Class Action

Don't confuse this with a class act, i.e. someone who gives up his exit-row seat to a veteran, or offers a stranger his umbrella on a rainy day. Class actions tend to go the other way, if only because they tend to involve corporate lawyers.

Say a company dumps a bunch of chemicals into a nearby river, and those chemicals end up in the groundwater of a particular town. Everybody in the town suffers some of the effects. Rather than each person suing the company separately, which takes a lot of time and money on both sides, they combine their complaint into a single suit. They make a class action. They aren't suing as individuals...each claim gets combined under the same umbrella: a class.