A Class-Action Suit is a lawsuit that is brought by one party on behalf of a group of individuals all having the same grievance. This type of lawsuit works out in the best interest of the suing parties as they all work together as one force and pool their resources to pay for legal representation. Class-action suits are becoming more and more common as the rights of individuals are being trampled on more and more by different people, companies, conglomerates, or other entities that place the offended parties in a difficult position. While some things that companies do in terms of initiating actions against a group of individuals places them at the end of a law suit and is sometimes justified and legal, not all of these actions are lawful.
For example, in November 2002, PayPal found itself facing a class-action suit. The “suit charges PayPal with illegitimately restricting customers’ access to their money. The suit asks for an unspecified amount of damages. PayPal frequently locks customers’ accounts if it suspects that fraud played a part in a transaction, even if the amount in doubt is a fraction of the total amount in an account, said Gail Koff, an attorney and founding partner of Jacoby & Meyers, which filed the lawsuit.” – CNet News.com (http://news.com.com/2100-1017-842240.html). PayPal’s justification for locking customers’ accounts is that it trying to protect itself from fraudulent transactions. However, the affected customers’ believe that PayPal was treating any “suspicious” activity as fraud, even if it was not, as they have been losing millions of dollars due to fraud. In any case, this is just one example of a class-action suit because it involved a group of people who had a grievance with PayPal.
Another example of a class-action suit that was filed is that against AT&T for “Collaboration with Illegal Domestic Spying Program”. In this case, the “Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications…. The EFF lawsuit arose from news reports in December 2005, which first revealed that the NSA has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications without any court oversight and in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001, apparently intercepts and analyzes the phone and Internet communications of millions of ordinary Americans.” - EFF (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/). In this case, customers accused AT&T of violating their privacy by listening to their calls without their consent, in effect an invasion of privacy. The disgruntled customers subsequently filed a class-action suit against AT&T.
These are two completely different cases where a class-action suit was filed. There are many other examples of such suits that are of similar interest and depth. All in all, class-action suits are here to stay because there will always be a set of disgruntled individuals who are unhappy with something that someone or a company does to them, resulting in lawsuits being filed.
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