If you run a company that holds consumer data — and today, that is virtually every company — the name Shamis & Gentile, P.A. should be on your radar. This Miami-based class action law firm has quietly become one of the most prolific firms handling data breach and consumer privacy class action lawsuits in the United States, and its pace shows no signs of slowing.
Led by founding and managing partner Andrew Shamis, Esq., the firm has recovered over $1.6 billion for clients across more than 200 litigated cases. That figure is not a marketing statistic — it is a signal to compliance officers, GCs, and privacy teams that Shamis & Gentile has built the infrastructure, the legal strategy, and the plaintiff pipeline to prosecute data breach class actions at national scale and now is the time to get compliant and protect against expensive privacy lawsuits.
Who Is Shamis & Gentile, P.A.?
Shamis & Gentile, P.A. is a class action and mass torts law firm headquartered in Miami, Florida. Founded and led by Andrew Shamis, Esq., the firm has built its national reputation almost entirely on consumer protection class action litigation — with a particular emphasis on data breaches, TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) violations, personal injury, and mass arbitration.
Andrew Shamis is admitted to practice in eight states — Florida, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, and Washington — and holds federal court admissions in more than two dozen U.S. District Courts spanning every major litigation hub in the country. This geographic reach is not incidental. It is the foundation of a strategy that allows the firm to file and pursue class actions in the most favorable jurisdictions for plaintiffs, regardless of where the defendant company is headquartered.
Shamis has personally litigated over 10,000 civil cases and has been routinely appointed as class counsel by federal judges. The firm reports having recovered over $250 million for consumers through Shamis’s individual work, with the firm’s total recovery exceeding $1.6 billion across all matters.
The Core Strategy: Volume, Speed, and Nationwide Reach
Shamis & Gentile does not specialize in a single niche of privacy law. Instead, the firm has built a diversified class action practice that pursues claims wherever consumer data has been exposed or misused. Its practice areas span:
-
Data breach litigation is the firm’s most visible and fastest-growing area. The firm maintains a live database of active data breach investigations on its website, updated weekly. In a single week in April 2026, the firm was actively investigating breaches involving Nobu Restaurant Group, Revolution Dancewear, Aligned Orthopedic Partners, Impac Mortgage Holdings, Ameriprise Financial, Alaska Air Group Federal Credit Union, Georgia Heritage Financial Credit Union, Eyemart Express, Carlson Building Maintenance, ScrogginsGrear, Bank3, Mullinax Ford, Charles River Insurance Brokerage, Longevity Health Plan, and Phoenix Art Museum — among others. This volume illustrates the firm’s capacity to monitor the entire landscape of breach notifications and move quickly to file or investigate claims before competitors.
-
TCPA litigation represents another major arm of the practice. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which governs unsolicited calls and texts to consumers, carries statutory damages of up to $1,500 per violation, making mass TCPA claims financially significant even for relatively small businesses. Shamis & Gentile has litigated extensively in this area, using the same consumer-plaintiff pipeline it employs for data breach work.
-
Mass arbitration is an emerging and strategically important piece of the firm’s toolkit. As corporations increasingly force class action waivers into their consumer contracts, plaintiff firms have responded by filing mass arbitration demands — sometimes thousands simultaneously — that can overwhelm a company’s arbitration process and impose staggering administrative costs. Shamis & Gentile has invested specifically in this capability, listing it as a dedicated practice area.
-
Personal injury and mass torts round out the firm’s practice, allowing it to pursue claims involving defective products, pharmaceutical injuries, and other large-scale consumer harm.
The Data Breach Playbook
Shamis & Gentile’s approach to data breach litigation follows a well-established but highly refined playbook. When a company files a breach notification — whether with a state attorney general, the HHS, or directly with affected consumers — the firm monitors those notifications systematically and moves to contact potential class members quickly.
The legal theories typically involved in these cases include negligence (the company failed to implement reasonable security measures), breach of implied or express contract (users expected their data would be protected), violation of state consumer protection statutes, and, in healthcare cases, claims that implicate HIPAA’s expectation of data security even where HIPAA itself does not provide a private right of action.
The firm’s breadth of federal court admissions means it can select jurisdiction strategically — a critical advantage in class action practice where the choice of forum can significantly influence certification outcomes and settlement valuations.
What makes Shamis & Gentile’s data breach practice particularly potent is the diversity of industries it pursues. A review of the firm’s active investigations reveals targets across healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail, automotive, food and beverage, arts and culture, and aviation. No sector is treated as immune.
Why This Matters for Privacy Compliance Teams
The message for compliance professionals is direct: data breach liability is no longer a theoretical risk managed primarily through insurance. It is an active, fast-moving litigation exposure that requires real operational controls.
Shamis & Gentile is one of several firms — alongside Lynch Carpenter LLP, Pollock Cohen LLP, and Keogh Law — that have industrialized the process of identifying breached organizations, recruiting plaintiffs, and pursuing class certification. The cost of defending a class action, even one that ultimately settles for a modest amount, can easily reach seven figures when attorney fees, discovery costs, and management time are included.
The firm’s no-fee-until-we-win model removes the financial barrier for consumers to join class actions. Combined with the firm’s ability to publicize breach investigations through its website and newsletter, Shamis & Gentile can reach thousands of potential class members quickly — which in turn strengthens its negotiating position with defendants.
Risk Assessment: Who Is Most Exposed?
Based on the firm’s active investigation patterns, organizations with the following characteristics face the highest litigation risk from Shamis & Gentile and similar plaintiffs’ firms:
-
Healthcare organizations that have experienced or disclosed a breach involving patient data face heightened exposure because the sensitivity of the data elevates both the harm narrative and the damages argument. Orthopedic practices, health plans, and hospital systems appear repeatedly in the firm’s active caseload.
-
Financial services firms — including mortgage companies, insurance brokers, credit unions, and investment advisors — are consistent targets because the combination of financial and personal data in these breaches creates compelling harm narratives for juries and mediators alike.
-
Consumer-facing businesses in retail, automotive, and food service that have suffered third-party vendor breaches or ransomware incidents are increasingly finding themselves in plaintiff firms’ crosshairs, even when the breach originated with a vendor rather than the company itself. Courts have generally permitted negligent security claims to proceed even in these third-party breach scenarios.
-
Small and mid-size organizations should not assume that their size provides protection. The firm’s active investigation list in April 2026 included firms as small as a regional law firm, a single-location auto dealership, and a local credit union — illustrating that the firm’s plaintiff recruitment process is indifferent to company size.
Action Steps for Compliance and Legal Teams
If you are responsible for data privacy or information security at any organization that handles personal consumer data, treating Shamis & Gentile — and the class action ecosystem more broadly — as a concrete operational risk is now a baseline compliance obligation. Practical steps include:
-
Conduct a breach response readiness audit: Ensure your notification process, forensic investigation capacity, and consumer remediation workflows are documented and tested before an incident occurs. Plaintiffs’ firms can identify breach disclosures within hours of their public filing. Your readiness at the time of notification directly affects your litigation posture.
-
Review vendor contracts and data processing agreements: Ensure that third parties handling consumer data have appropriate security obligations, liability provisions, and insurance requirements. Shamis & Gentile’s investigations frequently involve breaches that originated with third-party service providers, and courts have held organizations liable for inadequate vendor oversight.
-
Implement continuous cookie and tracking technology auditing: While Shamis & Gentile’s core practice is traditional data breach litigation rather than pixel-based wiretapping claims, the broader privacy plaintiff bar — of which it is a prominent member — is rapidly expanding into tracking technology cases. An organization that addresses its data breach exposure while ignoring its website’s cookie and pixel practices is only partially protected.
-
Establish swift incident response protocols: Ensure your incident response plan includes a litigation hold protocol and a process for engaging outside privacy counsel within hours of breach discovery. The window between breach notification and the filing of a class action investigation can be very short.
How To Protect Against Privacy Lawsuits?
Shamis & Gentile, P.A. is not a firm that targets companies acting in bad faith. Most of the organizations it pursues are companies that experienced a data breach — often at the hands of criminal actors — and whose primary failure was insufficient preventive investment in security and privacy controls.
That is precisely why the firm’s activity matters as a compliance signal. The $1.6 billion in total recoveries represents real organizational costs that flowed directly from preventable security failures. For every settlement that Shamis & Gentile negotiates, there is a board meeting, an insurance claim, a management bandwidth loss, and a reputational impact that no settlement check can fully repair.
For privacy professionals, the firm’s prolific caseload is a useful and sobering map of where data breach exposure actually lives in 2026: in healthcare networks, in mortgage servicers, in regional credit unions, in local auto dealers, in restaurant chains, and in arts organizations. Privacy risk is not confined to big tech. It lives wherever personal data is collected, stored, or transferred — and wherever that data is insufficiently protected.
Key Takeaways
-
Shamis & Gentile, P.A. is one of the nation’s most active data breach and consumer privacy class action firms, with over $1.6 billion recovered across 200+ cases.
-
The firm monitors breach notifications across all industries and moves quickly to investigate and recruit class members.
-
Its multi-state federal court admissions allow strategic jurisdiction selection — a key advantage in class action litigation.
-
Healthcare, financial services, insurance, and consumer-facing retail are consistently represented in the firm’s active investigations.
-
Privacy compliance programs that include proactive breach response readiness, vendor oversight, and continuous tracking technology audits represent the most effective defense against class action exposure.
