That’s a possibility raised by Alan Kaplinsky in his analysis of the Supreme Court’s universal injunction case, Trump v. CASA, at Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Finance Monitor Blog. Because CASA will make it harder for consumer financial service companies to seek injunctions against CFPB regs, etc., Mr. Kaplinsky suggests they may resort to class actions, though trade groups may also still have a role. It would be ironic for financial companies to use class actions in the cases they bring while blocking their use in the cases brought against them. It would be doubly ironic if class actions became more useful to the industry than consumers. Whether this approach will be used against the CFPB before we have a Democratic president seems unlikely, but perhaps it will be used against other agencies in the interim.
Interesting, Jeff. A reporter asked me the same question last week. Will corporations/business start bringing aggregate litigation more often than they do?