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Could UK Class Actions Put a Stop to Ticketmaster’s Price-Gouging?

April 18, 2023

Could UK Class Actions Put a Stop to Ticketmaster’s Price-Gouging?

The following piece was contributed by Tom Davey, Co-Founder and Director at Factor Risk Management. News of another class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster comes as little surprise, given the company’s long history of legal disputes both in the UK and North America. Described by US senator Richard Blumenthal as a “monopolistic mess”, the company has been beset with criticism and legal action ever since merging with events promoter and venue operator Live Nation in 2010. The combined entity controls around 70% of the live venue and ticketing marketplace, a situation which many believe it exploits at the expense of its customers. The latest class-action suit, filed by a Canadian law firm, centres on the alleged price-gouging of ticket sales for an upcoming concert by rap superstar Drake. A Montreal man purchased two “Official Platinum” tickets for Drake’s show on 14th July, believing it was the only date he would be performing at the Bell Centre. Having paid $789.54 for each ticket, he then discovered the next day that a second show had been added, with the same tickets each costing $350 less than what he had paid. The suit claims that Ticketmaster had been deceptive in not announcing both dates at the same time and had intentionally withheld the information about a second show to manipulate fans into overpaying. Further, the suit alleges that the tickets sold as “Official Platinum” were simply ordinary tickets relabelled as premium in bad faith. As such, compensation of the difference between the prices paid and the cheaper-priced identical tickets is being sought, as well as punitive damages of $300 for each affected customer. While collective actions are not easy to mount in North America, plaintiffs are bolstered by the fact that juries there tend to be more claimant-friendly than in other jurisdictions, including by awarding significant damages when finding in their favour. Beneficial costs rules also make such legal actions easier to bring, making the conditions sufficiently clement for group claims to proceed to trial. By contrast, the system in the UK remains more austere, operating under an unclear, unpredictable and complex regime, whether in the High Court or in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT). However, there is an increasing trend of lawyers at North American firms with a UK presence, or vice versa, noticing the direction of travel set by their colleagues in the US and exploring similar actions, subject to the limitations of their respective jurisdiction. As such, Ticketmaster’s various legal issues in North America may well prove a precursor for similar UK-based claims. The current class-action facing Ticketmaster is just the latest in a series of lawsuits brought against the company for claims including price fixing and anti-competitive behaviour. The company also faced severe criticism after introducing a “dynamic pricing” model in the UK last year. Already in use in its US sales operations, the system replaces fixed-price tickets with tickets that fluctuate in price based on demand, with critics seeing the model as yet another example of Ticketmaster abusing its dominance of the market to extract even more profit from a captive consumer base. The company’s legal woes are not limited to issues over the pricing of its tickets. Following a data breach affecting 1.5m UK customers in 2018, Ticketmaster settled out of court in relation to a 40,000-strong group claim. However, the £1.25m penalty notice issued by the ICO did not confer compensation to the affected individuals, nor was it binding by the court. In any event, given the seriousness of the breach, in which personal and banking information was stolen and misused, resulting in over 60,000 bank cards being fraudulently used, such a small fine would have had little effect as a deterrent. With global revenues of over $9 billion, it is evident that large companies like Ticketmaster are able to flout the rules with limited financial impact. With little meaningful regulatory or court enforcement against the firm, Ticketmaster continues to operate with impunity, safe in the knowledge that its ballooning profits will exceed any financial penalties imposed for any wrongdoing it carries out. There are clouds on the company’s horizon, however, with US Senators earlier this year calling on the Justice Department to investigate what they called “anticompetitive conduct” by Ticketmaster in relation to its sales. Their call to arms followed a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February, which had convened to investigate the lack of competition in the ticketing industry and what they saw as the unfair dominance of Ticketmaster in the sector. The Senate inquiry had been prompted in part by the well-publicized fiasco surrounding ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s upcoming five-month tour. Ticketmaster’s website crashed during the sales process, stranding customers in line for “presale” tickets for hours, and eventually leading to the cancellation of the public sale. Instead, the only tickets available for purchase were listed on resale sites at sky-high prices, despite Ticketmaster’s promises to weed out scalpers, bots and resale firms from its original sales process.  A class action lawsuit duly followed the debacle, as well as reports that the Justice Department had already opened an antitrust investigation into the firm. Politicians were quick to echo the concerns of affected customers, while Tennessee’s attorney general announced a consumer protection investigation into the company after being deluged with complaints from residents of the state. Should the claims of antitrust practices be confirmed by the Justice Department, there is a high likelihood that legal teams in the UK would then explore a potential claim against the company via the CAT. This would be a lengthy, expensive and high-risk process, with any cases brought via such route needing third-party funding in order to see their way to fruition. While group actions such as the Canadian lawsuit currently facing Ticketmaster can be complex processes to negotiate, court-awarded compensation is a far more effective tool in curbing corporate malpractice when compared with the modest fines which regulators can levy. If UK law firms are to follow the lead of their North American counterparts, Ticketmaster may finally pay the price for price-gouging.

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Op-Ed Ties California Litigation Costs to Rising Cost of Living

A commentary published this week argues that California's litigation environment functions as an unofficial tax on businesses and consumers, adding to the state's cost of living at a moment when affordability dominates its politics.

As reported by California Globe, the piece by John Allard, a former mayor of Roseville with more than two decades as a small business owner, sets national tort costs at $529 billion in 2022, equivalent to 2.1% of GDP, and cites projections that the figure could exceed $900 billion by 2030. Within California, the author points to 199 nuclear verdicts between 2013 and 2022 totalling more than $9 billion.

Much of the argument focuses on state-specific mechanisms. Allard highlights the Private Attorneys General Act, noting that claims routed through the state review process resolve 52% faster while workers receive 67% less compensation than in court-filed claims, and describes Proposition 65 as having produced an industry of citizen enforcers, with settlements rising from $26 million across 890 settlements in 2022 to more than $101 million across over 1,300 settlements more recently. The commentary also flags the Gilead "duty to innovate" case as an example of novel liability theories reaching the state's highest court.

Third-party litigation funding appears only in passing, referenced in connection with Georgia's 2025 reforms rather than through California-specific data. That absence is itself notable: the state has no funding disclosure or registration statute, and the op-ed offers no estimate of funded case volume within its cost figures.

The piece is advocacy rather than analysis, and its figures come from tort reform sources whose methodology has been contested. It nonetheless illustrates how the cost-of-living frame is being applied to litigation policy in the largest state yet to legislate on funding, and where a disclosure debate has so far failed to gain traction.

Commercial

Novarex Capital Partners Closes Initial £5 Million Funding Round

London-based Novarex Capital Partners has completed an initial £5 million funding round, with a second round already underway as part of a broader capital programme.

According to ACCESS Newswire, the firm describes itself as a specialist introduction platform focused on private credit, litigation finance and structured capital, identifying opportunities for sophisticated investors seeking access to private markets. The proceeds of the initial round support the working capital requirements of an SRA-regulated law firm engaged in the preparation of eligible claims, operating in accordance with SRA standards and maintaining professional indemnity insurance.

The company said each stage of funding is designed to align with operational requirements while adhering to relevant regulatory frameworks. A second round is advancing, with a further round planned.

The structure reflects a financing model that has become increasingly common in the UK claims market, where capital is deployed against a law firm's working capital needs during claim preparation rather than committed to individual matters. That approach places the funder's exposure at the firm level, tied to the pace at which eligible claims are built and progressed, and depends heavily on the quality of the underlying claim pipeline and the discipline of the regulated firm carrying out the work.

The raise is modest by the standards of the institutional funds that have dominated recent fundraising headlines, but it sits in a segment of the UK market that has drawn scrutiny following a series of failures among smaller funders and claims businesses over the past year. Whether Novarex's staged capital programme reaches its later rounds will offer some indication of investor appetite for law firm working capital exposure at a moment when that risk is under closer examination.

Commercial

Auto Injury Claim Costs Outpaced Medical Inflation for Five Straight Years, Study Finds

Average payments on U.S. auto bodily injury claims rose at more than double the rate of medical care inflation between 2017 and 2022, according to a new Insurance Research Council study drawn from one of the largest claims datasets assembled for the line.

As reported by Insurance Business, the IRC analysed more than 7.4 million auto injury claims closed with payment over the five-year window, pooled from nine insurers representing roughly 43% of the U.S. private passenger auto market. Average bodily injury claim payments climbed from approximately $14,000 in 2017 to more than $20,000 in 2022, an annualised increase of 7.8% that accelerated markedly after 2020.

The study points to attorney involvement as a central variable. Legal representation among claimants rose from 40% in 2017 to nearly 50% by 2022, with bodily injury claimants showing the sharpest movement at 11 percentage points, while litigation rates nearly doubled from 10% to 18%. Medical bills increasingly functioned as a multiplier rather than a fixed cost: for each dollar of medical expense, total settlement value rose from $1.80 in 2017 to $2.30 by 2022.

The outcomes data complicates the picture for claimants. Represented claimants saw median closure times of 440 days against under 220 days for unrepresented claimants, and after accounting for medical costs and legal fees, netted $1.40 per dollar of medical bills compared with $1.80 for those without representation. IRC's Patrick Schmid tied the trend to settlement pressures and their downstream effect on auto insurance affordability.

The findings arrive as insurers and trade groups press state and federal lawmakers on third-party litigation funding disclosure, and the report's framing of structural cost drivers is likely to feature in that argument. The dataset's scale gives the numbers unusual weight in a debate that has often turned on contested estimates.