I know class action lawyers who work incredibly hard to defend the 'small people' and don't make that much. They take David vs Goliath cases. They went after a tobacco company, for example.
The lawsuits take a lot of work, they only get paid if they win, and they don't always win.
I'm sure there are class action lawyers who are in it for the money, but most lawyers who are in it for the money would go into corporate law, not class action.
While I don't doubt that there are lawyers who are very much in it for the small guy, I can count on one hand the number of class action lawsuits I've seen where the outcome for the small guys in question is anything more substantial than a coupon. That's assuming you consider 0 fingers as a valid count on one hand. (I don't doubt such cases exist, but I've never seen one).
Yeah I'm not saying the payouts are great. But let's say, pessimistically, that the lawyers took 80%; if they had done it pro bono, you'd get 5 coupons instead of 1. Better, but not by much.
A small payout could be due to greedy class action lawyers, but it could be due to the corporate lawyers successfully arguing damages down to nearly nothing (compared to the size of the class). The second one sounds more likely to me.
In the cases I've heard about, the corporate team had orders of magnitude more resources than the class action lawyers (think 3 lawyers working part time on the case vs. the corporation having an expert prepare for 2 years to appear once in court. I am not making this up.)
I'm biased though, the few class action lawyers I know are good guys, it's possible most aren't. I havn't looked at the field in general, and IANAL, so take that with generous salt.
I wonder if there's a term for the more general concept - rules are put in place to help/empower the individual/less powerful only to have the system corrupted by the powerful interests already in existence.
"Regulatory capture" is also an example of this idea but I think there's a larger pattern.
