Cost-Benefit Analysis of Class Actions An Israeli Perspective

Diffusion of Legal Innovations: The Case of Israeli Class Actions

“…6 As it turned out, these requirements created significant barriers to class action certification (Klement 2004) In this respect, we should emphasize, though, that despite the apparent similarity between the Israeli and the U.S. class action procedures, the many differences in market size and structure, rules of procedure and discovery, and law firm characteristics seriously undermine the potential for Israeli law firms to rely on past experience in the United States (Klement & Klonoff 2018). 6 For a description of these statutory class action procedures and a comparison with class action arrangements set in the CAL, see Klement and Weinshall-Margel (2016). 7 We searched the three main Israeli legal databases ("Nevo," "Takdin," and "Dinim") for all class actions submitted from the enactment of the first law allowing class actions in 1988 (the Securities Law of 1988) to 2006, and found only 215 cases, mostly submitted during the 1990s.…”

“… For a description of these statutory class action procedures and a comparison with class action arrangements set in the CAL, see Klement and Weinshall‐Margel (). …”

Does Class Action Have a Deterrent Effect?

“…Comment by Christoph Engel * Data are the oil that fuels the empirical legal movement. The paper by Klement and Weinshall-Margel (2016) comes with a full barrel of this oil. The paper is based on a complete data set of all class action suits that have ever been filed since Israel introduced class action in 2006.…”

“…The value of the case may serve as a proxy for the risk that a case will be tried if it is positively correlated with the attorney's and the representative plaintiff's expected profit. This is not obvious, since the courts have discretion in defining both profits (for detail see Klement and Weinshall-Margel, 2016). Yet empirically this correlation is indeed observed (Table 1).…”

“…As Klement and Weinshall-Margel (2016) explain, actual court rulings are rare in class action. Yet the fact that the case is settled, rather than dropped, is a good proxy for success.…”