Take on a class action and you risk the change of becoming a victim if things go wrong. With collective redress becoming more popular in England and Wales, what should law firms do to protect their practices from the dangers of class actions? Nick Bird reports
It couldn’t have been any clearer. Professor Rachael Mulheron’s report to the Civil Justice Council last month identified ample evidence of a need to reform collective redress procedures. Her core recommendation was for an ‘opt-out’ regime – one where the class members would have the ability to ‘opt out’ but would otherwise be ‘in’. The design, cost and funding issues of such a regime fell outside the scope of her report but it followed in the wake of a report to the Government last year recommending the legalisation of contingency fees in limited circumstances and the regulation of third-party funding of litigation.
