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LOS ANGELES — L.A.’s federal courts last year overtook the Southern District of New York (SDNY) as the most active venue for class-action litigation in the nation, driven by a surge in cases related to e-commerce and consumer protection.
That’s one of the findings in a report released this week by the legal analytics company Lex Machina, which concluded that the Central District of California is the country’s “proving ground” for new legal theories spanning the areas of e-commerce, consumer privacy and electronic contracts.
The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California includes the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura.
Though SDNY has in multiple recent years posted the highest volume of class actions, in 2025 the Los Angeles federal district handled 1,662 such cases, topping the class actions in SDNY by more than 300, the report found.
Nationwide, class-action filings surged in 2025 after years of relative stability, reaching more than 12,200 cases last year, according to Lex Machina. Digital disputes were behind the surge in such cases, which were driven by consumer protection lawsuits focusing on online transactions. These included dynamic pricing driven by artificial intelligence and techniques used on websites and apps that manipulate consumers into purchasing services or products they otherwise don’t want or need, the data indicates..
Consumer protection filings had been fairly flat for about a decade, but from 2024 to 2025, the number of such lawsuits went from 5,115 to 7,650, a surge of more than 40%, according to the study.
“This jump reflects the expanding footprint of digital commerce and heightened attention to data and privacy practices, especially at the state level,” the report says. “Together, these forces are fueling a new wave of class-action litigation that appears both broad and sustained.”
The data in the report aims to help legal professionals assess risks and strategies to help clients weather the class-action obstacle course.
“As filings increase, customers need clear insight into where cases are being filed, how they are progressing, who the key players are and where financial exposure is rising,” Eric Wright, Lex Machina’s senior vice president, said in a statement emailed to the Southern California Record.
The report provides more data to back L.A.’s growing reputation as one of the country’s top “judicial hellholes,” tops on the list of what legal reform advocates have said are the worst of America's most abusive court systems.
The Lex Machina report says the increase in federal class actions will produce momentum that will last for years. In addition, the same plaintiffs, firms and defendants are more often showing up in the litigation as a result of “repeat-player behavior,” according to the study.
“A small group of plaintiffs and plaintiff-side firms now accounts for an outsized share of filings, while major national corporations appear again and again as defendants,” the report states. “This concentration indicates a maturing ecosystem in which specialized firms deploy high-volume litigation strategies and large enterprises consistently face class exposure across multiple jurisdictions.”
The top class-action defendants are Walmart, Amazon and Apple Inc.
More than $32 billion in class-action settlement damages were obtained in federal courts from 2023 through last year, according to Lex Machina. Most of these cases are resolved through settlements, the report said, but the medium timeline for a full trial can take about four years.
