated error. The article itself explains the value of class actions.

Class actions are an ideal instrument for redress of harm where the harm to any individual is small, but the harm is widespread, meaning that a company is cheating or hurting many people but it's not worth any one individual's effort or expense to sue them.

This is the source of the fallacy you commit: the idea that this involves large compensation for consumers. Consumers ARE compensated in class actions, it's just that their individual harm is small so their individual payout is small.

So if, say, Comcast has been secretly overcharging customers $10/month, it's not a big enough problem for any one of them to sue. But as a class of millions of Comcast consumers, it may be worth it, and can have a real punch at that level.

This is the other part of your error: of course class actions are "lawyer-driven" because, again, the harm to any individual is small. It's the lawyers and firms pursuing the class action that are doing the work and organizing the action, often on contingency. Related to your first mistake, you and many others see the lawyers getting a big payment as "stealing" from the class when they are being compensated for the work they did and winning restitution for harms that no individual consumer would pursue, and the class members STILL get fairly compensated for the small harm done to them.

Finally, and perhaps the largest part of your error, this does and, in the US, is really the only way to, deter illegal conduct because, again, this illegal conduct is premised on the idea that it's too small for any person to care or find it worthwhile to fight. By organizing a class action you enable consumers to hit back and stop this kind of behavior, and put companies on notice that they can't try these underhanded tactics without risk.

I agree that a regulation model would be preferable to this kind of litigation, but until we have regulation we must use the litigation tools we have available.

Be very wary of screeds against class actions, they're almost certainly corporate propaganda.

I don't think there's any simple or easy solution to these problems. They're messy human problems with vested interests, and smart people are going to have to work hard, together, to implement even partial solutions.

Government and politics are unpleasant and can go horribly wrong. But I've come to distrust all simplistic answers that begin, "All you need to do is X", whether "X" is "privatize everything" or "invent benevolent AI" or "allow the state to wither away in favor of an enlightened proletariat." No, I think we need to work very hard, be smart, and try to find common ground with as many other people as we can. And if merely sort of works, we should count ourselves lucky.

What the documentary left out, was that it happened over a 10 year period where 700 out of 171 BILLION customers got burned from mcdonald's coffee. This is statistically nothing.

> Tort reform is largely a concept pushed by big business trying to avoid getting sued when they do wrong.

While I do not know who created the youtube video you posted, the "Hot Coffee" documentary that is frequently mentioned about the liebeck case is actually created by a special interest group, "Association of Trial Lawyers of America". If you think this movie doesn't have an agenda as well, I have a bridge to sell you. A video that does a better job of clearing up the misconceptions of the case is here: http://www.hotcoffeetruth.com/ .

> The number of frivolous lawsuits in the US is actually pretty low.

I have a hard time believing this. Frivilous lawsuits are easy to do in america and my friends (annoyingly) do them all the time. In fact, they brag about the ease of doing it. My personal estimate is around 70% of "I was injured" lawsuits from my friends were just made up to cash out.

Finally, "hot coffee" lawsuits happen all the time in america at temperatues as hot or hotter than what was given in liebeck case. And the cases almost always get thrown out by judges and juries because they are regarded as "frivilous". Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

The liebeck case was the exception, not the rule.