A recent ruling by the High Court in London will mean that unsuccessful claimants in the well-publicised Municipio De Mariana & Ors v BHP Group PLC & Anor group action claim will need to make an interim payment of £8m to cover 50% of their opponents legal costs.
In making the ruling, High Court judge Mr Justice Turner said that it was wrong to penalise the defendants for the work done on the case. Justice Turner had already struck out group litigation on behalf of some 202,600 Brazilians last November who were claiming compensation following the collapse of the Fundao dam in Brazil in 2015, saying the task of managing such a case would be ‘irredeemably unmanageable’ if it was allowed to proceed.

An important decision has recently been in the UK’s Volkswagen group litigation claim that is good news for the 91,000 claimants who are seeking compensation from the German motor manufacturer.

GDPR’s European-wide introduction in May 2018, combined with an increasing awareness of data privacy issues amongst businesses and individuals is likely to result in an increase in data privacy related class action (also known as group action) claims and litigation in the UK.

Now that GDPR – the new, European-wide General Data Protection Regulation – has come into effect from 25th May 2018, observers in the UK legal profession are anticipating an increase in data protection based legal actions, with group / class actions being increasingly likely. Group actions, whereby a group or collective of claimants come together and are represented legally by a member of that group (usually a lawyer, solicitor or law fim), aren’t particularly common in the UK but changes to the Civil Procedure Rules (‘CPR’) back in 1999do allow such actions.