Tag: class actions

Consumers are better off when they fight together

Successes and challenges of the French law allowing group actions

The French collective redress procedure, where consumers can go to court as a group, will soon enter its 5th year of operation. Time to have a look at what has been achieved (or not). It’s certainly food for thought in...

/ October 8, 2018

Altroconsumo’s experience of collective redress

If the market is the carrot, then group actions are the stick. The creation of an EU-wide collective redress procedure is currently being hotly debated in Brussels. In Italy meanwhile, the Italian consumer group Altroconsumo has used this stick 14 times...

/ September 14, 2018

US-style litigation culture? Only if you like alternative facts!

  The howls of protest from business groups could be heard across Europe. On 11 April, the Commission proposed to make collective compensation claims possible when large numbers of consumers have been harmed by the same trader. Cue uproar and...

Collective redress for European consumers – yes, we can

I was sitting back in a train from Strasbourg to Brussels in early spring 1998. Looking at the landscape in a train often gives you the distance you need to analyse something happening in your life. I was a young...

/ April 16, 2018