Originally Posted by
oventoast
Nope, all the people affected don't have to agree at this stage.
Class actions are a procedural mechanism that lawyers can use to group all of the claims together without identifying all of the parties involved (usually on the plaintiff side). What happen is a law firm will bring one lawsuit under a "representative" plaintiff who basically serves as a representative/figurehead for a "class" of people. The representative plaintiff will usually have similarities in common with the rest of the class, i.e., be representative of the class.
The lawsuit will define the class of people to be represented (the "class definition"). For example, for a harmful medical device case it would be everyone implanted with the device. The lawyers don't have to know or receive consent from everyone defined in that group of people until much later. They don't even need to know for sure who is in the class, only to have some type of methodology for detecting/identifying who is in the class.
The reason for this is that simply filing a class action lawsuit doesn't actually mean you have a class action yet. The lawyers will file a "proposed" class action lawsuit with this defined group of anonymous/non-consenting/unaware people under a "representative", and then the plaintiff lawyers will have to seek the court's approval to get it "certified" as a class action. The first step in a putative class action lawsuit is generally certification.
Once the class action lawsuit is certified, its no longer "theoretical" or "proposed", and it becomes official. Once it is certified, it carries on like a more "ordinary" lawsuit, i.e., goes to trials etc.
Usually sometime after the class action is certified, something called "notice" will be done, i.e., the law firm will try its best to contact everyone defined in the class and make them aware that they are subject to a class action lawsuit. Notice goes out and alerts everyone in the class. Generally this happens when a settlement is reached, because a settlement will sign the legal rights away of everyone in the class in exchange for a sum of money, so it's important to make sure everyone who doesn't want to be captured by the settlement has a chance to opt-out of it.
The rules might differ depending what state (or country) you are in, but I think that if you become aware of a class action where you are part of the class, you can opt-out any time before the opt-out period expires (generally it expires after a settlement has been reached and notice goes out detailing a specific "date" by which it is expired - the court has to approve the notice).
Why they didn't take JS to court privately as one party:
Taking JS privately to court as one party would be very time-consuming, the person would have to pay an individual lawyer and the lawsuit probably wouldn't be done on contingency. Class actions are usually done on contingency, and many of them are "lawyer-driven" (this one probably is), meaning that the lawyers essentially start them (as opposed to the representative plaintiff or the class). Because they are done on contingency, the lawyers are effectively working for free until a settlement is reached (and then they take a portion of the settlement as fees at the end of a class action).
So basically, it would be too expensive and not worth it for anyone involved to do it individually. By doing it as a class action, the lawyers are putting their bets on reaching a settlement that covers a large enough group of people for it to be profitable to them (i.e., $5 per person).
The best explanation of this phenomenon is in the context of price-fixing class actions (where a group of large corporations has been caught fixing the price of an item over a period of time--kind of like IRL Merchant Plus). When a bunch of Canadian companies were caught fixing the price of bread over 20 years, the judge explained it using this quote: "The realistic alternative to a class action is not 17m individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $30."
Another really good thing about class actions is that filing a proposed class action effectively "freezes" the limitations period for the claims, for everyone. For many cases you only have a finite number of years to file your lawsuit (i.e., 2 years) before your claims are extinguished. Filing a class action freezes the clock for those claims for everyone that fits in the class definition, so their legal rights are protected until the end of the lawsuit.
In 2011, certain changes were made to the class actions regime in the US which made it more difficult to bring medical device/pharmaceutical industry cases as "class actions" - it no longer works to bring them and they generally don't get certified. The biggest downside is that now these have to be brought as "group claims" (kind of like what your post describes). This is really bad for plaintiff's lawyers because essentially once you file the first set of "group claims", if someone comes to you 2+ years later with the same injury/side effects/etc, their claim might be extinguished or "out of time" because it wasn't protected by a suspension of the limitations periods. There are a lot of other downsides in terms of efficiency, etc. as well, but this is probably the biggest problem with bringing a group claim vs a class action. For a case where you just don't personally know who has been affected by the damage, if you file it as a group claim, you run the risk of leaving a large chunk of people vulnerable to having their legal rights permanently lapsed. This is why you will frequently see TV advertising about pharma lawsuits - they are trying to locate as many people as possible before time runs out.