WHATEVER YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE PLAIN- tiffs bar, you have to admire its resourcefulness. In recent months, plaintiffs lawyers have devised new types of class action lawsuits that are catching companies off guard.

These aren’t your father’s class actions. They involve cutting-edge technology. And they reflect the ever-growing importance of e-commerce, which increased by 20 percent in 2015 and is expected to double by 2019.

Here’s one example: Dozens of companies, from The Home Depot Inc. to the National Basketball Association Inc., have been accused of not making their websites accessible to blind or deaf users. The U.S. Department of Justice could stem the tide of lawsuits by clarifying what companies need to do, but the agency recently announced that it wouldn’t offer guidance until 2018.

Biometric data such as facial scans and fin-
gerprints have also become fodder for class
actions. The second half of 2015 brought a rash
of lawsuits alleging mishandling of this pow-
erful data, including several cases relating to
Facebook Inc.’s use of facial recognition soft-
ware. These suits will likely increase as more
states enact legislation to regulate the rapidly
growing biometrics industry, which was worth
an estimated $7 billion in 2014 and could be
worth $44 billion by 2020, according to the
research firm Radiant Insights.

Plaintiffs lawyers are scrutinizing electronic payments as well. In recent months, there has been a wave of class actions alleging unauthorized deductions from bank accounts. Because of the way the statute at issue is written, a single defendant can face multiple class actions, each purporting to represent plaintiffs in a different geographic region. “It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” says Donald Maurice, name partner at Maurice Wutscher, a financial services law firm.