Certification is the real issue. As long as the class is not certified, the defendant faces a single plaintiff; once it is certified, it faces thousands of people at once — and the financial risk becomes such that settlement is often unavoidable, regardless of the merits.
That is why procedural battles over predominance are so bitter. In franchise litigation, the question becomes: are the operators' situations similar enough to be judged together, or does each agreement, each restaurant, each local market require individual examination? The defendant always argues for the second answer.