In July 2015 the class action claim was rejected in the High Court of Justice by Mr Justice Jay, who decided that the symptoms suffered by the 16,626 claimants were "short-lived and had not exceeded the hurdle the law sets for actionable personal injury." In his ruling, he said: "It is difficult to say for how long the smoke and these mild symptoms lasted, but I have in mind a maximum period of about one week. Many months later – it is unclear exactly how and why - lawyers arrived on the scene and sensed the opening of a business opportunity. It proved not very difficult to recruit willing claimants to the group, not least because there was a lot of ill-feeling in the neighbourhood directed towards Sonae, and many people genuinely believed that they must have been harmed in some way. The legal process preyed on human susceptibility and vulnerability, and the rest is history."