CARLTON FLETCHER: There’s little class in those class-action lawsuits

“I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon, As vacation land for lawyers in love.”

— Jackson Browne

OK, I think I have this thing figured out:

If you happened to be driving through North Carolina and stopped off at Camp LeJeune in the early to mid-80s after taking a Zantac tablet and stopping off to put Johnson and Johnson baby powder on your child and feeding her Enfamil, you’re only a phone call away from receiving “significant compensation.”

At least that’s what the country’s lawyers are telling us on an endless array of television ads that ensure us we can “Get the compensation you’re entitled to!”

I’ve heard people ask: When did this country get so litigious? The answer, it seems, is quite simple: When attorneys with very little tact — they used to be called ambulance chasers — started taking their pitch to the airwaves and telling people they can get rich just by cashing in on unfortunate circumstances, real and imagined.

Now I’m not going to make this a diatribe about lawyers, because I know a lot of them, and most are decent, hard-working and honest. But there’s a reason all those lawyer jokes are out there. (What’s the difference in a lawyer and a skunk being run over on the highway? Where the skunk was hit, you actually see skid marks where the driver tried to stop.)

Back to these get-rich class action lawsuits that run on a seemingly never-ending loop on afternoon TV: If you were not not impacted by the aforementioned leaking poison at Camp LeJeune, Johnson and Johnson baby powder, Enfamil baby formula and Zantac antacid, there’s always Roundup herbicide and Tylenol that have attracted their own class-action lawsuits.

I’ve done a little reading and talked to some folks who understand the way the law works, and they offer a side to this type of tort action that I hope would at least gives people pause before they sign on for one of these lawsuits in hopes of getting rich for, essentially, doing nothing except having a bad reaction to a product.

If you call one of the lawyers advertising for the big product paydays, they are most likely going to sign you up, even if you have little proof that you were actually impacted by the myriad products they’re going after. See, it’s all about numbers.

“What these class-action lawyers do,” one seasoned veteran of the law told me, “is they sign up people all over the country for a class-action suit in which all the litigants are united. This usually happens when one ‘test case’ goes through the courts and someone wins a settlement. The more people the lawyers sign up for their suit, the bigger the risk becomes that the folks who make the product, who’ve already lost at least one usually substantial case, will want to settle.

“It makes more sense to agree to a $100 million payment than it does to add the cost of litigation to hundreds of cases that may end with significant multimillion-dollar pay-outs.”

But, this barrister tells me, the people who sign on to the cases usually get a big shock when they find out they’ve “won” their case.

“What happens is, the lawyers end up with a huge percent of the winnings,” my friend the lawyer said. “Let’s say a case is settled for $100 million. That’s astronomical, and you can imagine the people who put their faith in these tort lawyers licking their chops and making a wish-list of things they’re going to buy when all that settlement money comes pouring in. But because there are so many plaintiffs, the amount of money each one gets is insignificant when you consider the amount of money involved.

“I heard of a case like that where the attorneys handling the case got $40 million, and by the time all the plaintiffs were paid, they ended up with $30-something thousand dollars each. Now getting $30,000 for being part of a get-rich scheme is a pretty good payday, but what about the people who actually did suffer from using the products and actually deserved to be compensated? They get the 30 grand, just like everyone else.”

So, before you fall victim to these get-rich-quick ads by seeking money for something that really did not harm you in any significant way, I’d recommend talking to an attorney who is the antithesis of all those lawyers for whom the jokes were intended. (Old Zeke at the Snake Farm mistakenly left the cages open, and there were snakes crawling free all over the place, many of them poisonous. Zeke tried everything but couldn’t get the snakes back into their cages. Finally, he yelled, “Quick, somebody call a lawyer!” “A lawyer?” his guests asked. “Why?” Zeke replied, “We need someone who speaks their language.”)