From left: Attorneys Gerald Maatman and Jennifer Riley
CHICAGO - Reforms to Illinois' stringent biometrics privacy law appears to have doled out some relief in 2025 to employers and other businesses targeted by what had been an ever-mounting blitz of big money class actions under the controversial law, according to a new report tracking nationwide class action activity.
Last year, the number of new class action lawsuits filed under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) crashed to levels not seen for at least eight years.
And at the same time, settlements of such class actions also receded sharply compared to 2024.
Those findings were among the trends and data from 2025 discussed in the 2026 edition of the Class Action Review, the annual report published by the Chicago-based law firm of Duane Morris, under the leadership of class action defense attorneys Gerald Maatman and Jennifer Riley.
"Following steep year-over-year growth between 2017 through 2024, companies that operate in Illinois finally saw a reprieve from the growth in BIPA litigation in 2025," the Class Action Review authors noted in their executive summary of the data.
The Duane Morris report indicated trial lawyers had filed just 150 new BIPA class action suits in 2025. That marked a decline of nearly 185% compared to 2024, when 427 BIPA filings were lodged in state and federal courts in Illinois.
And it stopped a string of six straight years in which more than 300 BIPA class actions were filed. In 2023, for instance, 417 BIPA lawsuits were filed. And that had marked an increase of 15% compared to the 362 BIPA class actions filed in 2022.
At the same time, Duane Morris reported BIPA class action settlements edged down in 2025 to $136.6 million. That marked a decline of 34% vs 2024, when BIPA class action settlements totaled more than $206 million, the Duane Morris report said.
The decline in BIPA settlements mirrored a steep drop nationally in privacy class action settlement activity in 2025.
In all, the Class Action Review reported privacy law class actions, excluding BIPA settlements, dropped about 60% in 2025 to nearly $802 million.
In 2024, privacy class action settlements, excluding BIPA cases, resulted in payments of more than $2 billion, the Duane Morris report said.
In all, however, those declines defied the overall class action trend in U.S. courts. Nationally, the Class Action Review reported class action settlements resulted in businesses agreeing to pay out $79 billion. That marked an 88% increase from 2024, and even exceeded the $66 billion in settlements logged in 2022, according to Duane Morris' report.
"Particularly when viewed in conjunction with the settlement values observed in 2023 and 2024, the settlement numbers in 2025 confirm that corporate defendants are operating in a new era of enhanced class action risks," the Duane Morris report said.
"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 authors, however, said Illinois' declining BIPA numbers represented one of the bright spots in the class action litigation landscape.
The report's authors largely credited the drop to the approval in the summer of 2024 of BIPA reforms long sought by Illinois business advocates, as Illinois Democrats, in a rare rebuff of the state's politically powerful trial lawyers, agreed to amend the BIPA law to restrict the ability of trial lawyers to use the law to extract potentially massive, and relatively easy payouts from targeted businesses.
Since 2015, a growing number of trial lawyers have used the BIPA law to lodge thousands of class action lawsuits against employers and other businesses.
Some of the lawsuits have famously resulted in high profile settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars from tech giants, like Google and Facebook- and Instagram-parent company Meta.
To this point, the overwhelming bulk of BIPA lawsuits have come down on Illinois employers of all sizes and types. Those lawsuits have typically accused such employers of violating the law by scanning workers' fingerprints, voices, faces and other so-called biometric identifiers, without first obtaining written consent or providing notices about how that information might be stored, used, shared and ultimately destroyed.
Typically, such lawsuits have claimed employers improperly required workers to scan fingerprints to verify their identities when punching in and out of work shifts or to access secure or sensitive areas in a workplace, or to monitor workers' actions while on the job to ensure workplace and public safety.
To coerce compliance, the law gave plaintiffs the so-called right of private action, allowing them to sue businesses accused of violating the BIPA law. Those sued can face potentially steep payment demands of $1,000-$5,000 per violation.
Under Illinois Supreme Court rulings, the law was interpreted broadly, as plaintiffs could bring their lawsuits against businesses without showing they were ever actually harmed, and they could demand payment for each and every allegedly illegal biometric scan, rapidly ratcheting potential payouts into the many millions or even billions of dollars.
The potential for such financial windfalls under the state Supreme Court's rulings, in turn, fueled a years-long surge in BIPA class actions.
In 2017, for instance, fewer than 60 BIPA lawsuits were filed. But 2019 marked the first of six consecutive years in which more than 300 BIPA class actions were lodged, until lawmakers took action in 2024 to rein in the potentially big paydays for plaintiffs and their lawyers.
In 2023, for instance, the Chamber of Progress, a Virginia-based group advocating for U.S. tech companies, reported that trial lawyers were the leading beneficiaries of BIPA lawsuits, bringing in an average of $11.5 million in fees from BIPA class actions. In all, the report estimated BIPA plaintiffs' lawyers have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from BIPA class action settlements.
However, those potential payouts appeared to have been curtailed by BIPA reform legislation enacted in 2024, revising BIPA to explicitly remove the potential for "per scan" damages and instead limiting the claims basically to $1,000 to $5,000 per alleged victim.
While business leaders had hoped for more substantial reforms, they still welcomed the change, which they also hoped could help to slow the flood of BIPA lawsuits, particularly against employers.
The Duane Morris authors said those hopes appear to have at least partially materialized.
"Over the past year, the impact of this amendment became apparent as the plaintiffs’ class action bar shifted its attention away from the BIPA and toward potentially more lucrative statutory schemes," the Duane Morris report said.
