Yeah I'm not saying the payouts are great. But let's say, pessimistically, that the lawyers took 80%; if they had done it pro bono, you'd get 5 coupons instead of 1. Better, but not by much.
A small payout could be due to greedy class action lawyers, but it could be due to the corporate lawyers successfully arguing damages down to nearly nothing (compared to the size of the class). The second one sounds more likely to me.
In the cases I've heard about, the corporate team had orders of magnitude more resources than the class action lawyers (think 3 lawyers working part time on the case vs. the corporation having an expert prepare for 2 years to appear once in court. I am not making this up.)
I'm biased though, the few class action lawyers I know are good guys, it's possible most aren't. I havn't looked at the field in general, and IANAL, so take that with generous salt.
