Californians are exposed to more legal services commercials on television than to restaurants and furniture store promotions, according to a new study.
The ATRA Legal Services Advertising Spending report found that an estimated $34 million was spent to broadcast some 250,000 legal services ads in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento in the first half of 2022.
“California has long been a haven for entrepreneurial trial lawyers and abusive litigation targeting a variety of industries,” said Tiger Joyce, president of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). “The high rate of local legal services TV ads in California is not surprising given the large amount of litigation in the state.”
The advertisements include allegations of injuries caused by consumer products, pharmaceutical drugs, and medical devices and the top targets are Roundup weed killer, talcum powder, and the herbicide paraquat.
“The problem with these ads is that they can often be misleading and purport claims that are not based in sound science, unnecessarily causing fear among consumers while simultaneously recruiting those consumers as clients to create even more litigation,” Joyce told the Southern California Record. “Further, these ad campaigns making unverified claims about specific consumer products can shift the public’s perceptions on the safety of those products, making it difficult for a defendant to overcome those perceptions once a trial begins.”
Like in Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, California lawmakers can introduce laws that curb misleading ads and ensure that false claims are not presented as government alerts.
“California judges also have a propensity to adopt novel theories of liability while the legislature enacts liability-expanding legislation year after year,” Joyce said. “Judges allow junk science in their courtrooms to support plaintiffs’ baseless claims, particularly in talc and Roundup litigation.”
ATRA has ranked California on its annual Judicial Hellholes list for the past 16 years.
“Trial lawyers view California as their laboratory to test new theories of liability – if they gain traction in California, they can then export those theories across the country,” Joyce added. “Such long, drawn-out litigation is a burden on the judicial system overall and increases the costs of doing business. In the end, the result looks like higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.”
The study further found that the Roundup weed killer has been the top target of mass tort product liability litigation TV ads since 2015 with an estimated $131 million spent on more than 625,000 ads airing nationally and locally across the country.
Second only to Roundup litigation ads, are ads soliciting claims alleging a link between the use of talcum powder and incidences of cancer. An estimated $109 million has been spent on more than 370,000 talc litigation ads nationwide since 2015