Class Action Suits on the Rise in 2022

• Author: Kelly Cooke
• Posted: 2024-11-06

In civil litigation, class action lawsuits have long been a way for ordinary people to fight back against powerful entities like governments and corporations that have wronged the individuals in some fashion. Over the past decade or so, class action suits have been on the rise, which is no great surprise when you consider just how corporate that society is becoming. Everything is an ad to buy some product, with the goal to be to get excited for the next product. Corporations require consumers, and they have done all they can to turn people into a class of consumerist zombies whose only aim in life is to spend money. As such, more and more class action lawsuits have been popping up in recent years. However, in the past year, that number has grown by nearly 18%, which is a huge one-year increase in any sort of litigation.

It's important to understand that people rarely file class action civil suits against small entities, such as mom 'n pop shops or local school boards, etc. What they file suits against are huge, controlling entities that have excess capital and power. The fact that these lawsuits have risen nearly 18% from 2021 into 2022 is a very telling statistic. It speaks to just how flippantly a lot of companies were treating people during the pandemic, and how products pushed for pure profit ended up damaging lives. The supposed safeguards provided by the government to protect the consumer have all but faded away, as we find in many areas. For instance, the people at the FDA in charge of telling us which drugs can sell on the marketplace were once former CEOs of pharmaceutical companies and still have financial ties.

It's a very messy, convoluted game being played, with normal people as the pawns. To see that these normal people are fighting back through legal means is a great thing for society. It means that corporations are no longer getting away with just outright bullying people and manipulating customers. There's actually some push-back going on, and it's this sort of thing to which companies respond, because it hits them where it hurts the most: their bottom line

Corporate Liability

Another reason that everyone is witnessing a steep increase in the amount of class action lawsuits filed (and won) is that corporations aren't as protected as they used to be. It's an odd thing, to be sure, and there is no broad brush with which to paint. The basic gist of it is that while social media giants and the world's largest corporations are entirely protected by the federal government and can pretty much do what they want, that same government still needs to show the public that they're willing to maintain fair practices in the market. Therefore, what you end up seeing are all the smaller corporations (juxtaposed against mega-corps) that have even more rules to follow, and so they're a lot easier to sue now.

The huge guys, like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, GM, etc? They're immune from prosecution, for all intents and purposes. But the rung just under them, that don't have controlling shares in the careers of politicians, are able to act as a whipping post for the government's optical illusion of fairness and law and order. This has certainly opened a pretty wide door and has allowed aggrieved parties to make the case that they are victims of these large entities, and the legal system has allowed them to pursue damages. In years previous, the process to do this was a lot harder. Those were the days when the word "billions" was the unheard of standard, and millions was the norm. Now, however, mega corporations are dealing with "trillions," and billions are chump change. Remember "too big to fail?"

What everyone eventually realized about that was the fact that these mega corporations were too big to fail because they are basically the government.

The People Are Tired

Another reason that class action lawsuits spiked so dramatically is that people are just sick and tired of corporate rule, the wealth gap, and not to even get into great detail about the drastically lower quality of products that are churned out. It used to be that if a person was in some way aggrieved or even harmed in a minor capacity, they were willing to overlook it. This isn't the case now, however, as people are lining up to tell their tale and join these lawsuits.

Class action lawsuits only rise when large entities are doing wrong. These suits aren't frivolous. Expect to see more of them as corporate power grows.