A class action is a lawsuit in which a representative plaintiff sues or a representative defendant is sued on behalf of a class of plaintiffs or defendants who have the same interests in the litigation as their representative and whose rights or liabilities can be better determined as a group than in a series of individual suits. Class actions are common in the areas of consumer protection, worker rights and antitrust.
Examples of major class-action suits include a suit brought by Vietnam veterans exposed to the herbicide Agent Orange against three manufacturers (settled in 1984); a suit concerning the effects of passive smoking brought against tobacco producers (settled in 1997); and a suit led by Jonathan Tasini that seeks more than $100 million in damages and alleges that thousands of bloggers have been wrongly denied any compensation for the value they have created for the popular website “The Huffington Post”.
Class action experts need the appropriate skills and knowledge to manage class action lawsuits. For instance, in order to even get the class certified, an expert will often need to assist counsel in demonstrating statistically that the class is similarly situated. This usually involves analysis of voluminous and complex transaction data. Once the class is certified, the expert’s experience is the key to determine the calculation of the class-wide damages, as well as amounts due to individual members.
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