While reforms passed by Illinois state lawmakers may have blunted some of the worst excesses of the state's biometrics privacy law, the stringent law continues to fuel an ever-growing risk of class action lawsuits and big class action payouts against businesses operating in Illinois and beyond, a new report tracking nationwide class action activity has found.
And those hundreds of new class actions filed in 2024 and in preceding years has, in turn, placed Illinois and its famously plaintiff-friendly courts at the forefront of states helping to drive the growth of the lawsuits extracting "gargantuan" payouts worth billions of dollars from employers and other businesses, while generating "extraordinary and record-setting" fees for the lawyers who filed the suits, the report said.
Those findings were among the trends and data from 2024 discussed in the 2025 edition of the annual Class Action Review published by the Chicago-based law firm of Duane Morris and class action defense attorneys Gerald Maatman and Jennifer Riley, who served as editors for the report.
According to the report, class action settlements nationally totaled more than $40 billion for the third year in a row. In all, the report said class action lawsuits in the U.S. generated settlements worth a combined estimated total of $42 billion in 2024.
That figure was down from 2023, when class action litigation generated settlements totaling$51.4 billion, which in turn was down from the $66 billion estimated to have been paid by companies sued in U.S. courts in 2022.
"Combined, the past three years of $159.4 billion reflect use of the class action mechanism to redistribute wealth at an unprecedented level," the report's authors said.
The most costly settlement of 2024 was worth $10.3 billion, according to the report, under a deal overseen by a South Carolina federal judge to end claims stemming from the use of so-called "forever chemicals," formally known as polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in firefighting foams.
The report noted that litigation over alleged harm from PFAS has stood as one of the primary drivers of the surge in class action settlement activity nationally.
The report pointed out that in 2024, six states enacted regulations concerning disclosure and levels of PFAS, common chemicals which are found in a wide range of consumer, commercial and industrial products.
The surge of concern of PFAS has then inspired a blitz of lawsuits across the country from trial lawyers pushing claims over the amount of PFAS in drinking water, flooring, food additives, firefighting foam, and a host of other products and goods.
"Given the settlement numbers to date, companies can expect PFAS to generate more filings in the coming year as plaintiffs seek a share of the PFAS treasure chest and their targets, in turn, seek to pass costs down the chain," the Duane Morris report said.
After the South Carolina PFAS firefighting foam settlement, the next four largest settlements listed in the report included:
- $4 billion pledged as part of a global settlement to end more than 450 lawsuits from victims of the 2023 Maui wildfires in Hawaii;
- $2.8 billion to settle antitrust litigation against health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield, pending in Alabama federal court;
- $2.78 billion in federal court in Northern California to resolve litigation from former college athletes who claimed they were wrongly blocked by the NCAA under amateurism rules from getting paid for the use of their name and likeness; and
- $2.2 billion to be paid by the makers of the Zantac heartburn medication to resolve state court cases claiming the drug allegedly caused cancer.
The Top 20 class action settlements included deals worth $375 million to $1.5 billion, Duane Morris reported.
According to the report, the settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more arose from 16 major areas of class action law classified by the report's authors, including:
- Product liability class actions: $23.4 billion, down from $25.82 billion in 2023;
- Antitrust class actions: $8.412 billion, down from $11.14 billion;
- Securities Fraud class actions: $2.55 billion, down from $5.4 billion;
- Consumer Fraud class actions: $2.44 billion, down from $3.29 billion;
- Privacy class actions: $2.01 billion, up from $1.32 billion;
- Wage and Hour class/collective actions: $614.55 million, down from $742.5 million;
- Data Breach class actions: $593.2 million, up from $515.75 million;
- ERISA class actions: $413.3 million, down from $580.5 million;
- Discrimination class actions: $356.8 million, down from $762.2 million;
- Government Enforcement litigation: $335.9 million, down from $263.58 million;
- Civil Rights class actions: $313.8 million, down from $643.15 million;
- Labor class actions: $237 million, up from $139.67 million;
- BIPA class actions: $206.85 million, up from $147.86 million;
- TCPA class actions: $84.73 million, down from $103.45 million;
- FCRA class actions: $42.43 million, down from $100.15 million; and
- EEOC Enforcement litigation: $25.95 million, down from $61.63 million in 2023.
"Particularly when viewed in conjunction with the settlement values observed in 2022 and 2023, the settlement numbers in 2024 confirm that we have entered and are operating in a new era of enhanced class action risks," the report authors said."Corporations should expect these numbers to continue to incentivize the plaintiffs’ class action bar to be equally if not more aggressive with their case filings and settlement positions in 2025."
ATTORNEYS' TAKE
The report authors noted the settlements have particularly benefited one group:
Plaintiffs' lawyers who file the lawsuits.
According to the report, attorneys raked in billions of dollars in attorney fees in 2024.
Typically, attorneys bringing successful class action lawsuits can expect to claim about one-third of any settlement amount, though the amount can vary as low as 10-15% to as much as half, depending on the size of the claim and a judge's valuation of their work, relative to the amount received.
According to the report, the Top 5 largest attorney fee collections were:
- $2.13 billion to lawyers leading National Prescription Opiate Litigation in Ohio federal court;
- $840 million to attorneys leading PFAS litigation vs manufacturer 3M in South Carolina;
- $540 million to lawyers leading litigation vs 3M over the alleged ineffectiveness of military combat ear plugs in Florida federal court;
- $503 million to attorneys leading a class action in Kansas federal court vs Syngenta over varieties of corn that were disallowed in China, prompting lawsuits from farmers; and
- $345 million to attorneys leading a class action in Delaware state court vs. billionaire Elon Musk over his compensation as CEO of Tesla.
The remaining Top 25 payouts to plaintiffs' lawyers in 2024 ranged from $16.7 million to as much as $266.7 million, according to the report.
"Numbers like this explain at least in part why we are continuing to see the plaintiffs’ class action bar grow in numbers and expand its reach as lawyers clamor to identify the next 'tort of the day,'" the report authors said.
ILLINOIS BIOMETRICS SUITS GROW
While the report authors noted other states, notably led by California, have played large roles, Illinois' famously lawsuit-friendly courts and legal system have also played an outsized role in the sustained strength of class action litigation across the U.S.
Illinois' contributions have been particularly felt in the continued rapid growth of privacy litigation, thanks in large part to its biometric information privacy law.
Known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the law has served as the basis for thousands of class action lawsuits in the past decade against a wide range of employers and other businesses operating in Illinois and elsewhere.
Enacted in 2008, the Illinois BIPA law was ostensibly designed to safeguard the so-called unique identifying biometric information of employees and customers, including their fingerprints, facial geometry and other unique physical characteristics. Lawmakers at the time said the measure was inspired by the collapse of the company known as Pay By Touch, which had been among those pioneering the ability of consumers to pay for goods and services using fingerprint scanners.
Since 2015, however, the BIPA law has been used by a growing cadre of trial lawyers to target businesses of all types and sizes with an onslaught of thousands of class action lawsuits filed in Cook County and other courts in Illinois, and even in other states.
Some of the lawsuits famously targeted tech giants, resulting in headline-grabbing settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The overwhelming bulk of BIPA litigation, though, has landed on employers in Illinois, who have been routinely accused of wrongly scanning workers' fingerprints, faces, voices and other biometric characteristics, without first obtaining written consent or providing notices about how that information might be stored, used, shared and destroyed, among other technical provisions in the law.
The law, to this point, however, has largely allowed trial lawyers to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in fees paid by businesses targeted by the lawsuits, without ever having to prove any of their clients were actually harmed.
A growing number of BIPA class actions have now targeted trucking companies for monitoring drivers on the job by scanning their faces as they drive for signs of fatigue in real time, while others have gone after app operators and other businesses for scanning customers' faces in their ID photos or in uploaded selfies to verify their identities when registering for services or renting equipment or other online or remote interactions.
To coerce compliance, the law gave plaintiffs the so-called right of private action - meaning they can file suit without permission from the state. And those sued under the law can face steep potentially payment demands of $1,000-$5,000 per violation.
However, under a series of decisions offering a broad interpretation of the law, the Illinois Supreme Court empowered trial lawyers to use the BIPA statute as a club against targeted defendants, to secure relatively quick and easy big-money settlements, often worth millions of dollars.
Most recently, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled the BIPA law should be interpreted to allow plaintiffs to claim the $1,000-$5,000 damage award for each and every scan of their biometrics, not just the first one. They further ruled those claims should have a five-year statute of limitations.
Justices on the state hight court warned these rulings put Illinois businesses at risk of financial ruin and placed the economy of the state at risk. Justices on the court joined with business advocates calling on Illinois lawmakers to bring balance to the law and rein in the potentially ruinous burdens of the law, as interpreted by the state high court.
In 2024, after years of ignoring pleas for relief from the business community, Illinois Democratic lawmakers enacted BIPA reforms, which made clear that the law should be read to count "individual violations" as once per person, not per biometric scan. Thus, BIPA plaintiffs should be limited to demand $1,000-$5,000 each, not multiplied across potentially hundreds or even thousands of potential biometric scans per person over five years.
The Duane Morris report authors noted the revisions to the law should significantly reduce the risk faced by businesses in Illinois under BIPA, bringing it back into line with the risks more regularly associated with class actions under other federal and state privacy laws.
However, the report authors said that risk also remains "sizable" and the potential payouts should remain attractive to plaintiffs' lawyers.
They further noted lawmakers failed to answer a key question with the reform measures: Whether the change should be read to apply only to new and future BIPA lawsuits, or whether courts should read the changes to apply retroactively, to those filed before the BIPA law was amended to clarify the meaning of "individual violations."
"We anticipate that parties will continue to litigate this question in 2025," the Duane Morris report said.
In the meantime, the report authors noted the number of BIPA class action lawsuits continued to proliferate in state and federal courts in Illinois and elsewhere.
In 2024, plaintiffs' lawyers brought 427 BIPA-related lawsuits. That was up from 417 in 2023, and 362 such filings in 2022.
The report said cases have particularly proliferated around facial recognition systems and any technology that "performs any function at all involving a face," including "virtual try-on technologies" for eyewear and other accessories, "efforts to measure affects or emotions, attempts to verify conformance with pornography restrictions or passport photo requirements, and other functions."
And the BIPA-related lawsuits continued to result in big settlement payouts in 2024, as well, the report said.
According to the report, BIPA settlements accounted for three of the Top 10 largest settlements of privacy-related lawsuits last year.
These included:
- $75 million in a class action brought by truckers vs railroad operator BNSF over fingerprint scans required for entry into secured rail yards;
- $52 million to settle claims against Clearview AI over its alleged unlawful practice of "scraping" photos posted online to collect biometric data; and
- $40 million to end a class action against the operators of the Bumble and Badoo dating apps for allegedly improperly scanning the faces of app users to verify their identities at registration.