dispositions combined, which is 13 months.74 Eight disposition types had a mean time to disposition after certification that was shorter than that for settlement, including two verdicts. Lastly, in 25% of cases settled after certification, almost two years elapsed between the granting of the motion for certification and the settlement disposition.75 To the extent that time to disposition provides a useful gauge of settlement pressure, it would be difficult to conclude from these analyses that the certification decision forced settlement. The contrary argument to this conclusion, however, would be that the defendants were in fact forced into settlement, but that the process of settlement negotiation simply was time consuming because of the higher stakes of the outcome, thus decoupling the settlement pressure examination from the time-to-disposition inquiry. However, this theory cannot be tested using the available data. Keeping this possibility in mind, nevertheless, given the time to settlement it is reasonable to conclude that defendants are not forced into instant settlement, and that whatever level of pressure they may be operating under is not enough to compel them to immediately surrender during the negotiation process. In sum, California data show that very few cases could be included in a category in which the commonly discussed parameters that define settlement pressure from class certification may have been a factor in the decision to settle. Many cases circumvented the issue altogether by including class certification as an element of the settlement itself. In cases with a class certified through a court-granted motion for certification, neither the overall disposition composition nor the time-to-settlement analyses seem to suggest an automatic or immediate progression from certification through motion to settlement which would allow the determination that pressure results in inevitable settlement. The conclusion here is not that the idea of settlement pressure is fabricated, or even altogether negligible, but rather that the pervasive effect of settlement pressure in California does not appear to be supported by the data. Conclusion Prior to this study, empirical data relating to California class certification was almost nonexistent, despite the importance of the certification decision to the maintenance of a class action case and the debates that often swirl around its impact on litigation. This initial analysis of systematically collected California certification data has revealed several interesting findings on the subject. First, the findings supply a new perspective on the considerable growth in the number of class action filings observed over the study period.76 Though the filings data point to a significant 74
Mean, 412 days; median, 387 days. See appen. D, table D.3 for full data. 76 See First Interim Report, supra note 2, at pp. 3-4: ―Total unlimited civil filings decreased 17.8% between 2000 and 2005 in comparison to a 63.3% increase in class action filings.‖ 75
28
