Access to justice, Class actions, Legal Practice Management
Leave a comment

Few number of claimants prompts questions over class actions

Nearly three decades after class actions made their first appearance in the Canadian legal landscape, little light has been shed over the proportion of class members who make a claim, which hasn’t stopped some from speculating that the numbers are so low that they call into question the need for class proceedings.

“Where there is money set aside for individual plaintiffs and they have to apply for the funds, anybody who did the research would find that there’s very little uptake and the funds that are unapplied for are given to charitable organizations,” asserts William Vanveen, a former assistant law professor at the University of Windsor’s faculty of law, now a partner with Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP in Ottawa. “The lack of application for relief to the funds by directly affected plaintiffs indicates to me that there isn’t a great social need for these actions.”

Read More

This story was originally published in The Lawyers Weekly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *