In-house legal spend on class action lawsuits has increased for the fifth year in a row and will likely increase in the coming years because of the new coronavirus and data privacy laws, according to the 2020 Carlton Fields Class Action Survey published on Tuesday.

“Over the last several months the plaintiffs’ bar has been extremely active. We thought the activity might have slowed down because of the pandemic and the opposite has happened,”  said Julianna McCabe, a shareholder at Carlton Fields in Miami and director of the firm’s class action survey.