The Italian class action: a powerful tool that few people know

We live in an age in which the bargaining and economic power of large corporations vastly exceeds that of the individual citizen. The law has tried to build tools to rebalance that relationship. One of them has existed in Italy since 2021 — yet almost nobody knows it, and it is not what most people think.

When people speak of class actions, the collective imagination almost always runs to the American model: a lawsuit that automatically involves an entire category of injured parties, with lawyers collecting a monster award distributed far and wide. In Italy it works differently, and understanding why is the first step to understanding the tool — and how much it really protects us.

How it works

Since 19 May 2021 the Italian class action has been governed by Articles 840-bis et seq. of the Code of Civil Procedure (a reform introduced by Law no. 31/2019). Anyone may sue — a natural person, a business, or a non-profit association entered in a special register kept by the Ministry of Justice — to establish the liability of a company or of a public-service operator and obtain damages or restitution, or to have an unlawful practice stopped (collective injunction). Proceedings take place before the specialised business courts and pass through two distinct phases: first the court rules on admissibility, then it decides the merits. Those who consider themselves harmed can join online — without needing their own lawyer — through the Ministry of Justice’s online portal, where all pending actions are published, within two time windows: after the admissibility ruling and after the judgment establishing liability.

Here lies the crucial difference from the American model: the Italian system is “opt-in”, not “opt-out”. Nobody is automatically part of the class — you must actively join. That is why, even when an action succeeds, the number of people who actually collect compensation often remains limited.

The potential

Compared with the past, the field has widened considerably: no longer only consumer relationships, but any situation in which several parties share the same right infringed by a business — including business-to-business relationships. It is a tool designed precisely for “serial” damage: bank charges applied to thousands of account holders, recurring clauses in standard contracts, widespread commercial practices. Cases in which the individual loss is too small to justify suing alone, but becomes significant when added to everyone else’s — exactly the cases in which, individually, the citizen never had a voice.

A tool for businesses too

It would be a mistake to read the class action only as the consumer’s weapon against business. Serial litigation is a cost and a source of uncertainty for defendants as well. Think of a recurring interpretative question — the meaning of a standard contractual clause, or the scope of an unclear provision — generating dozens or hundreds of nearly identical cases between the same types of parties: I have personally handled matters in which a single interpretative doubt fed an entire stream of parallel proceedings, with the concrete risk of divergent outcomes. Situations in which, as the saying goes, the main beneficiaries are the lawyers. Concentrating the dispute in a single forum reduces costs, avoids the multiplication of claims and — above all — produces a single, stable answer on the disputed point. This is the issue, decisive for everyone, of legal certainty: predictability of risks and costs is as valuable to citizens as it is to businesses, which build their decisions upon it.

Why it is used so little

The numbers speak plainly: in four years, the actions registered on the Ministry’s portal have remained below one hundred across the whole of Italy — growing, but still minimal. The reasons are several: the rules apply only to conduct occurring after May 2021, which excludes most of the serial litigation already accrued; whoever brings an action that is declared inadmissible risks paying the procedural and publicity costs, and those who join must still contribute to an expense fund — a non-trivial disincentive where the per-capita loss is modest; finally, the competent courts, designed for corporate and competition matters, find themselves handling subjects far from their specialisation, with a workload that slows everything down.

How it could be revived

Among practitioners several proposals circulate: selectively extending a simpler or automatic joining mechanism for small-value claims; genuinely specialising the judges assigned to these cases; reducing joining costs for small claimants; investing in awareness of a tool currently entrusted to a portal that very few people know. These are hypotheses, not settled solutions — but they show where the game is played, and how far there is still to go before an instrument born to rebalance power relations stops being little more than a name on paper.

When it may matter to an individual or a small business

Certainly not for an isolated dispute: there, individual remedies remain more effective. It is worth considering when your case is, in all likelihood, one among many identical ones — a standard contractual clause, a commercial practice repeated on a large scale, a charge applied uniformly to an entire category of customers. In those cases, joining forces can make worthwhile what alone would never have been. A good starting point, for anyone suspecting they are in such a situation, is precisely to consult the Ministry’s portal: one search is enough to see whether an action concerning the facts that affect you has already been filed.

A tool that exists, in theory, to balance the economic strength of those who contract with millions of people against the weakness of those who contract alone. The question, then, is whether Italy’s instruments of collective protection — not only the judicial ones — are truly keeping pace with the power they are meant to counterbalance, or whether they too often remain little more than a name on paper.