MOWER & CARREON, LLP

CLASS ACTION

Class action cases can take many forms.  Our firm represents class action plaintiffs in employment, consumer fraud, product defect, and unfair business practice claims.  We are among a select group of attorneys in Orange County who have successfully prosecuted class action cases in all of these areas.

A class action is a special form of lawsuit filed by one or more “class representatives” on behalf of a much larger group of people who have similar claims.  The purpose for class action cases is to allow claims that would be economically  difficult to prosecute individually because of their value to be pursued on behalf of an entire class or group of people where the combined value of the claims is worthy of the extensive litigation efforts that are frequently required to obtain a fair and just recovery. 

A couple of examples are illustrative. 

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2. •In the employment context, an employer may deny overtime or meal breaks to a large group of employees over a period of years.  Each individual employee may have a claim for only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars which, if pursued individually in the court system, would potentially cost more in time, expense, and fees than the case is worth.  However, when these claims are aggregated and there are perhaps several hundred or even several thousand claimants, the overall value of the case is now quite large and justifies the expenditure of time, costs of litigation, and hundreds or thousands of hours of attorney time that will be required to bring the employer to justice.
   

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4. •Similarly, a consumer may have been illegally or unlawfully victimized by a business perhaps losing only a few dollars.  It would be impossible to justify the expense of each individual having to prosecute a case for such a minimal amount, but banded together in a large group, they now have a substantial “clout’ and can successfully prosecute an action against even a large and powerful corporate defendant.
   

Class actions vindicate the rights of the “little guy” against the fraudulent, unfair, and bullying tactics of those who, without the class action system, would be able to get away with causing relatively small amounts of individual harm to a very large group of consumers or employees.  As one cynical commentator quipped: “it’s a lot easier to steal $5 from a million people than $5 million from one person.”  As lawyers who concentrate their practice in the prosecution of class action claims, we view it as our job to see that this prediction is not assisted by the justice system.  We are always on the lookout for instances where ordinary people are being taken advantage of by those with a monopoly on information and power.

Class action cases are often brought to us by people who see “something wrong” in the way a business operation, service, or employer is conducting itself.  We will investigate claims of wrongdoing and evaluate the potential for a class action case.