Why most eligible businesses never file

The uncomfortable truth about class action settlements is that the money is real and most of it goes unclaimed. Filing rates in consumer classes run in the single digits. The funds left on the table are enormous.

Businesses aren't different in kind, just in scale. A merchant that qualifies for an antitrust settlement often never files, and the reasons repeat.

Nobody's watching. New antitrust settlements open every quarter. Notices arrive by mail or email to an address that may be years out of date, land in a shared inbox, and get filed under "probably junk." No one on staff owns the job of tracking which settlements a company qualifies for.

The claim looks like work. Class notices are written for lawyers. Proving eligibility means pulling years of transaction data out of systems that have since been replaced. Faced with an uncertain payout and a certain hassle, most teams do nothing.

It looks too good to be true. Real settlements get mistaken for scams, partly because scams imitate them. The instinct to ignore anything promising money is usually healthy and occasionally expensive.

The deadline passes quietly. Windows close on a fixed date with no second chance. The payment card claims window closed February 4, 2025, and it is closed permanently.

The fix is unglamorous: monitoring plus audit-ready filing. Someone watches every settlement that could touch your business, flags the ones you qualify for before the deadline, and builds a claim your records can support. That's the entire job, and it's the difference between eligible and paid.

That's what we do. If you'd rather not build it in-house, we've been doing it for three decades.