When is a chicken wing not a chicken wing? No, it’s not an existential question, but it’s a question that a Chicago man and his lawyers are asking a federal court to resolve in a somewhat absurd case against Buffalo Wild Wings.

It all started (as so many good stories do) with an order of chicken wings … or something labeled as chicken wings. But to hear Aimen Halim tell it, Buffalo Wild Wings duped him. To his apparent horror, the restaurant made his order of boneless wings not from wing meat but from breast meat.

Halim, with his discerning palate, claims that if he had known about this “deceptive” practice, he wouldn’t have bought them or at least would have paid less for them. He then did what any “reasonable” person would do: He filed a class-action lawsuit against Buffalo Wild Wings for false advertising and is seeking financial compensation for the "injuries” Buffalo Wild Wings caused to him with its deceptive marketing.

It should be a slam-dunk case, right? After all, Buffalo Wilds Wings responded to the lawsuit with a tweet saying, “It’s true. Our boneless wings are all white meat chicken. Our hamburgers contain no ham. Our buffalo wings are 0% buffalo.”

But apparently Halim’s not persuaded. Will the court be?

Interestingly, this is not the first time Buffalo Wild Wings has come under fire for its Boneless Wings. In 2020, a man from Nebraska gave a speech to his local city council about their Boneless Wings, making the same claim that they’re misleadingly labeled because they’re not made of wing meat. Buffalo Wild Wings responded then via tweet as well, disagreeing with the man that its Boneless Wings aren’t “wings,” offering him free traditional wings for a year, and making a donation to the local Boys and Girls Club.

Now that seems like an appropriate resolution!

Sadly, Halim’s case has the potential to be yet another example of lawyers being the true beneficiaries of class-action lawsuits instead of the consumers whose interests they supposedly represent.

For example, several years ago, disgruntled plaintiffs claimed that their footlong Subway sandwiches weren’t really a foot long. This travesty came to light after an Australian teenager posted a photo, which went viral, to Facebook showing that his sandwich was only 11 inches. Oh, the horror! So, of course, in the United States, those who suffered this grave harm filed class-action lawsuits.

The case settled in 2016 and resulted in the 10 named plaintiffs receiving just $5,000 in incentive awards ($500 each) for their services representing the class of “harmed” individuals. The other class members essentially received bupkis.

Their lawyers, on the other hand, made out like bandits and received $520,000 to cover their costs, expenses and attorney’s fees. The left-wing district judge who approved the settlement, Lynn Adelman, has a long history of issuing troubling decisions and making inflammatory statements.

Fortunately, Ted Frank, who objected in the district court and who objects to the ridiculous settlements in many class-action cases, appealed the original settlement to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected it as being worthless to the plaintiffs and only benefiting the attorneys.

In fact, Judge Dianne Sykes, who wrote the unanimous opinion for the three-judge panel, said that “A class action that seeks only worthless benefits for the class and yields [only] fees for class counsel is no better than a racket and should be dismissed out of hand.” And, she said, “That’s an apt description for this [the Subway sandwich] case.”

It’s likely an apt description for the Buffalo Wild Wings case too.

The numbers support the conclusion that lawyers are the real winners in most class-action lawsuits, instead of consumers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (despite its constitutionally problematic status) analyzed more than 500 class-action lawsuits where attorneys received close to half a billion dollars, while the average consumer got about $30. Another study by Jones Day had similar findings, that class-action settlements “often award no monetary relief to class members yet award class counsel significant amounts of attorneys’ fees.”

That will probably be the outcome for Halim’s case against Buffalo Wild Wings too if any recovery is made. He would probably be better off just enjoying Buffalo Wild Wings food—regardless of what he calls it.

Zack Smith is a legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Caroline Heckman is an administrative assistant in Heritage’s Institute for Constitutional Governance.