THE CASE FOR CLASS ACTION REFORM IN THE UK
Access to justice for individuals injured by substantial corporates is all but non-existent in the UK. For a country whose systems of law were once the admiration of the world, it is embarrassing to have to make that statement. This article examines why this situation has arisen and proposes a solution.
It often happens that torts committed by corporate defendants cause modest loss to individuals but that, when the losses of multiple individuals are aggregated, the total loss is very large. The US, Canada and some of the European civil law countries have developed forms of ‘class action’ to deal with this situation. In the UK an attempt has recently been made to adjust the law in order to achieve the same result; but the introduction of the procedure failed to take into account the features of UK litigation that are different from other legal systems in which class actions work.
In the US, for example, claimant lawyers are at the heart of the viability of class actions. Lawyers develop claims on behalf of classes of individual or consumer claimants and drive the claims forward to settlement or trial at their own risk. Their reward is a contingency fee comprising an agreed percentage of the settlement or damages. Other than in rare and exceptional cases, there is no adverse costs risk. Claimant lawyers do not need to be concerned with the legal costs incurred by the defendants.
Oct-Dec 2020 issue
Humphries Kerstetter LLP