For those of you following the Chinese drywall mess, the Banner settlement is simply the latest scam to come down the pike.
Execrable plaintiff’s lawyer Arnold Levin is in charge here, and predictably, the attorneys are set up to get millions, while the affected homeowners might get a few thousand—and that assumes that they can obtain all the necessary documentation to prove their case. Naturally, such documentary compliance is all at the homeowners’ expense.
It is a testimony to the peculiarities of the human mind that class action lawsuits exist at all. Evidently, the victimized public gets sufficient succor by seeing the defendant “suffer,” even though they themselves will get no meaningful recovery. The idea is to build the class as big as possible to garner the maximum settlement, assuring big attorney’s fees, and at the same time securing nothing for the plaintiffs.
Ironically, the only class action that ever benefited the plaintiffs involved Blockbuster Video, which settled, and changed its late fee policies. And that exception proves the rule that class action litigation, including the Banner settlement, is a total crock.