Slight digression. This podcast/article is a good explanation of why people who partake in a class action rarely see any of the settlement money:

https://oliverbatemandoesthework.substack.com/p/the-work-of-...

"We have a case pending right now in the Ninth Circuit. It was a privacy lawsuit against Google. A journalist, not a trial lawyer, determined that you could turn off tracking in Google Maps and it was not supposed to share your data, and then learned that Google was sharing it anyway, whether you turned it off on your phone or turned it off in the app. State attorneys general came in, fined Google a bunch of money, and forced Google to stop. And simultaneously there is a follow-on class action built on the journalists’ research, and that has settled.

The settlement is that Google creates a fund of sixty-two million dollars. The lawyers get nineteen million and the class gets zero. The rest is a big slush fund for a set of left-wing groups. Nothing requires the recipients to be left-wing other than that being what the attorneys chose to present to the court. They do it partly because some of these organizations are clients of the law firm, some of them have lead partners of the firm sitting on their boards, some of them are the attorneys’ alma maters, and some of them are just left-leaning outfits that are promising to do left-wing things. The class is two hundred million people. Maybe a hundred fifty million of them would not like what is being done in their name with their money.

And the judge decides who gets paid. This judge was very excited about getting to stop being a judge and start being a grant administrator with a big pot of philanthropy. We said, why are these unrelated organizations, which are not even unrelated, they are affiliated with class counsel, getting the class’s money? If the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to support the ACLU, it should come out of their pockets and not the class’s pockets. It is perfectly feasible to distribute that money to the class. Much smaller settlements get distributed to similar class sizes all the time. You can complain that if you divided it evenly among every single class member it would be a tiny amount and not worth paying out, but you do not have to do it that way, and most class actions are not done that way. Most class actions settle for less than a dollar per class member. You create a claims process, let class members sign up if they want the money, and divide it that way."