[dontnotice]

The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer/law firm.

Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and the media should consider that before obliging with the reputational damage.

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I don't think I've made any non factual or offensive statements.

[geofft]

Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to court and paying a lawyer to be worthwhile.

If you think that lawyers being motivated by money corrupts the legal system, well, I would agree and apparently so would Judge Richard Posner, who retired this week because he suddenly realized how unjust this all was. But, well, this is the system we have now.

[srtjstjsj]

Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news should be illegal!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career

[dontnotice]

My more pressing (no pun intended) concern is with the press' coverage of these suits, when they don't lay bare the underlying machinations they are basically choosing sides.

[pillowkusis]

>The media should practice more circumspection

They won't for exactly the reason the lawyers do this. This is a trendy, hot topic (look how many comments it has on HN so far). This is "news" fodder for media outlets. They don't mind that they're being taken advantage of as long as they get a non-zero amount of ad views out of the deal. Win/win for the lawyers and the media, although definitely a loss for those reading.