I received an announcement that I am a member of a class in a class action lawsuit against AT&T Wireless. I've taken to reading the details of these mailers (it seems I get one every couple of months) just to see how the lawyers and the 'victims' are making out.
In this case, it seems that under certain circumstances, if you cancelled your AT&T Wireless service, they charged you through the whole month, rather than stopping on the day you cancelled the service. So, for someone who had a plan like mine, that could be a $70 or so overcharge. I'm sure that on average, the charge is much less, but you understand my point.
Since these lawyers have gone to bat for me, you'd think I'm looking forward to my huge reimbursement check, maybe I could buy some friends some beers with it or something. Alas, no. My reimbursement is either a 50 or 100 minute long distance calling card (non transferrable) - retail value, maybe $10 - actual cost to AT&T Wireless - zilch + $.01.
Um, yeah. When was the last time someone with a cell phone with a billion 'free' minutes bothered to use a calling card anyway?
Well, surely the lawyers will enjoy their 100 minute callings cards, right? Alas, again, no. The are not receiving the very valuable calling cards that are just compensation to those of us victimized by the ruthless AT&T Wireless company. Rather they are nobly receiving $2.1 million dollars for a few months worth of work, and even that wasn't full time, I'm sure. Even if it was 5 lawyers full time for 2 months, that's about 3200 hours of time, that's about $650 per hour. Not bad work if you can get it. And realistically, it was probably a lawyer and an assistant, with about 100 hours of work total (it's not that hard to make a boilerplate lawsuit), equalling $21,000 per hour.
I think the first step in lawsuit reform would be to pass a law that says that a lawyer cannot receive more than (say) 100 times the amount that an individual victim will receive from a settlement. Of course, given that most lawmakers are in the pockets of lawyers (or former lawyers themselves), we know that will never happen. In this case, they could use their 10,000 free long distance minutes to shop around for other victims. How about those people sick of ads everywhere - there's got to be some money in solving a real problem like that!
Thank goodness those lawyers are out there protecting us from being ripped off.