Johnson & Johnson has just agreed to pay at least $5.5 billion to settle tens of thousands of claims that its talcum powder products cause ovarian cancer. A federal court recently gave final approval to a settlement in which Anthropic will pay out $1.5 billion to authors who claimed the AI company improperly used their work to train its Claude chatbot. Last month, another federal court gave preliminary approval to a settlement in which Visa and Mastercard will reduce swipe fees charged to merchants by tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.
While all this has been happening, the Justice Department seems to be doing everything possible to avoid major cases against large corporations. The DOJ has not announced a single case resolution with a fine anywhere near $1 billion since Trump retook office. Many investigations have been dropped, and others are not starting in the first place.
It used to be that federal prosecutors and plaintiff’s lawyers worked in a kind of coordination. The feds would bring a criminal action against a company for misconduct and thereby set the stage for a follow-on private civil action.
Now the DOJ is making life a lot easier for rogue companies. Along with abandoning many prosecutions, Justice is allowing many corporate defendants to avoid criminal charges by offering them leniency in the form of non-prosecution agreements, deferred protection agreements, and declinations. This makes those follow-on civil lawsuits more challenging.
Additional obstacles have been erected by the business-friendly conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Among other things, SCOTUS recently ruled in favor of Monsanto and its parent Bayer in litigation relating to the herbicide Roundup.
Trial lawyers, nonetheless, continue to file a steady stream of class actions and achieve many substantial settlements. In the dozen categories covered in Violation Tracker, about 50 settlements worth $50 million or more have received final court approval since the beginning of 2025. About half of those had a value of $100 million or more.
There are also many settlements that have been agreed to by the parties but which have not yet received final court approval (and thus are not yet shown in Violation Tracker). About three dozen of these are worth at least $50 million, including 18 with a value of $100 million or more. The most frequent issues in these cases are price-fixing, privacy abuses, and consumer protection violations. The defendants include some of the biggest names in the corporate world, such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and AT&T.
With the feds increasingly out of the picture, plaintiff’s lawyers often find themselves working parallel to state attorneys general instead. This has occurred most notably in the national opioid litigation, which has yielded more than $70 billion in settlements from drug companies and pharmacy chains.
The Trump Justice Department may be focused on the wrist-slapping of business defendants, but rogue corporations are still being held to account in a serious way by the states and by the plaintiffs’ bar.
You must be logged in to post a comment.