If business leaders assumed Covid would slow the pace of class action lawsuits or the size of settlements, they were wrong.
In 2021, a new record was set for the amount of top class action settlements: $3.62 billion. That’s compared to $1.58 billion in 2020 and $1.34 billion the year before that.
This is according to Seyfarth Shaw, an employment and labor law firm whose 844-page Workplace Class Action Litigation Report was released today. Seyfarth said the annual report, which is now in its 18th year, analyzed 1,603 class action rulings (also a record) on a circuit-by-circuit and state-by-state basis.
Writing in the report’s executive summary, Seyfarth chair and managing partner Peter C. Miller noted that, “The continuation of the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted everyone and everything, including class action litigation. The last few years have seen a transformation in class action and collective action litigation involving workplace issues.
“This came to a head from 2014 to 2021 with numerous major class action rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court. The stakes in these types of employment lawsuits can be extremely significant, as the financial risks of such cases are enormous. More often than not, class actions adversely affect the market share of a corporation and impact its reputation in the marketplace. It is a legal exposure which keeps corporate counsel and business executives awake at night.”
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