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Class actions promise strength in numbers. The dispute over representation in the Mariana dam litigation exposes a less reassuring possibility – claimants becoming caught between rival legal teams and complex financial agreements. The Law Society Gazette reports describe a High Court battle over whether a claimant committee could terminate agreements with Pogust Goodhead and appoint Bailey Glasser International. For Class Action Alert, this raises a fundamental question: how much control do people retain when they join mass litigation?
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Litigation funding is promoted as a route to justice. The planned closure of Litigation Capital Management (LCM) exposes the uncertainty behind that promise. The Law Society Gazette reports that LCM has entered an orderly run-off after recording annual losses of approximately £87 million. Seven of its eight investments concluded during the year produced losses. The company, which finances individual cases and class actions, will stop making new investments while managing its existing portfolio to completion. The lesson here is clear – commercial backing is no guarantee of a successful claim.
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An Australian law firm’s recruitment campaign offers a revealing glimpse into the commercial ambitions behind mass litigation. The Law Society Gazette reports that Shine Lawyers is recruiting experienced UK litigators to relocate to Australia, offering sponsorship and relocation assistance. Class actions are identified as a strategic growth area for the firm. For prospective recruits, that may be an attractive opportunity. For the public, it raises a more fundamental question – does growing the business of litigation necessarily serve the people bringing the claims? The campaign concerns Australian jobs, rather than UK expansion. Nevertheless, the question matters in Britain, where claims of access to justice should face the same scrutiny as any other commercial proposition.
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A group claim against cryptocurrency platform Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, has grown to approximately 2,700 claimants, with alleged losses exceeding £250 million. The scale is eye-catching. But the figure represents alleged losses—not a judgment, settlement or compensation fund. It also reveals nothing about the claim’s prospects, its funding arrangements or the deductions that could be made from any recovery. What is being alleged? The High Court claim concerns retail investors who traded cryptocurrency derivatives and leveraged products through Binance.com. The claimants allege that Binance offered futures, options, leveraged tokens and margin trading to UK consumers without the authorisation required from the Financial Conduct Authority. These products can magnify gains and losses. KP Law, which represents the claimants, says some investors lost tens of thousands of pounds and others lost millions. The allegations have not been determined by a court. Binance has said it will defend the proceedings and remains committed to complying with applicable law.
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Twenty-three years is an unusual definition of efficient justice. Yet that is the striking backdrop to the UK Supreme Court’s recent decision in the AXA case. The case stems from a Group Litigation Order (GLO) established back in 2003 to coordinate claims by companies challenging aspects of the UK tax regime. AXA was not selected as a test case. Its claim was stayed while other proceedings made their way through the courts – a process involving multiple levels of the UK judiciary and the European courts. The GLO may have avoided multiple parties litigating the same questions separately, but for an individual claimant it also meant years of waiting. That exposes a tension in how we think about the efficiency of collective litigation. A procedure can be efficient for the court system while being remarkably inefficient for the individual claimant. Reducing the number of hearings and avoiding duplication is valuable, but so is reaching a resolution within a reasonable timeframe. From a claimant’s perspective, a dispute that remains unresolved for years carries its own costs – financial, commercial and simply the uncertainty of not knowing when the matter will finally end. The difficulty is that these different forms of efficiency do not always point in the same direction. What may be the most efficient way for a court to determine a common issue may not be the quickest route for every claimant whose case depends on that issue. The AXA litigation therefore raises a broader question about how we measure the success of GLOs. If collective litigation is intended to deliver efficient justice, perhaps efficiency should be measured not only by how much litigation is avoided, but also by how long claimants have to wait. Perhaps, then, the more useful question is not simply whether collective litigation is efficient, but efficient for whom? After all, justice may be collective. The waiting is not.
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Coles got caught. Then the class action’s damages case got so tangled that a Federal Court judge openly admitted he can’t follow it. Welcome to “access to justice.” In May 2026, Australia’s Federal Court found supermarket giant Coles misled shoppers on 13 of 14 “Down Down” tickets — prices quietly bumped up, then “slashed” back down to fake a bargain. A clean liability win. A genuine black eye for Coles. Then came the damages phase. And the very same judge who wrote a razor-sharp 500-paragraph liability ruling is now, by this week’s reporting, openly struggling to understand how the class action even calculates what shoppers are owed. If the bench can’t follow the math, what chance do you have of seeing a cent? Liability was the easy part Proving Coles fooled the market? Manageable. Proving what each shopper lost? A nightmare. Across 245 products and 15 months of millions of anonymous transactions, “your loss” stops being a fact and becomes a statistical guess — sampling, regressions, and assumptions stacked on assumptions. When a judge says he can’t follow it, that’s the model waving a white flag. Your “class” includes people who lost basically nothing Bought one Cadbury bar during the window? You’re lumped in with someone who did weekly big-basket shops for a year and a half. Average that out and you get a number that satisfies a formula — not a number that reflects what anyone actually lost. Good luck getting paid Nobody kept four-year-old receipts. So payouts get estimated, or funnelled off to unrelated “cy-près” causes when real victims can’t be found. The money drifts away from the people it was for. Everyone gets paid before you do Funders don’t take risk for charity. Between funding commissions, legal fees and admin costs, a fat slice of any award is spoken for before a single shopper sees a dollar. The headline figure and the cash in your pocket are two very different numbers. Four years and counting Conduct: 2022–2023. Liability: May 2026. Damages: still being fought in August 2026 — appeals looming. For a few dollars of loss per product, that’s not justice. That’s a machine that pays the funders, the firms and the lawyers, and hands the shopper the scraps. If the judge is lost, so is your payout!
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