Are there surveys on the share of class action settlement that actually goes to the plaintiffs?

Question

I am interested in links to scholarly papers with actual comprehensive and preferably up-to-date statistics. I have done some search on Google Scholar but failed to find wide-ranging surveys (the ones I found were either very old (1980) or narrow, dealing with security class action suits (from 2002)).

Answer 1

Although it's difficult to find exact numbers on class action settlements, there are some studies that suggest that the settlements are often of little value to plaintiffs.

A Mayer-Brown paper was only able to obtain data on six settlements - in these cases, claims rates were 0.000006%, 0.33%, 1.5%, 9.66% and 12%.

The same paper found that in one case of an $8 million settlement fund made available to 13,500 members, counsel received $5.5 million.

Appendices A and B of this paper provide further examples where class action settlements are either a negligible amount, or benefited a negligible number of class members.

Although the scope of this paper is somewhat narrow, its findings suggest that it is representative of many class actions.