Max, a partial response on the attorney thing.
The class action system is a bogus system that basically enriches attorneys without properly compensating the injured parties. Many frivolous class action suits are filed just to take advantage of this law without any regard to the people who they are supposed to be representing. It's a money grab by the attorneys in most cases, nothing else.
If the attorneys actually believed in these cases, they wouldn't agree to the bogus settlements that basically get them paid in cash and clients paid in coupons that can be applied to future purchases of products or services.
Several good friends of mine are attorneys, and they admit the class action system is flawed.
I wish you could see the cases being brought in California by bounty hunters against nearly every company that does business in California. The law there allows people to sue for contact with any one of 604 chemicals that has been shown to possibly cause cancer or birth defects at 1000-times the levels touched.
In other words, if I sell a plastic toy that has 10 Parts per million of a chemical that has been shown to be safe at levels under 10,000 parts per million, I'm liable for damages under the law of $2,500 per day per item for up to the past 4-years.
If I sold 100 squirt guns in California at 1000-times safer than the minimum safe level, and each one was handled by 10-kids for a minute each, my liability for that $0.99 product just for that one day is $2,500,000 on squirt guns worth under $100.00. If they did it every day over 4-years, my liability would be $3.65 Billion under the law for under $100 worth of products.
Bounty hunters are actually provided for in this law, so
you can see my frustration over these situations.
Anyway, we need protection of the consumer in this country, but until we get a system where there is a form of losers pay, with the money coming out of the pockets of the losing attorney (like in Great Britian) we're going to have a skewed system I'm afraid. |
