When one or more companies conduct themselves in a way that causes financial harm to a large group of people, each of those people has the right to sue in court to recover the financial damages they’ve endured. As you can guess, if a lot of lawsuits are filed over the same matter, the cost to prosecute all of them to their conclusion would be so high that the only winners would be the lawyers.
A Representative Action addresses that problem.
What is a Representative Action ? A Representative Action is a legal proceeding where –
- a couple of people are chosen as a representative sample of the harm the group as a whole has suffered,
- legal action is taken on their behalf to recover funds from people and companies whose actions or failure to act resulted in an actionable offence against the affected people,
- any proceeds from this action is given to the group as a whole, and finally
- only the Representative Action case is allowed to proceed – all other civil filings on the matter in question are barred.
Doing things this way maximizes the amount of funds returned to the affected people while minimizing the legal fees, level of confusion, and the amount of time needed to pursue a case to a conclusion.
For the District and DIL Representative Actions, the court documents establishing the parameters of the District Subcommittee and its Representative Action are here. The court documents for the DIL Subcommittee and its Representative Action are here.
The District Subcommittee is in charge of supervising counsel for the District Representative Action. They had picked counsel and were starting to take action – when some of the Subcommittee members did something they shouldn’t have and got into legal hot water. As a result all but one of the District Subcommittee members and counsel for the District Representative Action resigned.
The net effect was that only one person was left on the District Subcommittee leaving it unable to act. After the Monitor solicited members of the Subcommittee from the affected members of the District group of people, they found enough people to re-form the Subcommittee. The Subcommittee then retained Higgerty Law as counsel for their Representative Action.
The DIL Subcommittee is in charge of of supervising counsel for the DIL Representative Action and they have retained Sugden McFee & Roos as counsel. Counsel for the DIL Representative Action has since posted documents pertaining to the specific allegations they intend to pursue on their website here. I encourage anyone that thinks that CEF / DIL was simply a failed business venture to read this document – or wait for the summary I’ll be posting in the next few days.
Some details of what the District Subcommittee allegedly did is in the Monitor’s 28th report paragraphs 23, 26-59. The Court’s action is reported in the Monitor’s 29th report paragraphs 18-28. Appendix A-L has the pertinent correspondence in reverse chronological order.
ANO / Lutheran Watch 