The Economist collects class actions
The previous print issue of The Economist (of February 17th 2007) contains three articles on class actions. They can be found online, as follows (with thanks to Best in Class for the second link):
- Accepting the ambulance chasers (subscription required, pp.16,17)
- If you can’t beat them, join them (pp.71,72)
- Classier actions (pp.80,81)
To regular readers of WV&Z and learned friends however, there is hardly anything new here, rather, all three together serve as a tidy collection of what’s already elsewhere. The basic theme of the first two articles is that ‘the American-style collective lawsuits [are] coming to Europe’ and what the differences in practice are between the US and the various European jurisdictions - of the latter, some do and some do not (yet) accommodate for ‘group actions’.
Jurisdictions singled out include Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and France; cases mentioned, among others, are Royal Ahold NV (securities, settlement), Parmalat SpA (securities, pending), BP Plc (derivative, see this previous post) and British Airways Plc (anti-trust, previous post).
In addition, a recent example of a ‘collective action’ brought in the Dutch courts by an investor association and institutional investors which led to a court-approved settlement for the whole class is the Unilever NV settlement (previous post).
The third article is about the drop in the number of US class actions, but how those fewer actions yield higher settlements by an increasing share of institutional lead plaintiffs. For links to the sources of competing filing statistics and a thorough analysis of them and the trends behind them, see The D&O Diary, The 10b-5 Daily and PointofLaw.com.
Now, for more fun, also at The Economist, check out its Corporate Non-Governance quiz. You’re unlikely to finish it without at least a chuckle or two.