Cambrianhouse has inspired me to become more professional and study a whole lot of new things, so now I am a lot more skilled and I think I may have landed a killer job at Electronic Arts, probably thanks to the mention of Gwabs

Cory Ross

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

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Class Action Lawsuit Crowdsourcing

Submitted by: Rafe
Created: Sep 7, 2007, 6:55 pm

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The Idea

Class action lawsuits are good because they hold companies accountable for actions which harm people. Individuals cannot fight corporations due to disparity of resources. Class action suits are crowdsourced lawsuits. Unfortunately, lawyers are the only ones who really benefit when all is said and done, taking 30% - 50% of any judgment or settlement, giving people who weren't really harmed an (albeit small) free ride, and diluting legitimate claimants drastically.

This idea allows suit classes to self-organize, just like CambrianHouse does for new businesses. Unlike current class actions, ours would choose their legal team via a bidding system or by work contributed from lawyers in the class. Proceeds would be distributed via credit systems similar to the onese used here.

No need to re-invent the wheel. The software and business model on CH.com is close enough that it could be forked off to do ClassActionMarket.com with just a few modifications.

I thought of this idea when I was...

Thought of it a couple years ago when I first started looking into new uses of market systems, such as those done on Ideosphere.com. The whole enterprise of class action suits seems like an inefficient market of information, work and allocation.

In my original conception of the idea, class action suits could actually "IPO" and sell shares to the public once they were formed. What do you think, would this work?

Comments Posted

saigon Posted: September 7, 2007, 9:39 pm

The usual question on such an idea is Integrity and abuse..how do yo make the organizational control and filtering of legitimate complainants?

cRitter Posted: September 12, 2007, 12:57 pm

On the one hand: I completely support this idea! The rhetoric of Capitalism states that the Consumer ultimately has control over the market based on their buying power. In reality, we're subjected to over priced crap which is replaced every six months by the latest and greatest and no longer supported. Leveraging crowdsourcing to give the power back to the consumer could be a godsend, and your idea really does make sense in this regard.

However, on the other hand: You don't succeed in a Capitalist system by being the Consumer. The harder we push, the higher the prices are raised. Businesses and governments complain that the current cost of services are due to the lawsuits which are filed against them, or the regulations which are imposed against them. Even though I've got a list of business that I would love to sue, I'm afraid the fallout would land squarely on our pocketbooks.

doublelibra Posted: September 27, 2007, 12:03 am

cRitter, didn't you say you just read 'supercapitalism'? what about 'our low-low prices' and the nefarious effects of that? how does that jive with your 'higher prices due to regulations & litigation' theory? Also the 'rhetoric' you mention is more than rhetoric - its economic fact. if there's no demand for something it's value is lower. the 'over priced crap' has much demand that isn't easily quenched, hence why it keeps coming out...and selling.

and unless we're talking about purely frivolous litigation (which hopefully we're not), then being scared of suing a company that has truly harmed a lot of people in some way, esp based merely on the vague prospect of paying a few more dollars for something later on, is insensitive and selfish.

Regarding the idea - it seems like a pretty good one! I don't imagine you'd be overhauling the whole class action system, but instead facilitating the existing procedures via the internet. Seems like a great idea.

Oh I just remembered, there was a class action case against netflix a while back, that someone decided was a lawyer-driven money grab & scam and made a web-based initiative to kill the case. The lawyers were the only ones getting anything out of it - millions, while the 'class' stood to gain something ridiculous like an upgraded membership that they even had to start paying more for, without notice, after a few months. Anyway, this was very much a internet-enable class action, both the action AND the anti-action, so worth looking into.
'
Damn, looks like the site that originated the anti-action has expired, so you'll have to use the wayback machine to check this site, try october 2005:
http://netflixsettlementsucks.com

But here's some info links:
http://tinyurl.com/ysd42h
http://tinyurl.com/yshmhc

And here's the class-action website:
http://www.netflix.com/Settlement

Rich2809 Posted: November 12, 2007, 7:13 am

boo!!

Hello!

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