It depends. The law firm sues on behalf of a class of affected individuals/entities (i.e. customers who were wronged) but they can’t do that without your permission. Sometimes this permission is implied if you don’t respond to a notice, so it’s opt-out. Sometimes it is opt-in. Not sure about this one, but you do have a choice to decline representation and theoretically pursue your own legal claim since you wouldn’t be bound by the settlement. But in practice, you aren’t gonna be able to successfully sue a large corporation on your own. That’s the point of class-action lawsuits.
I guess in theory a corporation could set up these flimsy settlements as a sort of inoculation against later claims, but I think that wouldn’t really work in practice. They would have to do this for every possible line of complaint, which is near infinite for a sufficiently large organization.
It depends. The law firm sues on behalf of a class of affected individuals/entities (i.e. customers who were wronged) but they can’t do that without your permission. Sometimes this permission is implied if you don’t respond to a notice, so it’s opt-out. Sometimes it is opt-in. Not sure about this one, but you do have a choice to decline representation and theoretically pursue your own legal claim since you wouldn’t be bound by the settlement. But in practice, you aren’t gonna be able to successfully sue a large corporation on your own. That’s the point of class-action lawsuits.
I guess in theory a corporation could set up these flimsy settlements as a sort of inoculation against later claims, but I think that wouldn’t really work in practice. They would have to do this for every possible line of complaint, which is near infinite for a sufficiently large organization.