Now an this is totally old news. It figures more tort lawyers would be trying to jump on it. They need people to sue because thats how the assholes make money. Ya Ford was messed up with DCT but tort lawyers are no better in my eyes. Lol
I would respectfully disagree. I'm a retired lawyer. I didn't handle tort or class action lawsuits, I had a general practice in a small town and did a lot of criminal and traffic cases, but being a lawyer does give me a different perspective.
I think that sometimes a lawsuit is the only way to expose corporate wrongdoing. This is particularly true in an area where government regulation is lax. Large corporations often have too much influence on the agencies that are supposed to regulate them, and there is sometimes a revolving door where people go back and forth between the two. In those cases, it's either a private lawsuit, or essentially no regulation at all.
I recently read a revealing article by a doctor who was talking about how essentially unregulated medical devices like hip implants are, and describing extensive problems that have been caused by the failure of many of these devices. He said the FDA theoretically regulates them, but in practice does so much less rigorously then with their regulation of drugs, and also says some laws made it difficult to sue the companies that make these devices. He actually advocated for changing those laws and making it easier to sue those companies as the only way to provide more protection for patients.
I would agree with
@SteveS above that in the class actions, the lawyers often take a huge recovery, and the beneficiaries get a small amount. That has certainly happened to me as the beneficiary of various small class action suits. It does appear, though, that in this class action involving the Ford DCT transmissions that at least some of the beneficiaries will get a substantial settlement. It also appears that government regulation did not provide them with an effective remedy in this case, as in the hip implant situation I referenced above.
So again, in many cases the choice is either no effective regulation or a private lawsuit. In this case it does look like Ford's conduct was pretty bad, that they knew about a serious problem for a long time and either did nothing about it or actively tried to cover it up, and should have been held accountable for it. That lawsuit was probably the only way that this was going to happen.