A couple of years ago, I wrote about a class action lawsuit in which I was a participant. The end result of that was me dropping out because I had to provide proof of my involvement, which I could have, but it was more effort than I wanted to expend for my “up to $900”, but realistically more like $5 award.
And now today, I get an email about the Yahoo security breach class action lawsuit. Oh boy, this should be expensive. Scanning the email quickly for numbers, I find that the settlement is for $117 million. Nice. Now, how many potential claimants? Oh… 3 billion.
Quick, what’s the math on this? About four cents per claimant. Well, I guess that’s something. And what, perchance, are the lawyers fees for the case? $30 million, plus an extra $2.5 million for expenses (postage for 3 billion $.04 checks=$900 million, FYI). Oh, and the expenses. Some people endured a greater hardship to prove the culpability of Yahoo, and those people will get awards of $2,500, $5,000, or $7.500. I did not see in a quick scan of the online documents how many people this award pertains to, but there are six plaintiffs. When talking in millions of dollars, 4-figure awards are a rounding error.
So, let’s round down to the nearest million for the post-lawyer-payday settlement pool, which is now $84 million. And now, each claimant is due at least 2.8 cents. I would round that up to 3 cents, but that’s $6 million of rounding that we just don’t have the funds for. Sorry about that.
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