We’ve all seen the television ads with spooky music, doctors and pills, and a final appeal to call a 1-800 number. And anyone who has driven down a freeway has seen a dozen billboards for lawyers with catchy slogans and promises of big payouts. It’s an odd way to choose something as serious as legal representation. It’s good to inform people when they may have been victims without realizing it. It’s not good to scare people with biased information that causes them to doubt legitimate medicine and responsible corporations.
Nevertheless, the widespread cultural acceptance of over-the-top lawyer advertising reflects a deeper dynamic: that America’s trial lawyers have built a lucrative industry by turning allegations against employers into high-dollar litigation. Such lawsuits can give people who have genuinely been harmed an important path to justice. But too often, misaligned incentives have caused lawyers to abuse the system to turn mass advertising into quick payouts. In those instances, who holds them accountable?
The problem is larger than just a few dubious lawsuits. The mechanics of mass litigation can reward speed and scale, with attorneys incentivized to assemble as many claims as possible rather than looking for the best or most factually solid claims. A rush to assemble clients for a “mass action” rather than a class action encourages quantity over quality, which can push erroneous or doubtful claims into a case.
Yet once they have been assembled, the sheer volume of these claims makes individual scrutiny difficult and amps pressure on defendants to simply cut bait and settle. That leverage drives larger contingency fees for law firms, reinforcing the incentive to build big cases instead of good ones.
That model harms more than the businesses being sued. When non-meritorious claims flood the system, it can delay valid claims as courts must sift and winnow to find deserving plaintiffs. Defendants incur enormous costs long before trial, which ultimately reach Americans through higher prices and insurance premiums. And too often, the easy thing to do is just pay everyone a little bit, granting weak and strong claims the same outcome just to get it over with.
This is a problem the legal system has grappled with for decades.
One prominent example was the Fen-Phen litigation, which arose after the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) requested the 1997 withdrawal of the weight-loss drugs fenfluramine (Pondimin) and dexfenfluramine (Redux) following evidence associating them with heart-valve abnormalities and other cardiopulmonary injuries. The litigation was settled in 1999 for $3.75 billion. By 2004, the settlement trust had audited 4,600 claims and reportedly found nearly two-thirds were insufficient. The audit found that medical personnel had screened supposed victims in venues such as law offices and hotel rooms, and even more troubling, that some diagnosing physicians reportedly received contingency-based compensation with escalating payments linked to more aggravated findings.
In the wake of these abuses, the court and trust adopted meaningful safeguards within the Fen-Phen settlement. But they did not produce broader reforms governing future mass-tort litigation, leaving the door open for future misconduct. The allegations surrounding California’s Chiquita Canyon landfill suggest that more than two decades later, that fundamental weakness remains.
Since 2022, a heat-producing reaction deep within an inactive portion of the landfill has raised concerns in surrounding communities about odors and emissions. The EPA says its exact cause remains unknown and confirms that the operator is financing and carrying out regulator-directed mitigation. Yet local trial attorneys have pressed forward with litigation seeking to assign liability for an event that experts still do not fully understand.
The methods reportedly used to assemble some of those claims have raised concern and cast a shadow over the case. The Los Angeles Times reported allegations that a nonlawyer actor was paid to solicit residents, a practice prohibited by California law. Some residents said they believed they were signing petitions. Others said lawsuits were filed in their names without their authorization. Text messages reportedly included a law-firm partner instructing a recruiter to “Packem Rackem Stackem.”
The firm denied improper solicitation and attributed the accusations to a competitor. But that denial did little to resolve questions about its client roster after one of its attorneys told a federal judge that the firm had transferred about 500 clients and lost contact with roughly 500 more as it prepared to leave the litigation. These allegations cast serious doubt on the integrity of the cases the firm assembled and taint a litigation campaign whose apparent strength rests in significant part on the number of people it claims to represent.
These cases expose the same weakness: scrutiny often begins only after questionable claims have multiplied and defendants have already spent heavily. By then, legitimate plaintiffs and the public have also paid a price. Policymakers should look at reforms that ensure claims in a “mass action” context are scrutinized individually. And courts should be vigilant to ensure that plaintiffs authorized lawsuits filed in their names and possess supporting evidence before those claims can be aggregated or used to drive settlement negotiations. States must enforce solicitation rules promptly, and judges should impose sanctions proportionate to the costs of misconduct. Penalties that arrive years later and represent a fraction of the harm will not deter a volume-driven business model.
Instituting such safeguards would strengthen legitimate claims by directing court resources toward people who can demonstrate real injuries. They would also help protect the public from costs created by cases that should never have been filed. Lawyers provide essential representation to people who have been wronged, but that responsibility makes accountability more important, not less. Those who profit from invoking the courts should be held to standards as exacting as those they seek to impose.