A New Source of Data on Class Action Settlements: The Department of Justice's Class Action Fairness Act Log

Studies of class action settlements have been notoriously difficult because of the logistical burden of assembling datasets from district court orders. This is especially true for non‐securities settlements. Moreover, even when they have been undertaken, they have been of unknown representativeness. Yet, since the enactment of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), defendants have been required to send a notice to the United States Department of Justice every time they settled a class action, lest the settlement not be binding. These notices therefore have the potential to overcome many of the challenges and limitations of past catalogs of settlements. This paper is the first to assess the efficacy of the Department's CAFA notices to study class action settlements. Using Freedom of Information Act requests, I obtained a log the Department keeps of CAFA notices. Although the log contains thousands of entries and many more settlements per year than any prior dataset, I find that the log is unpredictably incomplete. This is especially apparent for securities class actions, but appears to be true of non‐securities class actions as well. As such, the log will not improve the representativeness of class action settlement studies. But the log will mitigate the logistical burden of creating datasets and therefore should improve the frequency of settlement studies.