Apart from regulatory actions, companies can be held accountable through private litigation. In Violation Tracker we collect information on class-action and multi-district lawsuits in a dozen categories. Most of these lawsuits are resolved through settlement agreements.
Sources
The vast majority of entries in Violation Tracker involve enforcement actions by federal, state and local regulatory agencies, but the database also includes more than 5,000 successful lawsuits brought by non-governmental plaintiffs. In these cases, defendant companies paid over $200 billion in damages and settlements. These include class actions and multi-district cases filed in both federal and state courts in the following categories:
• Consumer protection
• Employment discrimination
• Environmental
• ERISA and other retirement plan abuses
• Fair Credit Reporting Act
• False advertising
• Non-workplace discrimination
• Price-fixing and related anti-competitive practices
• Privacy and data breaches
• Product liability
• Wage and hour
• WARN Act
The focus is on more significant cases, especially those brought against larger corporations. We use Law360 and other legal publications and websites to identify these cases, and we document them using the PACER database of federal lawsuits and state court dockets. Cases are added when the court gives final approval to a settlement or when a defendant company facing an adverse verdict exhausts its appeals.
Search Techniques
On search results pages, private litigation cases display the phrase Private Lawsuit-Federal or Private Lawsuit-State in the column where the agency name appears in regulatory cases.
Class action and multi-district lawsuits can also be found by choosing Private Litigation from the Action Type dropdown on the Advanced Search page. That choice can be combined with a company name or numerous other variables. Private litigation entries use the same set of broad Offense Groups and more specific Offense Types as the agency entries.
You can use the full text search box to search specific words or phrases mentioned in the description field of the individual entries.
All private litigation individual entries include full legal citations, including links to PACER dockets (which requires a subscription) in federal cases. Violation Tracker subscribers also have access to key court documents such as settlement agreements.
