Class Action Litigation Report: Filings, Settlements, and Privacy

The class action litigation reports covering 2025 tell a consistent story: federal filings hit their highest level in at least a decade, consumer protection claims did most of the work, and defendants paid a record sum to make cases go away. Lex Machina counted 12,284 putative class actions filed in federal district courts in 2025, up roughly 25 percent from 9,847 the year before.¹ Duane Morris, using a broader methodology, put the total above 13,000 cases, an average of more than 36 new filings a day.² Total settlements crossed $70 billion, the largest annual figure in the history of American class action practice.³

Filings at a Decade High

The 2025 filing count marks a fourth straight year of increases after a long stretch of relative stability. Lex Machina’s data shows a steady climb from 7,069 federal class actions in 2016, interrupted only briefly during 2020.¹ The most widely cited annual reports covering the 2025 year come from Lex Machina, Cornerstone Research (with Stanford Law School), Duane Morris, NERA Economic Consulting, and Seyfarth Shaw, and their combined picture is unusually aligned: every top-line indicator moved up.

Consumer Protection Cases Are Driving the Numbers

Consumer protection filings reached 7,650 in 2025, a year-over-year jump of more than 40 percent by Lex Machina’s count.¹ The category now represents close to half of all federal class actions filed over the past ten years.⁴

Three subcategories carry most of the growth. Data breach class actions rose from 108 in 2018 to 1,488 in 2024, a more than 1,265 percent increase, and Lex Machina identified breach litigation as the single largest catalyst behind the recent surge.⁵⁶ Data privacy cases exceeded 1,800 filings in 2025, a 25 percent increase over 2024 and more than 200 percent growth since 2022, with much of the activity targeting session-replay software, website chatbots, and tracking pixels.⁷ Website accessibility disputes and digital-commerce claims round out the picture.⁸ Civil rights filings ticked up modestly after two years of decline, but no other category came close to consumer protection’s growth.

Settlement Dollars at Record Highs

Corporate defendants paid more than $70 billion to resolve class actions in 2025, the highest annual total on record.³ It was the fourth year in a row the total topped $40 billion.⁷ Duane Morris measured the ten largest settlements alone at more than $79 billion on a broader basis.²

The biggest single deal was the $38 billion Visa and Mastercard merchant fee settlement finalized in November 2025, resolving a decade-plus antitrust class action over credit card interchange fees. That case, In re: Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation, received final district court approval in December 2019 and was affirmed by the Second Circuit in March 2023, with the court authorizing initial partial distributions on October 30, 2025.⁹ Also significant: a $2.8 billion Blue Cross Blue Shield settlement approved in August 2025, covering hospital and physician claims of reimbursement underpayment.² Lex Machina reported total court-approved settlement damages of nearly $10.9 billion in 2025 alone, up from $9.9 billion in 2024.⁶

Securities Class Actions Moved the Other Way

Securities filings ran counter to the broader trend. Cornerstone Research counted 207 securities class actions in 2025, down from 226, with core federal filings at 201, the lowest since 2014 and below the 1997–2024 average of 227.¹⁰

The dollar exposure moved the opposite direction. Disclosure Dollar Loss reached a record $694 billion, up from $429 billion, with “mega filings” involving at least $5 billion in disclosed losses accounting for 81 percent of the total. Median DDL also set a record at $503 million. The technology sector captured the divergence: filings dropped from 37 to 30, but Maximum Dollar Loss surged 260 percent to $1.25 trillion. Sixteen AI-related cases and nine cryptocurrency cases were filed in 2025, while SPAC and COVID-19 claims fell off sharply.¹⁰

On resolutions, NERA counted 234 total in 2025, with 155 dismissals and 79 settlements. The median settlement climbed to $17 million, a 21 percent increase and a ten-year high, while aggregate settlement value dropped 25 percent to $2.9 billion on fewer very large payouts.¹¹ Cornerstone reported a nearly three-decade-high median at $17.3 million.¹²

Where the Cases Are Filed and How They End

Two federal courts dominate class action dockets. From 2023 through 2025, the Southern District of New York handled 4,793 class action cases (15 percent of the total) and the Central District of California handled 3,678 (11.5 percent), with the Northern District of California third at 2,211. In 2025 alone, C.D. Cal. surpassed S.D.N.Y. as the single busiest venue, tracking the growth in West Coast consumer protection filings. The Ninth Circuit handled 30.8 percent of appellate class action activity, followed by the Second Circuit at 12.2 percent.¹

Roughly 95 percent of class actions never reach trial. Lex Machina’s three-year data shows 2,333 cases reaching class certification, 1,788 settling, 1,264 getting to summary judgment, and only 109 going to trial.⁶⁴²¹³

Who Gets Sued, and Who’s Suing

Class action activity remains concentrated among a small group of defendants. Walmart topped Lex Machina’s list with 116 cases from 2023 to 2025, followed by Amazon.com Services (94), Apple (85), and Meta (85).¹ In 2025, Apple and Walmart each faced about three dozen new suits, with the United States government, Amazon, and Target close behind.⁶

On the plaintiff side, a handful of serial filers, most active in website accessibility litigation, account for a striking share of cases. Julie Dalton was named as a plaintiff in 231 cases across the 2023–2025 window.¹

Privacy Statutes as the Growth Frontier

Two state statutes are doing an outsized amount of the work behind privacy class action growth. California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, a decades-old wiretapping law that carries $5,000-per-violation penalties, has been repurposed to attack modern website tracking tools. CIPA filings jumped from 54 in 2022 to 675 in 2024, with projections above 3,500 for 2026.⁷¹⁴

Courts remain split on whether CIPA reaches digital tracking. In early 2026, the Southern District of New York let a CIPA claim against CNN proceed on the theory that aggregating tracking data into user profiles resembles traditional privacy torts, while the Northern District of California dismissed a similar case against USA Today for lack of standing. Two California state judges reviewing identical claims against the same defendant reached opposite conclusions the same month.¹⁵

Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act continues to generate large settlements. BIPA provides $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per reckless violation, and the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Cothron v. White Castle System held that each unlawful scan gives rise to a separate claim. After Cothron, the average per-member payout in workplace BIPA settlements rose about 25 percent, from $838 to $1,049.¹⁶ Broader online-tracking litigation exploded from roughly 200 cases in 2023 to nearly 4,000 in 2024, spanning 315 courts across 45 states.¹⁷

Twenty states had enacted comprehensive consumer privacy laws in force as of January 2026, most giving enforcement authority to state regulators alone. The CCPA remains the notable exception, allowing private suits tied specifically to data breaches. Plaintiffs facing that limitation have leaned on older wiretapping and common-law theories, which is what drives the CIPA activity described above, and that workaround is spreading litigation risk to B2B companies and nonprofits.¹⁷

Judicial Developments Shaping Certification

Several recent rulings are reshaping how classes get certified and defended.

Ascertainability

The Tenth Circuit in Cline v. Sunoco, Inc. (2025) rejected a strict “administratively feasible” requirement for identifying class members, holding that administrative feasibility should not “operate as a trump card that outweighs all other factors under Rule 23.” A follow-up, Rider v. OXY USA, Inc. (May 2026), applied Cline to reverse a denial of certification, making clear that gaps in a defendant’s records cannot alone defeat a class.¹⁸

Standing and Uninjured Class Members

On June 5, 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed the certiorari petition in Labcorp v. Davis as improvidently granted, leaving intact a Ninth Circuit ruling that neither Article III nor Rule 23(b) automatically bars inclusion of uninjured members in a damages class. Justice Kavanaugh dissented, arguing that overbroad classes coerce businesses into costly settlements and fail Rule 23’s predominance requirement.¹⁹ Other circuits continue to work through the question. The Ninth Circuit held in Healy v. Milliman (2026) that unnamed class members must demonstrate standing at summary judgment, and the Sixth Circuit in Generation Changers Church v. Church Mutual (2026) declined to pick a single framework, finding the claims survived either way.¹⁸

GEO Group v. Menocal

In February 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held in GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal that a private ICE contractor could not take an immediate interlocutory appeal after a district court refused to dismiss a forced-labor class action under the Yearsley government-contractor defense. Justice Kagan’s majority opinion distinguished a “merits defense to liability” from an “immunity from suit,” concluding that only the latter qualifies for immediate appeal under the collateral-order doctrine.²⁰²¹ The practical effect is that class action defendants relying on government-contract defenses have to litigate them through trial before seeking appellate review.²²

Mass Arbitration Runs Alongside the Class Action Numbers

Class action waivers pushed disputes into individual arbitration, and plaintiffs’ firms responded by filing thousands of individual arbitration demands at once, forcing companies to pay per-case administrative fees at massive scale. Both major arbitration providers overhauled their rules in 2024. The American Arbitration Association’s supplementary rules for proceedings involving 25 or more similar claims replaced per-case filing fees with a flat $11,250 initiation fee and installed “process arbitrators” to vet claims. JAMS introduced similar procedures for cases with 75 or more claimants, including a $7,500 filing fee and mandatory sworn declarations from counsel.²³

In Kiana Jones v. Starz Entertainment, decided in early 2025, the Ninth Circuit upheld JAMS’s authority to consolidate 7,300 individual claims into a single proceeding, distinguishing the consolidation from prohibited class arbitration because each claimant kept individual capacity. The consolidation reduced Starz’s potential arbitration fees from more than $12 million to a manageable amount. Because Starz’s contract did not explicitly bar consolidation, the institution’s own rules applied.²⁴

Legislative and Enforcement Activity

Two bills targeting third-party litigation funding disclosure sit in the current Congress. On the Senate side, Senators Chuck Grassley, Thom Tillis, John Kennedy, and John Cornyn introduced the Litigation Funding Transparency Act (S. 3826) in February 2026, which would require public disclosure of outside funders in class actions and mass torts and bar those funders from influencing strategy or settlement.²⁵ The bill remained at the introductory stage without committee hearings as of mid-2026.²⁶ Representative Darrell Issa introduced a House counterpart, the Litigation Transparency Act of 2025 (H.R. 1109), covering disclosure of third-party investors receiving payment based on federal civil lawsuit outcomes.²⁷ Roughly 25 percent of federal district courts already require disclosure of litigation funders under local rules, and Wisconsin, Montana, Indiana, West Virginia, and Louisiana have enacted state statutes on the same subject.²⁸

Workplace class actions are also being shaped by federal enforcement changes. The EEOC filed only 93 merit lawsuits in fiscal year 2025, down from 144 in fiscal year 2023, and in June 2026 a new National Enforcement Plan pivoted the agency toward intentional discrimination cases and away from disparate-impact theories.²⁹ For wage-and-hour work, courts in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits have replaced the traditionally lenient two-step FLSA collective-action certification with stricter early scrutiny of whether plaintiffs are “similarly situated,” pushing plaintiff-side filings toward the Second and Ninth Circuits or away from collective actions entirely.¹³

1
Lex Machina. 2026 Class Action Litigation Report
2
CFO Dive. Top US Class Action Settlements Hit Record $79B
3
Duane Morris. Duane Morris Class Action Review 2026
4
LexisNexis. Lex Machina 2026 Class Action Litigation Report
5
Duane Morris. Data Breaches Give Rise to an Unprecedented Number of Class Action Filings
6
Global Legal Post. Vast Majority of US Class Action Cases Never Go to Trial
7
Insurance Journal. Class-Action Settlements in 2025 Exceeded $70 Billion
8
Law360. Consumer Cases Drive Class Action Spike, Report Says
9
PaymentCardSettlement.com. Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement
10
Cornerstone Research. Securities Class Action Filings: 2025 Year in Review
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NERA. Recent Trends in Securities Class Action Litigation: 2025 Full-Year Review
12
Cornerstone Research. Securities Class Action Settlements
13
Duane Morris. Trend 2: Class Certification Numbers Normalize Across Substantive Areas
14
CookieScript. Consumer Privacy Lawsuit Roundup 2026: From CIPA to COPPA
15
Fisher Phillips. Courts Still Divided on Whether California Privacy Law Applies to Website Tracking
16
Edgeworth Economics. Analyzing Biometric Data Privacy Class Action Settlements
17
Stinson LLP. A New Era of Comprehensive Privacy Laws and the Surge in Data Privacy Litigation
18
American Antitrust Institute. Class Action Issues Update – Spring 2026
19
Venable LLP. Supreme Court Forgoes Chance to Resolve Issue
20
SCOTUSblog. Court Rejects ICE Contractor’s Right to Immediate Appeal
21
Justia. GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal, 607 U.S. ___ (2026)
22
Cornell Law Institute. GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal, No. 24-758
23
American Bar Association. Evolution of Mass Arbitration
24
Miller Canfield. Federal Court Upholds Institution Authority to Consolidate Mass Arbitrations
25
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley Proposes Third Party Litigation Funding Reform
26
GovTrack. S. 3826: Litigation Funding Transparency Act of 2026
27
Rep. Issa Press Release. Issa, House Colleagues Launch Reform of Third-Party Financed Civil Litigation
28
IADC. Third-Party Litigation Funding: State and Federal Disclosure Rules and Case Law
29
Seyfarth Shaw. Workplace Class Action Litigation