Member Article

Class action lawsuits continue to rise, both in terms of litigation spending and number of cases. Companies reportedly spent US$3.9 billion on class action defences in 2023, surpassing the previous record high, set in US $3.5 billion. Meanwhile, courts have continued their gatekeeping function at the class certification stage. Questions of whether common issues are truly predominant have remained at the forefront, with a continued focus on the presence of ‘uninjured’ class members. This article discusses these challenging class certification issues in the antitrust context by tracing the standards of certification and discussing the evolution of the ‘rigorous analysis’ performed by federal courts. It then spotlights notable decisions in recent years that have grappled with challenges to the sufficiency of plaintiffs’ statistical models used to demonstrate the preponderance of class-wide questions and with the number of putative class members required to be sufficiently numerous for certification.

To continue reading William Cavanaugh, David Kleban, and Voratida Sangchant's chapter on "Navigating Class Certification Challenges in the Antitrust Context" in GCR's Americas Antitrust Review, please click here.