Podcast: Suing City Hall: Class Actions as Private Enforcement of Local Governments

Title: Suing City Hall: Class Actions as Private Enforcement of Local Governments

Date: Monday, March 23, 2026

Description: Using data from Israel, this study examines the scope and effectiveness of class actions filed against local governments. The researchers analyzed about 2,000 cases, coding key details such as subject matter, outcomes and remedies. The findings show class actions can strengthen oversight of local governments, while also identifying ways to reduce misuse of the process by plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Speakers:

Omer Kimhi - Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Haifa University

Podcast:

Queen's Law · Qlaw Pod - Episode 60 - Suing City Hall: Class Actions as Private Enforcement of Local Governments

Transcript:

00:00:00
And now I'd like to introduce Professor Omer Kimhi.
00:00:04
He's professor of law at the University of Haifa.
00:00:06
He holds a bachelor's of arts degree, magna *** laude, in economics from Tel Aviv University, and an MBA specializing in accounting and finance.
00:00:19
Also magna *** laude, also from Tel Aviv, and a JSD from New York University, where, in fact,
00:00:28
So Omer's research areas include bankruptcy law, local government laws, corporate laws, and economic analysis of the law.
00:00:37
And he's published articles in these fields in many leading journals, particularly sort of American law reviews.
00:00:44
I noticed sort of a lot of publications in those law reviews.
00:00:48
And his interests range, in fact, quite widely beyond the topics that I just raised.
00:00:53
For instance,
00:00:54
He's written on the expansion of access to higher education, and he's written on anti-discrimination law.
00:01:02
He's held visiting appointments at Harvard Law School and at the Universities of Hamburg and Vienna, and he's contributed to national policy efforts and international conferences on insolvency and public finance.
00:01:16
So today, Omar is going to be presenting his really quite fascinating empirical research on an accountability mechanism for government that I had never thought of, which is specifically sort of class actions as they're used to sort of hold local governments to account.
00:01:32
So with that...
00:01:34
Thank you, Colin.
00:01:36
And thank you for having me.
00:01:37
Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
00:01:40
Let me say that the article is still a work in progress.
00:01:44
It's not submitted yet.
00:01:46
So any question, comment will make the work better.
00:01:51
So I welcome any comments.
00:01:55
As Colin said, in my university, I teach local governments and corporations.
00:02:02
Usually people think they're kind of disconnected, but there are some intersections and this article is
00:02:11
is one of those intersections.
00:02:13
It deals with class actions, which are usually commercial, against local governments.
00:02:21
So the article combines these two fields of work and trying to find out, does class actions actually do the same work with local governments as they do with commercial cooperations?
00:02:38
The presentation will go as follows.
00:02:40
First, I will briefly describe these two bodies of literature.
00:02:47
Then I will go to our empirical setting.
00:02:51
Then I'll describe the results and some policy recommendations at the end.
00:03:01
So we know from public choice theory that local officials do not always
00:03:07
act in favor of the residents.
00:03:10
Many times, they act for their own interests, trying to increase their own power and control.
00:03:17
So we need to have monitors for the local officials.
00:03:21
And the literature sort of typifies three types of monitors-- the central government, residents, and to some extent, creditors.
00:03:31
Central government seems like the obvious monitor, because central governments regulate local government.
00:03:42
The problem with central government monitoring is that it's expensive.
00:03:46
You have to have a lot of information about what happens in local governments.
00:03:50
You have to know who is responsible.
00:03:53
And central governments do not always want to spend the money required for efficient monitoring.
00:04:01
Also, central monitoring is often politically oriented.
00:04:07
So there are politicians in local governments, politicians in central governments, they are connected, same parties, sometimes opposite parties, but the monitoring may be influenced by politics.
00:04:22
Another channel for local monitoring is the residents.
00:04:27
Residents monitoring, I would say, in two ways.
00:04:32
First, the political market elections.
00:04:35
Residents can vote for politicians that do a good job in providing public goods, and they can vote off politicians that don't do a good job.
00:04:48
However, residents monitoring is is can be characterized also as a public good.
00:04:56
As I said before, monitoring is expensive.
00:04:58
You have to be knowledgeable.
00:05:00
You have to have information.
00:05:02
And for each resident, it would be beneficial to say, I won't do it, but my neighbor will.
00:05:10
So monitoring is under-provided.
00:05:13
And elections, I would say, are four years more or less apart.
00:05:18
So political market, it's a monitor, but maybe not sufficient.
00:05:26
Another residence monitoring channel is the market for residents.
00:05:30
So if public goods in the local government are not provided efficiently, then residents can just move.
00:05:38
This is what is called the TIBU model, the TIBU market.
00:05:43
It's not always easy to move.
00:05:47
It's not always feasible.
00:05:50
So I will expand on the TIBU model because it's important for the paper, but
00:05:56
For now, I would say, again, it's not sufficient.
00:05:59
Some people or some scholars said, okay, creditors also monitor local governments, but the monitoring of creditors is mostly financial.
00:06:10
If local officials do things that are good or do not matter financially for the city, but they're bad for the residents, creditors will not care.
00:06:22
The same monitors
00:06:25
can be seen with commercial corporations.
00:06:31
So in commercial corporations, the regulator, the central government, for example, the ECC is a monitor.
00:06:39
The shareholders are equivalent to some extent to the residents.
00:06:45
And we have creditors.
00:06:47
Creditors monitor commercial corporations very good, I would say.
00:06:51
But in the commercial context, we also have another type of monitoring that the literature discusses, which is private enforcement through class actions and derivative actions.
00:07:04
Both types of actions are a solution for a collective action problem.
00:07:09
In some cases, the damage that is caused by the corporation or its officials is dispersed among many residents, many shareholders.
00:07:21
And in order to, for each shareholder, it's not worthwhile to initiate litigation.
00:07:29
So the class action aggregates the damage in a way that it lets one representative plaintiff to sue for the entire group and the rest of the group, the rest of the shareholders, do not have to participate.
00:07:49
We know from commercial class action literature that the plaintiff's lawyer is usually the driver of the litigation.
00:07:58
The plaintiff's lawyer, they get their fees as a percentage of the damage that is caused to the entire group.
00:08:09
And it's worthwhile for the lawyer to look for causes of action, to find potential plaintiffs,
00:08:19
and then to initiate legal proceedings in order to get the fees.
00:08:24
And we wanted to know whether the same logic can apply to local governments.
00:08:30
So whether we can take plaintiff lawyers, plaintiffs that see damage that is caused to the residents and then they can sue in order for the damage to be remedied and for the lawyer to get their fees.
00:08:50
So basically we ask three research questions.
00:08:54
The first question, what are the characteristics and outcome of class actions against municipalities?
00:09:02
This is basically descriptive statistics.
00:09:04
We look at the class actions, we see what they're about.
00:09:08
What are the causes of action?
00:09:11
Who are the plaintiffs?
00:09:13
What are the remedies?
00:09:15
What are the attorney's fees, etc.?
00:09:18
Then we look at which local governments are most exposed to class actions.
00:09:25
Which local governments, I would say, suffer the most from class actions because they have to deal with many class actions when they are sued.
00:09:36
And the last question is which local governments tend to lose.
00:09:40
So which local governments suffer from successful class actions?
00:09:47
And we basically look whether there is a correlation of successful class actions and other indicators of governance quality.
00:09:57
How did we do it?
00:09:59
We looked for every class action filed against a local government in Israel between 2010 and 2020.
00:10:07
It's 2,129 actions.
00:10:13
We coded
00:10:15
information about each and every one of these lawsuits, whether the parties, whether the plaintiff lost or won, attorney's fees, causes of action, whatever.
00:10:29
Then we gathered information about local governments from the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, and then we tried to find correlation and statistically analyzed the information.
00:10:45
So we'll start with the descriptive statistics.
00:10:48
Almost within our sample period, almost all local governments are sued.
00:10:54
Average number per local government over our sample period is 8.3.
00:11:02
Tel Aviv is the winner or loser.
00:11:05
Depends on that.
00:11:06
Tel Aviv received most action, 125 within the
00:11:13
sample period.
00:11:16
In 2010, there was a total of 40 class actions against local governments.
00:11:23
In 2020, there were 451.
00:11:27
In most years, it's around 150.
00:11:30
So it's not like a real slope, but it's kind of in most years, it's like 150, 200, something like that.
00:11:40
The actions are filed by repeat lawyers.
00:11:43
So the person you see in the slide, his name is Muhammad Zfouri, and he's, I would say, perhaps the clearest example of the repeat lawyer.
00:11:55
37% of class action litigation against local governments in the sample period, it's 791 claims were filed by Muhammad Zfouri.
00:12:06
He's quite a busy guy.
00:12:11
What he does, he looks for a regulatory breach in a local government.
00:12:18
Usually, the breach is small.
00:12:20
It's kind of like the local government operated leaf blowers with too much noise.
00:12:30
Or there is the internet of the local government did not detail something that it should have done.
00:12:39
And he files this lawsuit, this class action, against hundreds of municipalities.
00:12:47
It's really cut and paste.
00:12:50
One example of that is he filed the class actions about bus stops not accessible to people with disabilities.
00:13:01
And he filed it against, I think, 100 or 150 local governments.
00:13:07
One of those local governments, the municipality of Mashhad, actually did not have bus stops.
00:13:13
He didn't even bother to look whether to see if there are bus stops.
00:13:18
It just cuts and pastes.
00:13:20
Muhammad's is not the only one.
00:13:23
Twenty-six lawyers initiated, in our sample period, between 10 and sixty-five sanctions.
00:13:31
And those actions are, we kind of call nuisance actions.
00:13:36
They're not nuisance in the sense that they usually find some regulatory breach, either justified or not, but mostly the lawyer wants to sue and then settle for something.
00:13:52
The causes of actions of local class actions, they are limited by the Israeli class action law.
00:14:03
So there are specific reasons or causes of action you can sue in class actions.
00:14:10
Most of the actions are for restitution of overcharges.
00:14:15
So the local government taxed too much, or the local government taxed the property it cannot tax, or the local government charges too much interest on debt.
00:14:28
29% is for equal rights for persons with disabilities law, and 5% are for environmental issues.
00:14:37
All actions, I would say, are for a certain regulatory breach.
00:14:43
The lawyer finds a regulatory breach and then sues in the hope, the regulatory breach, of course, causes a damage, and the lawyer hopes that he will get
00:14:56
certain parts of the damage as fees.
00:15:03
Perhaps most important is who wins and who lose, or how many plaintiffs actually win.
00:15:12
So it's
00:15:14
Winning and losing is evasive in the sense that how can you tell win or lose?
00:15:20
The plaintiff's lawyer took action for 10 million and he got 1 million.
00:15:26
Is it winning or losing?
00:15:28
Or I didn't get any money, but the local government had to do something.
00:15:35
So in order for a case to be considered successful, we defined
00:15:40
defined it as the case had to meet two cumulative conditions.
00:15:45
The first, the court must state in the decision that the litigation produced a benefit for the plaintiff's group and detail what the benefit is.
00:15:59
The rationale, if there was a benefit, it means that the action was successful.
00:16:08
And the class action actually monitored because there was a benefit.
00:16:14
In 90%, 89% of the class action that were successful, the benefit was not monetary damage.
00:16:25
There was no monetary compensation.
00:16:29
What happened is the local government was ordered by the court or through a settlement
00:16:36
to change its behavior to, if there was a remedy, to no longer practice the violating behavior or policy.
00:16:49
The second condition is that the court must award or approve in a settlement attorney's fee to the plaintiff's lawyer.
00:16:58
This condition is based on
00:17:03
the law in Israel or case law in Israel that says that attorney's fees should be or are connected to the benefit that the action brings to the plaintiff.
00:17:16
So if there is no benefit, then no attorney's fees, or maybe the plaintiff has to pay the local government.
00:17:23
But if there is a benefit, then there should be attorney's fees and only if there is a benefit.
00:17:31
Usually, the two conditions go hand in hand.
00:17:34
That is, if there is a benefit, there is also attorney's fees.
00:17:37
But we wanted to make sure that both take place, because sometimes there is a benefit, but the court was not sure if it's the litigation, so it didn't award attorney's fees, or sometimes there were attorney's fees, but the benefit was not clear.
00:17:55
So in order to make sure that we
00:17:59
We have a successful case.
00:18:00
We wanted those two conditions to take place.
00:18:04
Within the condition of the attorney's fees, we had two variations for the analysis.
00:18:11
The first variation is just positive attorney's fees, so even one shekel is enough because it means there was some benefit.
00:18:20
The second variation also considered the amount of attorney's fees so that
00:18:29
We assume, since most of the actions are not, there is no monetary compensation, so you cannot really evaluate what the benefit was in terms of money.
00:18:41
So we take a proxy, and the proxy is the attorney's fees, and we say if it's 20,000 shekels and above, it's meaningful, because the court was willing to award meaningful attorney's fees.
00:18:55
Why did we take 20,000 shekels?
00:18:58
20,000 shekels is the median attorney's fees in the district court when the district court decides a judicial decision.
00:19:08
And it's not class actions, certainly not local class action.
00:19:13
Any decision, any case, the district court decides.
00:19:18
If we take the attorney's fees, the median attorney's fees is 20,000 shekels.
00:19:22
So we assume that above the median,
00:19:25
should be a meaningful breach or meaningful case.
00:19:30
Pursuant to this definition, 43% are successful in the sense that the plaintiff won and the local government changed its behavior, and 22% are meaningful claims.
00:19:49
It means there was a breach, a regulatory breach,
00:19:53
And the court established there was a breach or in a settlement or in a decision, the court established there was a breach and rectified this breach.
00:20:08
And it's substantial because the court decided to approve or award at least 20,000 shekels.
00:20:19
As to the second question,
00:20:22
exposure to class actions.
00:20:25
So we see, this is not all our results, this is kind of highlights, but I will, these are basically correlations between the number of class actions filed against municipalities and their characteristics.
00:20:46
And the first correlation is local governments with residents from lower socioeconomic status,
00:20:52
as for the definition of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, are exposed to more class actions, more local class actions.
00:21:03
The higher the socioeconomic status, the less class actions the local government
00:21:12
receives.
00:21:14
And this is, as you can see, it's very, very significant in terms of statistics.
00:21:21
When we talk about the socioeconomic status, the Israeli Bureau of Statistics has a scale of the residents' socioeconomic status.
00:21:32
We're talking about kind of indicator that represents the residents' wealth and
00:21:40
the residents' education, employment status, all that is gathered into the socioeconomic scale.
00:21:47
And we have a scale with all the local governments, and this is the correlation.
00:21:52
The second correlation is the Gini score.
00:21:54
Gini score is wealth inequality.
00:21:57
The more a local government is inequal, the more class actions it receives.
00:22:05
The more a local government is
00:22:10
far from the center, the less local government is received.
00:22:16
And as you said, Tel Aviv is kind of the winner of local class.
00:22:20
Tel Aviv is the center.
00:22:22
The periphery score, the periphery scale, is basically the distance from Tel Aviv.
00:22:28
And when you get far from Tel Aviv, you get less class actions.
00:22:31
And when you get closer, you get more.
00:22:34
I will probably, I will explain this result in a bit.
00:22:39
And then we also have correlation between operating characteristics.
00:22:44
So local governments with higher deficits receive more class actions.
00:22:50
If the deficits are lower, if you have surplus, you get lower class actions.
00:22:57
So it's kind of a correlation between the surplus slash deficits to number of class actions.
00:23:04
Local governments that spend less
00:23:07
on education, welfare, and culture, when we take out the central government grants, receive more class actions, and local governments that spend more on other issues receive more class actions.
00:23:25
We think this is intuition.
00:23:27
It's people like local governments to spend on education, welfare, and culture.
00:23:33
And if the local government doesn't spend, so people are less satisfied, and maybe they sue more, or plaintiff's lawyers sue more, it's an intuition.
00:23:42
But as you see, this result will not be very important.
00:23:46
And lastly, which is very important to us, local governments with negative net immigrations are exposed to more class action.
00:23:56
So the more people relocating out of the municipality, net,
00:24:03
the people that come to reside within the municipality, you get more class actions.
00:24:10
When people are dissatisfied with the municipality, so they leave, there are also more class actions.
00:24:18
So the second step is exposure to class actions where the plaintiff was successful.
00:24:26
Which local governments are more exposed to successful class actions?
00:24:31
Socioeconomics
00:24:33
Scale still important, still correlated.
00:24:37
Local governments, weaker local governments are sued more in successful class actions.
00:24:46
The same with Gini score.
00:24:49
The correlation with the periphery scale no longer statistically significant.
00:24:55
Why?
00:24:56
It's our intuition, again, we're not sure, but it's our intuition, that the exposure to class action has to do with the number of lawyers that operate.
00:25:09
Most of the lawyers in Israel operate in the center, in Tel Aviv and around.
00:25:14
They operate there, they sue there.
00:25:18
It's more convenient.
00:25:21
But central local governments don't breach more regulatory
00:25:28
don't breach more regulations.
00:25:30
So central local governments, the geographical place of a local government is not correlated with the number of successful class actions as opposed to correlation with the exposure to class actions.
00:25:49
The correlation with the deficit surplus is still there.
00:25:53
The correlation
00:25:55
with migration patterns is still there.
00:25:59
The correlation with expenditure is not there yet.
00:26:04
It's not statistically significant anymore.
00:26:07
We think it's because...
00:26:10
As I said before, the expenditure patterns in the municipality does not really mean anything about regulatory breaches.
00:26:19
It just means that maybe people are not very satisfied.
00:26:24
They sue more, but it's not, it doesn't, it's not more successful.
00:26:30
Lastly, exposure to meaningful class action.
00:26:36
Class actions that
00:26:38
The court awarded or proved 20,000 shekels or more in attorney's fees.
00:26:45
Now, socioeconomic ranking no longer statistically significant.
00:26:53
This means something, I think, very important.
00:26:56
It means that local governments that are weaker socioeconomically, they may breach
00:27:06
more regulations, but not very meaningful ones.
00:27:11
When we talk about substantial, meaningful violations, it's the same whether we are talking about weak local governments or strong local governments.
00:27:22
So here, there is no correlation between the socioeconomic status of the local government and the exposure to meaningful, successful class actions.
00:27:34
But as I said, there is a correlation with all successful class actions.
00:27:42
The finding about the Gini score is still statistically significant.
00:27:48
The finding about the correlation with surplus deficits is still statistically significant.
00:27:55
And the finding about immigration patterns still significant.
00:28:03
Notice that higher deficits and migration are issues that pertain to the quality of the local governance.
00:28:17
So if the locality has a higher deficit, it means maybe it's not run very well.
00:28:26
And the same with net migration.
00:28:28
And with net migration, I want to focus a bit more.
00:28:33
We know the TB, or there is the TBU model about local governments.
00:28:38
And under the TBU model, local governments compete for residents by offering different bundles or packages of public goods and services.
00:28:53
Each local government provides, I would say, a different bundle of goods and public goods and services.
00:29:00
One local government
00:29:04
provides more education.
00:29:06
The other local government is more religious.
00:29:09
The other has a lot of green areas, whatever.
00:29:14
And these public goods are, of course, financed through local taxation.
00:29:21
The Tibu model says residents select
00:29:25
the place they reside, their jurisdictions, the jurisdiction that best matches their preference for local goods and services.
00:29:35
So if I'm a bachelor, I don't have kids, I don't care too much about the education level of the local government.
00:29:43
If I like to, if I like nature, maybe I want more green in the local government or more cultural activities or whatever.
00:29:51
And of course, everything is related to taxes.
00:29:54
So if I have two local governments provide more or less the same bundle of goods and services, I will prefer the local government that provides it with less taxes.
00:30:10
And when a local government provides services inefficiently or imposes excessive taxation, residents
00:30:18
again, according to the TIBU model, vote with their feet.
00:30:22
They relocate to another municipality.
00:30:27
The TIBU model underwent, I would say, hundreds, if not thousands of empirical researches.
00:30:36
By and large, we can say in the long run, it works.
00:30:42
In the long run, people don't really migrate from one minute to another, but in the long run, when a city is inefficient, we also see people relocating from her.
00:30:55
And migration pattern, therefore, serve as an indicator of governance quality.
00:31:02
And here is the connection.
00:31:05
A successful class action indicates that the local government breached
00:31:11
a regulatory mandate.
00:31:13
A higher number of successful actions, particularly meaningful breaches, suggests weaker local governance.
00:31:23
More frequent regulatory failures means that the local government is, of course, is not run very well.
00:31:33
And this is the connection.
00:31:36
Class actions, like the Tibu model,
00:31:39
like deficits, like the economic status, state of the local government.
00:31:46
Class actions indicate weaker local governments, and therefore it also offers a type of monitoring.
00:31:57
So let's take the trees and look from above.
00:32:03
I think that the analysis that we've made reveals a kind of attention.
00:32:09
Class actions offer monitoring.
00:32:12
They offer an important type and particular monitoring.
00:32:19
They target discrete instances of regulatory non-compliance, unlawful taxation, environmental nuisances, accessibility, which other type of monitors, local monitors, do not
00:32:38
address.
00:32:41
And they aim to remedy those breaches, those violations.
00:32:49
And they are relatively successful, as I said, 43% success rate, 22% meaningful success rate.
00:32:57
And we can even presume that
00:33:01
There is a deterrence effect.
00:33:03
So because of class actions, because local governments are aware that there are class actions, maybe ex ante, they even breach less.
00:33:12
So class actions are important.
00:33:14
But class actions are also expensive.
00:33:20
A non-trivial portion of class action litigation consists of low-value, duplicative claims
00:33:30
that are filed, cut and paste across jurisdictions.
00:33:34
It's expensive.
00:33:37
And what's more troubling is the socioeconomically weak local governments are disproportionately exposed to the nuisance litigation.
00:33:51
And we can think of that as a kind of a tax.
00:33:56
The nuisance litigation, even if they are successful, they are minor.
00:34:01
We're talking about minor breaches.
00:34:05
Probably most residents do not benefit from the from the remedy of of fixing those minor breaches.
00:34:18
But local government has to pay
00:34:22
a lot of legal expenses in order to address the class actions.
00:34:31
So it's kind of a tax because residents, especially socioeconomically weak residents, spend money in order to address litigation that maybe does not benefit them a lot, but costs a lot of money.
00:34:46
And this comes, of course, at the expense of
00:34:51
better public goods and services or just less taxes.
00:35:00
So dealing with this, dealing with this tension, we need to account the special nature of local class actions as opposed to commercial class actions.
00:35:14
In commercial class actions, the corporation pays, shareholders
00:35:20
take the burden.
00:35:23
Essentially, they take the burden because if the corporation makes less money, their share is worth less.
00:35:33
But shareholders benefit from limited liability.
00:35:38
And since shareholders hold a diverse portfolio, a large damage in a class action, even if the
00:35:49
corporation will go bankrupt, the shareholders will not be severely damaged because they hold many shares.
00:36:02
Local residents, on the other hand, they lack risk-spreading mechanisms.
00:36:07
So in local class actions, the local government pays, the public coffers pay, and the residents take the burden.
00:36:18
But residents, they cannot-- they don't have limited liability.
00:36:24
They don't have a way to diversify.
00:36:27
They reside only in one municipality.
00:36:30
And high damages may cause higher taxes and reduce services, and this might be a problem.
00:36:42
And this is in addition to temporal consideration.
00:36:48
Because shareholders, some shareholders frequently trade their shares.
00:36:55
So they don't internalize, if the remedy is forward-looking, they don't internalize that, or they might not internalize that because they will share their, sell their share quickly.
00:37:08
Maybe the price of the share internalizes the change, maybe not.
00:37:14
Residents, on the other end, remain in the municipality.
00:37:19
So for them, a forward-looking remedy is more important.
00:37:30
For them, compensating for past damages is less important than
00:37:37
to think about the future and how it will change the local government's behavior or policies in the future.
00:37:46
So whereas in commercial class actions, we usually-- courts usually give monetary compensation for past damages, in local class actions, as we saw in our study, remedies
00:38:06
are mostly forward-looking, a forward-looking injunction or a forward-looking remedy to solve the breach from the point of the case onwards.
00:38:20
And past damages are not compensated for.
00:38:29
Given that, some policy recommendations.
00:38:31
So the first policy recommendation is about incentives.
00:38:35
Since we know that class actions are based on forward-looking non-monetary damages, in order to incentivize the monitoring, we need to award attorneys fees when litigation, even when litigation produces non-monetary relief.
00:38:58
If we don't do it, then local class actions lose their strength.
00:39:05
This is to some extent what happens in the US.
00:39:09
In the US, we have what is called taxpayer suits, which is more or less class actions against local governments.
00:39:16
But they're not very strong, I would say.
00:39:19
They're not very powerful because lawyers do not want to sue.
00:39:24
In most cases, when we not get monetary damages, they don't get compensated.
00:39:32
Many of the cases do not end in monetary damages, so lawyers don't sue.
00:39:39
The second recommendation is a mandatory prior notice requirement.
00:39:46
The idea here is to reduce the amount of nuisance litigation.
00:39:53
A plaintiff must send a letter, a notice to the local government, you breach in this and this regulation.
00:40:02
If you don't, remedy, we'll sue.
00:40:07
And if the local government believes that it's worthwhile to change and believes it's justified to change its behavior, then it will change.
00:40:17
And no litigation should happen.
00:40:20
Of course, this should be connected to
00:40:22
Attorney's fees.
00:40:23
So if attorney's fees are not paid with changes to behavior that happens in prior notice, then they will not happen.
00:40:34
But we can find a mechanism that also compensates the lawyers here, and this just saves the litigation.
00:40:43
A third recommendation is what is called a ceasing notice.
00:40:49
Even if the localities, the local government decides to go to court and after seeing, after one court meeting or after it sees the complaint by the plaintiff's lawyer, it understands, okay, it's not worthwhile for me to continue with the litigation.
00:41:11
We propose
00:41:13
that the local government will have the authority to say to the court, okay, we will stop our behavior, we'll change our policy from this moment forward.
00:41:28
In return, please don't let us pay for past damages.
00:41:36
Sort of
00:41:39
kind of a settlement, but one that the plaintiffs does not have to agree to.
00:41:45
The local government just says, okay, we'll change our behavior, but we will not compensate for past damages.
00:41:55
Of course, again, the attorney must be compensated.
00:42:01
Without the attorney, there will not be any monitoring at all.
00:42:07
And the last recommendation, encourage consolidation of substantially identical claims.
00:42:13
This is more or less procedural.
00:42:18
That's it.
00:42:18
Thank you.