Class action legal cases surge as consumers fight back

YE gads! The peasants are revolting. How dare they!But fear not. The finance gentry will soon have everything in order and put those pesky revolting customers back in their place.

Class actions increase.

YE gads! The peasants are revolting. How dare they!

But fear not. The finance gentry will soon have everything in order and put those pesky revolting customers back in their place.

Or will they?

The rise and rise of legal class actions appears to be the only way customers have to fight back. Not only does a class action offer the potential of financial compensation but, importantly, it also offers a chance for people to feel heard and to be counted.

Finance customers have been fobbed off for years, their complaints ignored, their rights trampled and they have been made to feel powerless. Little wonder, then, that we have a surge in class actions.

The use of class actions by unhappy consumers has increased in Australia.

But these legal cases will not be easy and the warning shots have already been fired across the bows of the growing class action industry.

And that’s because the stakes involved are huge.

The reputational damage from the royal commission to banks, fund managers, advisers and insurers continues to grow. At each sitting we hear even more depraved behaviour under the stewardship of what were once considered Australia’s highest corporate leaders.

But despite the smart suits of these executives, their chauffeured lifestyles and narrow social exposure, these institutions are hitting back like hardened street fighters.

Little by little, without raising too much attention, they are buffering their defences and building even greater walls and networks to protect their profit streams.

And as a bloc, backed by billions of their own customers’ dollars, supported by mates in high places and let run rife by deliberately underfunded regulators, they make formidable alliance.

What chance have we customers of ever getting a fair go? Not much.

And that’s exactly what they want us to think. The subversive messages in their PR attack is to make us feel hopeless and powerless.

And the more hopeless and powerless we feel, the faster we’ll all be back to the good oil’ days where customers put up with what they got and, as individuals, they couldn’t afford to take legal action.

How long will it take to beat down the public outrage and to rewrite all the inconvenient truth revealed by the royal commission; three months, six months, pffff, maybe its already happened?

Many people are already so overwhelmed at the systemic lack of ethics within our biggest financial companies that they have already shrugged their shoulders in despair and switched off.

But the power tactics of the past are no longer as effective in today’s warfare. The front line of attack is no longer made up of exhausted and broke customers. Instead the spearhead is dominated by fully funded and fully briefed class action litigants and lawyers and senior counsel.

Which is why the use of class actions is now being denigrated by a member of the very institution that is supposed to uphold all of our legal rights — the judicial system.

A retiring federal court judge recently implied class action lawyers were vultures and their behaviour was predatory. Excuse me! If ever there was vulture-like and predatory actions it has been within the financial sector, not the lawyers acting for the victims.

To me, the judge’s comments were a warning to the law firms and litigation funders to pull their heads in and curtail their class actions against the big end of town.