Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
A class action lawsuit is a lawsuit in which many plaintiffs with small claims combine their claims to file one large lawsuit against a defendant. The class action is a legal tool that is extremely beneficial for plaintiffs with small claims who have been cheated out of money or goods as a result of a company’s illegal practices.
The costs of filing a lawsuit are often too high to make it worthwhile for a plaintiff to file a claim for a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars. Nevertheless, that amount can be significant to plaintiffs, and by cheating many people out of small sums of money, companies can illegally gain a huge profit. The opportunity to file a class action lawsuit gives plaintiffs the chance to pursue their claims and to prevent the defendant from similarly taking advantage of people in the same manner in the future.
But plaintiffs have to fit certain requirements in order for a court judge to grant class certification. The first requirement is numerosity, which means the class must be large enough to warrant pursuing the lawsuit as a class action. There is no specified number of plaintiffs that must be eligible to join a class in order to justify class certification, but in general, classes of less than 20 are not usually found sufficiently large to fulfill the numerosity requirement, while classes of 40 or more stand a pretty good chance of receiving class certification, provided the other requirements are met. Continue reading ›