About the Notice Project
Our Team
Alex Lara - Product Manager
Alex leads the development of Impact Fund's first access-to-justice product. He has experience developing robust product strategies, leading teams, and supporting complex business-to-business sales engagements.
Dedicated to social impact, he also serves on the Board of Directors for the Foothill-De Anza Foundation. Prior to his role at Impact Fund, Alex served as a Product Marketing Manager at View, Inc., and honed his analytical skills as an Analyst at Colliers International. Alex earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of California, Davis.
John Henry Frankel - Communications Lead
John Henry is the communications lead for the Notice Project initiative. Prior to joining the Impact Fund, John Henry worked in PR and content, writing Forbes articles, Wikipedia pages, LinkedIn blog posts, and technical press releases across multiple tech verticals as well as the music industry.
John Henry has two history degrees, and his historical area of focus is the intersection of colonialism, gender, and the media in the 20th and 21st centuries. In his free time, he enjoys watching Nicolas Cage movies.
Please reach out to us if you have any questions, comments, or need assistance.
Our Objective: Improving Class Notices
We believe that class actions are a powerful vehicle for justice, and they can be made even more effective by improving the communication between litigators and class members.
Notices exist to tell the public about their legal rights – they shouldn’t make class members feel frustrated for not being able to understand complex legalistic jargon.
If class members can’t understand notices, or are too frustrated to read them fully, then they will struggle to understand their legal rights and how to participate in the class action lawsuits.
Our objective is to improve access to justice in class action lawsuits and make class notices easier to understand. With that goal in mind, we're developing tools and resources to enable litigators to draft notices that are more accessible for class members.
You can find our Notice Templates here, and our NoticeAssist software is coming soon.
The Notice Project is a program created by the Impact Fund, a charitable nonprofit that funds and fights for economic, environmental, racial, and social justice.
The Notice Project is an Impact Fund initiative.
History of the Notice Project
In 2015, Impact Fund conducted focus groups of Alameda County residents to determine how people learned about and formed views on class action lawsuits. The most common way that the participants learned about class actions was from class action notices – and many of them expressed frustration with the notices they received.
With that in mind, then-Impact Fund Executive Director Jocelyn Larkin testified in front of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules for the federal courts and urged the committee to direct the Federal Judicial Center to improve the existing templates for class action notices. The panel responded positively but without serious commitment.
Frustrated that the Committee might not take her suggestion, she had a sudden realization:
“We can fix this! This is exactly what the Impact Fund does every day.”
Countless revisions later, we are finally ready to release our templates to the public. The templates have been beta-tested in multiple high-profile class actions, including the massive JUUL settlement, and the responses from lawyers and judges have been overwhelmingly positive.
We also have a powerful software tool set to be released in spring 2024, which will make it even easier for litigators to draft notices that everyday people can easily understand.
Stay tuned for more innovative solutions designed to empower lawyers to better communicate with their class members.