I'm not sure about that. If AT&T sends a lawyer to every one of these things, it will quickly become very expensive. If they don't, they risk it becoming very easy to get awarded this money. Plus with precedent set, it will be considerably easier for someone else to do this.
If the settlement dollar values hold up and this becomes easy enough, it could become far more costly to AT&T than any class action suit would have been.
Perhaps, but if one includes the risk of the lawsuit failing combined with the time to assemble the case, it's a loss for a lot of people. Since you're selecting out people based on income or how much they value their time, you're also selecting out most of the people who would go through with this in the first place.
I'm asserting that there won't be that many people willing and able to bring these cases to AT&T, particularly when the payout is so low, and that, in the end, makes the whole deal peanuts for AT&T.
This is the same fallacy that some people use about planes: "Traveling by plane doesn't result in more fossil fuels burnt because the plane would have flown anyway".
The way these things work is that every once in a while companies evaluate whether there were enough lawyers, and based on this they hire or lay off lawyers.
They don't have so many lawyers on payroll they can respond to a large increase in small claims court appearances though. They'll have to hire more, or send someone less qualified, or send nobody - all cases in which the consumer has "won".
The opportunity cost of spending the lawyer's time on small claims vs something else is not to be underestimated.
