FRANCE Law and Practice Contributed by: Grégoire Bertrou and Delphine Grimond, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP
associations’ financial burden while preserving pro- cedural efficiency. The most distinctive feature of the French system appears to lie in its provision for a dedicated public fund to finance class actions. This fund is intended to be financed by the civil fine introduced in Article 1254 of the Civil Code (see Section 5). While this initiative represents a novel and potentially powerful tool for promoting access to justice, its operational details remain unclear. To date, the criteria for selecting eligi- ble recipients and the conditions under which financial assistance will be granted have not been defined. It therefore remains to be seen whether this fund will prove effective in practice and whether it can serve as a credible complement (or even an alternative) to private litigation funding mechanisms. 3.10 Disclosure and Privilege French procedure lacks US-style discovery. Associa- tions largely bear the evidentiary burden, with judg- es empowered under Article 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure to request specific documents when their existence is known. To help associations gather evidence, publicity meas- ures for the procedures have been implemented. Pub- licity measures are designed to inform potential claim- ants. As under the Hamon Law, judges determine the publicity measures necessary to inform all individuals who may be entitled to compensation. Furthermore, a public national register of class actions is now maintained by the Ministry of Justice. This reg- ister tracks ongoing proceedings, promotes transpar- ency, and enables the public to monitor the progress and outcomes of representative actions. Claimant associations (qualified entities) are under a legal obligation to inform the public of: • the existence of the action; • its procedural progress; and • the final outcome, whether a judgment or a settle- ment.
This transparency requirement must also be fulfilled through publication on the association’s own website. It is enforceable by the judge, who may order addition- al measures to ensure public awareness. These obli- gations supplement the mandatory publicity measures already required by court orders during the course of proceedings. Professional secrecy and trade secret protections remain robust under French and EU law; broader comparative discussion appears in the trends section. 3.11 Remedies Available Remedies and Increased Flexibility The unified regime introduced by the 2025 reform pro- vides a broad spectrum of remedies tailored to the objectives of the class action. These include: • injunctive relief, allowing courts to order the cessa- tion of unlawful conduct without requiring proof of harm or fault; • compensation, covering all types of harm, “regard- less of their nature” – including economic, moral, and physical damage – irrespective of the legal sector concerned; and • restitution in kind, where appropriate, allowing the court to order specific performance or return of unlawfully obtained assets, excluding cases involv- ing bodily injury. This comprehensive remedial framework marks a deci- sive departure from the former, fragmented approach, in which each legal domain imposed its own limits on the types of damage that could be compensated (for instance, only economic loss in consumer law, or bodily injury in public health matters). The new regime removes such sector-based restrictions in favour of a more coherent and generous model, enabling greater access to justice and facilitating more meaningful redress for group harms. Moreover, the range of compensable harm has been significantly expanded. In principle, all types of dam- age may now give rise to compensation, including: • economic loss, such as overpricing, defective goods, or lost income (prior to the reform, eco- nomic losses, particularly consequential losses like
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