Dive Brief:

• U.S. class action litigation hit record financial levels in 2025, with the combined value of the 10 largest settlements across key areas such as privacy and antitrust totaling $79 billion, according to global law firm Duane Morris’ 2026 Class Action Review released last month.
• The wave of mega-settlements underscores the growing financial stakes of corporate litigation and the need for CFOs and other business leaders to focus on shoring up their liability-risk management strategies, according to Jennifer Riley, vice chair of Duane Morris’ class action defense group.
• The research findings are “indicative of a trend that we’ve seen over the last several years,” Riley said in an interview. “We’re seeing a snowball effect, where high settlement numbers are inspiring more lawsuits and even bigger settlements.”

Dive Insight:

The finding shows that corporate defendants are “operating in a new era of enhanced class action risks,” according to the report.

“Corporations should expect these numbers to continue to incentivize the plaintiffs’ class action bar to be equally if not more aggressive with their settlement positions in 2026,” the report said.

The $79 billion figure reflects the highest aggregate total for top-tier resolutions tracked in the firm’s annual review, which covers a range of litigation areas from antitrust and consumer protection to products liability and securities fraud. In the latest study, generative artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency were included as categories for the first time.

In 2025, plaintiffs filed more than 13,000 class action lawsuits in federal courts alone, which equates to more than 36 new class action filings every day, Duane Morris said in a press release.

Last year’s mega-settlements included a $38 billion agreement that Visa and Mastercard reached with a class of merchants who alleged the payments giants charged excessive fees to accept credit cards.

In another high-profile case, insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield agreed to pay $2.8 billion to resolve claims by hospitals, physicians and other health professionals who said they were underpaid for reimbursements.

“With corporations paying more than $70 billion to settle class actions in 2025 — the highest figure ever recorded in the history of American jurisprudence — the implications are staggering,” Gerald Maatman, Jr., who co-authored the review with Riley and chairs the firm’s class action defense group, said in the release. “To put it into perspective, that amount is larger than the annual budgets of multiple U.S. states and eclipses the GDP of more than half the world’s nations.”

The record settlement amounts and increased filings may be closely tied to high class certification rates, according to the research. Last year, judges granted more than 68% of all class certification motions they decided, up from 63% in 2024. 

Privacy litigation has emerged as a “centerpiece” of plaintiff attorneys’ business models, the report said. “The plaintiff’s bar continues to rely on a consistent recipe: pair modern, ubiquitous technologies with decades-old statutory schemes that impose statutory damages per violation,” it said. “The result is outsized exposure for routine business practices.”

Data privacy class actions totaled over 1,800 last year, with an average of more than 150 fillings per month, representing more than 25% growth over 2024 and more than 200% growth since 2022. The trend is not expected to slow down, even though courts have granted motions to dismiss these complaints at increasingly high rates.

The California Invasion of Privacy Act in particular presents an attractive option for plaintiffs because it offers statutory damages of $5,000 per violation, making it “one of the most, if not the most, generous damages schemes provided by any privacy law,” the report said.

Meanwhile, AI has continued to influence class action litigation on multiple fronts, according to the research. Courts have seen a rise of AI-related class actions in the copyright and employment litigation categories as well as an increase of filings generated by the technology.

“Some attorneys, unfortunately, have relied on generative AI without proper verification, resulting in fictitious citations or incorrect legal authorities being filed on public dockets,” the report said. AI is also accelerating litigation processes, shortening timelines and reshaping strategies by both plaintiffs and defendants in areas ranging from predictive analytics to document review.