Business Lawsuits 2024: Settlements, Antitrust, and Noncompetes

Business lawsuits in 2024 broke recent records on nearly every measure that matters. Federal civil filings jumped 22% to nearly 348,000 cases, class action settlements topped $42 billion for the third year running, and ten individual settlements each crossed the $1 billion mark.¹²³ Regulators blocked a $24.6 billion grocery merger, a federal judge struck down the FTC’s nationwide noncompete ban before it ever took effect, and data breach class actions hit a new high.

The Biggest Settlements of the Year

Product liability drove most of the money. The category produced $23.4 billion in settlements, followed by antitrust at $8.4 billion and securities fraud at $2.55 billion.²

3M’s $12.5 Billion PFAS Deal

The single largest settlement of 2024 was 3M’s agreement to pay up to $12.5 billion over 13 years to resolve thousands of claims brought by public water utilities whose supplies were contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, often called “forever chemicals.” A federal judge in South Carolina approved the deal on March 29, 2024, with roughly $2.9 billion in initial payments scheduled for the third quarter.⁴⁵ DuPont added $1.185 billion in related PFAS claims, pushing the combined pool for water remediation to roughly $13.6 billion.⁶ 3M also resolved a separate matter for $3 billion.²

Meta’s $1.4 Billion Texas Privacy Settlement

Meta Platforms agreed to pay $1.4 billion to Texas to settle allegations that its facial recognition system captured millions of Texans’ biometric data without consent, violating the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act. It was the first case brought and settled under that law, and the largest privacy settlement ever secured by a single state.⁷ The payout dwarfed Meta’s earlier $650 million resolution of an Illinois biometric privacy class action.⁸

Other Notable Resolutions

Apple paid $95 million to settle claims over Siri privacy. Walt Disney Company paid $43 million in a women’s pay disparity action.²

The FTC’s Antitrust Push

The Federal Trade Commission ran one of its most active enforcement years on record, pressing cases across groceries, drug middlemen, alcohol distribution, and Big Tech.

Kroger-Albertsons Blocked

On December 10, 2024, Judge Adrienne Nelson of the U.S. District Court in Oregon granted a preliminary injunction halting the proposed $24.6 billion merger between Kroger and Albertsons, calling the deal “presumptively unlawful.” She found the two companies “engage in substantial head-to-head competition and the proposed merger would remove that competition,” and she doubted the viability of a plan to divest 579 stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a company with limited retail grocery experience.⁹ A Washington State judge blocked the deal the same day on similar grounds.¹⁰

Robinson-Patman Comes Out of Retirement

In December 2024, the FTC filed its first Robinson-Patman Act lawsuit in more than 20 years, suing Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits for allegedly charging small independent retailers drastically higher prices than it charged large national chains for the same products.¹¹ The complaint alleged that volume discounts and rebates for big chains were deep enough to let those retailers sell below the wholesale price available to small competitors.¹² A California federal court denied Southern Glazer’s motion to dismiss in April 2025, and the case remains pending. A related Robinson-Patman case against PepsiCo, filed in January 2025, was voluntarily dismissed months later after FTC leadership questioned the evidence.¹³

Insulin and the PBMs

In September 2024, the FTC filed an administrative complaint against the three largest pharmacy benefit managers—CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx—along with their affiliated group purchasing organizations, alleging they artificially inflated insulin prices. The FTC said the PBMs ran a “chase-the-rebate” strategy that pushed patients toward high-list-price insulin and systematically excluded cheaper alternatives, with the cost falling on patients paying based on list prices.¹⁴ By January 2026, Express Scripts had entered settlement discussions, pausing proceedings while the FTC pursued parallel talks with CVS and UnitedHealth.¹⁵

Big Tech on Multiple Fronts

Late in 2024, the FTC opened an antitrust investigation into Microsoft, issuing a formal request for information about the company’s bundling of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity products.¹⁶ The agency’s existing Meta suit and its Section 2 Sherman Act case against Amazon continued, alongside Justice Department actions against Google and Apple.¹⁷

The Noncompete Ban That Never Took Effect

In April 2024, the FTC voted 3-2 to ban most noncompete agreements nationwide, treating them as an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The agency projected the rule would raise average worker earnings by $524 per year, boost new business formation by 2.7% annually, and increase patent filings.¹⁸

It never went into force. On August 20, 2024, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas struck the rule down in Ryan LLC v. FTC, ruling that the agency lacked statutory authority and that the rule was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. The order applied nationwide, leaving employers free to continue using noncompete agreements under state law.¹⁹²⁰²¹

Data Breach Class Actions at Record Levels

Data breach class action filings hit 1,488 in 2024, more than ten times the 108 filed in 2018. More than 1.7 billion breach notification records went out during the year, and over 5.5 billion accounts were compromised, an eightfold jump from 2023.²²

Rising breach volumes, plaintiff-friendly standing precedent, and defendants’ willingness to settle before class certification all fed the surge.²³ Privacy litigation reached well beyond breaches. More than 200 class actions challenged the use of tracking technologies like Meta Pixel and Google Analytics, Video Privacy Protection Act filings more than doubled, and 427 new lawsuits were filed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act even after a legislative amendment limited damages.³ Cybersecurity and data protection was the top area where corporate legal departments reported rising exposure, with 40% of organizations in a Norton Rose Fulbright survey citing an increase in 2023 and 44% expecting further growth in 2024.²⁴

EEOC Hits a Recovery Record

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recovered a record $700 million for more than 21,000 workplace discrimination victims in fiscal year 2024, a 5% increase over the prior year. New charges rose 9.2% to 88,531.²⁵

The agency filed 111 new lawsuits and resolved 132 cases with a 97% success rate. Sixteen systemic cases alone brought in $23.9 million, more than double the prior year’s total in that category.²⁶ Among the biggest resolutions: an $8.7 million settlement with DHL Express over racial segregation in driver route assignments, and a $2.5 million settlement for a class of female agricultural workers subjected to sexual harassment.²⁷ The EEOC also filed its first five lawsuits under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect in 2024.

Patent Cases Come Roaring Back

Patent filings rebounded by more than 20% in 2024 after a slower 2023, with the Eastern District of Texas reclaiming its spot as the leading venue by logging over 1,000 new patent lawsuits. Courts awarded more than $4.3 billion in patent damages across over 90 cases, a 20% increase from the prior year. Design patent filings rose 35%, copyright filings 23%, and pharmaceutical patent cases under the Abbreviated New Drug Application process climbed for a third straight year.²⁸

Samsung was the most frequently targeted defendant, followed by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Non-practicing entities continued to drive a sizable share of filings, and third-party litigation funding drew growing attention. One funded campaign produced an $847 million jury verdict against Verizon.²⁹

The Corporate Transparency Act in Limbo

The Corporate Transparency Act, which required millions of businesses to report their beneficial owners to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, spent 2024 and 2025 ricocheting through the courts. In December 2024, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas issued a nationwide preliminary injunction in Texas Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland, finding the law likely exceeded Congress’s enumerated powers. A Fifth Circuit merits panel reinstated that injunction after a motions panel briefly lifted it, and the Supreme Court itself intervened on January 23, 2025, to lift the Texas Top Cop Shop injunction.³⁰ A separate injunction out of another Texas case, Smith v. U.S. Department of the Treasury, immediately replaced it and kept reporting paused nationwide.

By March 2025, FinCEN effectively stood down: an interim final rule exempted all U.S.-created entities and their beneficial owners from reporting, halted enforcement against domestic companies, and limited remaining obligations to foreign entities registered to do business in the United States.³¹ A parallel challenge by the National Small Business Association produced a district court ruling declaring the CTA unconstitutional in March 2024, though the Eleventh Circuit reversed in December 2025, finding the law a valid exercise of Commerce Clause power.³²

What the Overall Filing Picture Looked Like

Contract disputes remained the single most common civil filing in state courts, accounting for 46% of cases. Federal courts logged more than 31,000 contract cases, roughly 14,000 intellectual property filings, and over 26,000 employment and labor matters. Much of the overall federal spike came from diversity-of-citizenship filings, which rose 46% to nearly 160,000 cases, and from product liability multidistrict litigation.¹

Trials kept getting rarer. Only about 1% of federal civil cases went to trial in 2024, compared with roughly 20% in the 1960s. Cases that settled reached resolution in a median of about seven months; cases that went to trial averaged nearly three years.¹ In the Norton Rose Fulbright survey, 88% of companies said they preferred to settle before trial. Regulatory activity also climbed: 61% of surveyed organizations were involved in at least one regulatory matter in 2023, up from 50% the year before, and ESG litigation grew from 2% of respondents in 2022 to 10% in 2023.²⁴

The Hidden Cost: Small Businesses

Headline settlements obscure who actually pays. A December 2023 study by The Brattle Group, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform, found that small businesses bore $160 billion of the nation’s $347 billion in commercial tort costs in 2021. Though small firms account for 20% of commercial revenue, they absorbed 48% of tort costs. The smallest firms, earning $1 million or less, faced roughly $35 in tort costs per $1,000 in revenue, seven times the rate borne by companies earning $50 million or more.³³³⁴

Between 36% and 53% of small businesses face a lawsuit in any given year, and about 75% are estimated to be underinsured against litigation risk. Median defense costs run at least $54,000 for a liability suit and $91,000 for a contract dispute.³⁵¹

Forces Shaping What Comes Next

Two currents ran under nearly every category of 2024 business litigation. Third-party litigation funding, now a roughly $3 billion industry in the United States, kept expanding, bankrolling plaintiff-side cases in patent and mass tort dockets especially. Funders often retain approval or veto rights over settlements, raising concern about conflicts with the interests of individual plaintiffs.³⁶ Delaware’s federal courts led a transparency push by requiring disclosure of funding arrangements, though no uniform federal rule yet exists.²⁹

Generative AI, meanwhile, is reshaping both the subject matter and the practice of litigation. Nearly half of corporate counsel surveyed expected AI to increase intellectual property exposure, and AI-related cybersecurity risks fed the record data breach and privacy caseloads.²⁴ Foundational questions about AI patentability and whether training large language models on copyrighted material amounts to infringement are still being worked out in the courts, and they will generate their own wave of business litigation for years to come.

1
MBH Texas Law. Business Litigation Statistics
2
Forbes. Class Action Settlements Topped $40 Billion Again in 2024
3
Milberg. Class Action Settlements 2024
4
Chemical & Engineering News. Court Approves $10 Billion PFAS Settlement
5
3M Investor Relations. 3M Settlement With Public Water Suppliers to Address PFAS
6
NRDC. PFAS Settlement Money for Water Utilities Poised to Evaporate
7
Texas Attorney General. Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures $1.4 Billion Settlement With Meta
8
Cyber Adviser Blog. Historic $1.4 Billion Data Privacy Settlement Between Meta and Texas
9
Justia. Federal Trade Commission v. Kroger Company
10
The New York Times. Kroger-Albertsons Merger Blocked by Federal Judge
11
FTC. FTC v. Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits
12
GK Law. FTC Sues Southern Glazer’s and PepsiCo for Price Discrimination
13
K&L Gates. Uneven Pour: FTC’s Robinson-Patman Enforcement Sees Mixed Results
14
FTC. FTC Sues Prescription Drug Middlemen for Artificially Inflating Insulin Drug Prices
15
BioPharma Dive. Cigna’s Express Scripts in FTC Insulin Pricing Settlement Talks
16
The New York Times. Microsoft FTC Antitrust
17
ProMarket. The Trends and Cases That Defined United States Antitrust in 2024
18
FTC. FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes
19
Employment Law Worldview. FTC Non-Compete Ban Enjoined Nationwide
20
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Ryan LLC v. FTC
21
FTC. Federal Trade Commission Files to Accede to Vacatur of Non-Compete Clause Rule
22
AXA XL. From Breach to Courtroom: Navigating the Rising Tide of Data Litigation
23
Duane Morris. Data Breaches Give Rise to an Unprecedented Number of Class Action Filings
24
Norton Rose Fulbright. 2024 Annual Litigation Trends Survey
25
EEOC. EEOC Publishes Annual Performance and General Counsel Reports for Fiscal Year 2024
26
EEOC. EEOC 2024 Annual Performance Report
27
EEOC. Office of General Counsel Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report
28
LexisNexis. Lex Machina Releases 2025 Patent Litigation Report
29
Unified Patents. Patent Dispute Report 2024 Mid-Year Report
30
Sidley Austin. US Supreme Court Lifts Corporate Transparency Act Injunction, but Another Takes Its Place
31
FinCEN. Beneficial Ownership Information
32
Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting. Group Urges Supreme Court to Hear Corporate Transparency Act Case as Lawmakers Consider Repeal
33
The Brattle Group. Tort Costs for Small Businesses
34
Institute for Legal Reform. The US Lawsuit System Costs America’s Small Businesses $160 Billion
35
The Zebra. Small Business Statistics
36
Cornell Law School. Third-Party Litigation Funding