Ankur Desai

Professor David Bailey from the Birmingham Business School.

They might have seen headlines about class action lawsuits where large groups of people under the umbrella of a collective claim for damages in court.

New figures compiled for the BBC suggest the number of cases is rising.

But critics argue that they're starting to damage business as firms worry about potential damages claims.

Ed Butler reports.

Disney has agreed to fork over more than... A major UK legal claim has been filed against Johnson & Johnson.

Car makers accused of misleading motorists over emissions... Big companies everywhere seem to be grappling with all kinds of complaints.

Class or mass action court battles typically happen when a group of people get together to raise a common grievance.

One person's name is put forward, the court rules over the merits of the case and the ruling is applied to all the rest.

Or a group of people could step forward with similar complaints and be treated by the courts as a single claim.

Kenny Henderson is a partner at the law firm CMS, which has compiled figures for us at the BBC, suggesting that in the UK alone, more than 700 million consumers and businesses were involved in class action cases last year.

so that on average UK citizens are now members of more than 10 class actions.

The UK is not alone.

In Europe, between 2018 and 2023, more than $164 billion of damages were being pursued.

So how did we get so litigious?

Here's Brian Fitzpatrick, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville.

What happens in 1966 is the people who write the rules that govern the courts in the United States decided to tweak the class action and allow people to sue for money as well.

And that's really what opens up the floodgates.

And another shift in the law was also to come out of the United States.

Claimants were able to opt in or opt out of some cases, which others were leading.