Insurance Dispute Lawyer Blog
The settlement in Orrill v. Louisiana Citizens Fair Plan demonstrates some of the hurdles faced by class action litigants and the benefits of having experienced class counsel. In that case, Katrina and Rita victims sought statutory penalties for their insurers’ failure to pay claims within the 30 days required by statute. The long history of the case dates to 2005, immediately after the storms first hit. The Berniard Law Firm vigorously pursued their claims past procedural roadblocks along the way to a final settlement this past January.
While class actions provide an obviously efficient way of adjudicating large controversies, the drawbacks associated with this device are equally apparent. Class actions allow courts to resolve all claims related to an occurrence in a single proceeding. This means, however, that even claims of those who do not participate must be decided. Otherwise, class members could “free ride” off the efforts of others, waiting to see whether a legal strategy or theory will succeed or fail without expending any efforts or resources. Courts have long resolved this dilemma by requiring class action plaintiffs to provide adequate notice to those who might have claims and by requiring that participants meet a series of requirements.
First, the class must consist of a sufficiently large number of claimants. Courts have not defined this “numerosity” requirement precisely; rather, a plaintiff satisfies this requirement by establishing that traditional methods of joining parties would be unreasonably difficult or expensive. Second, the claims of the class members must involve common issues. To meet this “commonality” requirement, it is not enough simply to have claims resulting from the same injury. Instead those claims must be capable of resolution in the same way. As the United States Supreme Court has stated, what is important is not the raising of common questions, but “capacity of a classwide proceeding to generate common answers.”