In a recent study about securities class action lawsuit filings in the first six months of 2025, NERA reports that first half filings represented a tale of two quarters, with the first quarter filings representing the highest quarterly number in five years, and the second quarter filings represented the lowest quarterly filing number in five years. The report, which is entitled “Recent Trends in Securities Class Action Litigation: H1 2025 Update,” and which can be found here, includes a number of other interesting observations, as discussed below.
The NERA report, which reports on and analyzes federal court securities class action lawsuit filings only (i.e., it does not include report on or analyze state court securities class action lawsuit filings) has its own distinct counting methodology, and so the figures reported and discussed in the report differ somewhat from other published reports. For example, NERA counts securities suits alleging essentially the same facts but filed in different federal circuits as separate lawsuits (unless later consolidated, in which event the cases are counted only once). Other published sources count these separate lawsuits only once. In addition, the NERA includes in its count not just class action lawsuit alleging violations of the federal securities laws, but also counts cases with other allegations, including “breach of fiduciary duty, as with some merger objection cases,” and others that are “filed in federal court under federal or state law.” Owing to these differences in counting methodology, the figures analyzed in the NERA report may differ from other published sources.
According to the NERA report, there were 108 new federal court securities class action lawsuits filed in the first six months of 2025, including 65 cases in the first quarter (representing a five-year high) and 43 cases in the second quarter (representing a five-year low). The first half filings project to a year-end total of 216, slightly below the 229 that NERA reported for the full-year 2024.
The NERA report adds the interesting observation that the percentage of federal court securities class action lawsuits filed against foreign companies has declined even as the percentage of foreign companies on U.S. stock exchanges has increased. Thus, even though foreign companies represent 26.9% of all U.S. exchange-traded companies (the highest such percentage since at least 2016), securities suits against foreign companies represented only 12.1% of all first half securities suit filings. Interestingly, this percentage of lawsuit filings against foreign companies is also the lowest percentage since 2016. The percentage of the total number of suits that the suits against foreign companies represent has been lower than the percentage of foreign companies on the U.S. exchanges for four straight years, since 2021. (Readers interested in these statistics will want to study Figure 6 on page 8 of the report.)
The NERA report also has some interesting observations about case resolutions. The report notes that of the 121 cases resolved in the first half of 2025, 87 were dismissed and 34 were settled. If case resolutions were to continue at this pace for the rest of the year, the year-end number of resolutions would total 242, which would represent a 12% increase in the number of resolutions compared to 2024, when there were 217 case resolutions. The growth in resolutions is “drive by a substantial rise in dismissed cases, which are on track to increase for a second straight year and exceed the 124 dismissals seen in 2024.”
Further with respect to case resolutions, the report notes that since 2016, more cases have been dismissed than settled, with approximately 30% of cases remaining pending. The median time from the filing of the first complaint to resolution for cases dismissed between 2021 and 2024 increased from 1.4 years to 2.0 years, but during the first six months of 2025, the figure declined to 1.6 years. For cases settled in the first six months of 2025, the median time from the filing of the first complaint until resolution was 3.3 years, a slight increase from the 3.2 equivalent period in 2024.
The aggregate total amount of securities lawsuit settlements in the first six months of 2025 was $1.8 billion, representing about 45% of the full year 2024 aggregate inflation-adjusted total of $3.9 million. The average securities suit settlement value for the first six months of 2025 was $56 million, representing a 27% increase over the 2024 inflation-adjusted average settlement value of $44 million. The media settlement value in the first six months of 2025 was $12.5 million, representing a $1.8 million decline from the 2024 inflation adjusted median settlement value of $14.3 million.