Class Actions and Mass Arbitration in 2026: The Plaintiff and Defense Playbooks Every Litigator Needs

You don’t have to be a class-action specialist to get pulled into one. A consumer-facing client gets named, a single arbitration clause triggers thousands of individual demands, and suddenly the templates you’ve relied on are lagging the law. The Supreme Court’s DIG in LabCorp v. Davis left the circuits openly split on whether uninjured class members can survive certification—so the same class definition can clear one court and collapse in another. Add the 2024 AAA and JAMS mass-arbitration fee schedules, the $38 billion Visa/Mastercard swipe-fee settlement, and the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic class—the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history—and every attorney with a pending Rule 23 motion, a consumer client, or an arbitration clause on file is exposed. This program delivers both playbooks side by side: the plaintiff record-building toolkit and the defense attack sequence. You’ll leave able to structure a Comcast-compliant damages model, draft a class definition that holds in your circuit, calibrate a Rule 23(f) petition before the 14-day clock runs, and draft arbitration agreements that survive unconscionability review while managing mass-arbitration fee exposure under current rules.