Posted on 02/07/2003 7:56:36 PM PST by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO -- The politics behind reforming California’s tort laws are as convoluted as the statutes themselves, which Republicans in the state Legislature, citing attorney abuses, have sought doggedly to overhaul for the last six years.
But even with the coalitions of unusual alliances that have successfully stymied every recent noteworthy attempt at restructuring the laws that provide legal remedies for civil wrongdoing, advocates for change say this year it’s all but certain meaningful tort reform will emerge.
“I am more optimistic this year than I have in any of the years past,” said Diann H. Rogers, executive director of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. “Republicans and (some) Democrats are united in this, and they are not traditional bedfellows.”
Why such optimism after years of stinging defeats? Observers are counting on the synergy of a greater number of Republicans in the Legislature this session and reformers’ newfound support of some moderate, business-minded Democrats.
Perhaps more than anything else, though, Jeffrey R. Sievers of the Civil Justice Assn. of California, said media attention from the rash of frivolous lawsuits filed in the past year under California’s Unfair Competition Act, UCA, is fueling calls for reform.
In those cases, Sievers said, a handful of unscrupulous attorneys used the 70-year-old law, which allows lawyers to sue on behalf of the public and act themselves as the plaintiff even if they were not harmed by the alleged wrongdoing, to line their pocketbooks with cash.
The Beverly Hills-based Trevor Law Group, for example, has filed lawsuits -- under the UCA, outlined in Business and Professions Code 17200 -- against nearly 2,000 Southland auto-body repair shops for such things as failing to fill out the proper paperwork and not signing work-orders.
In another instance, the Brar & Gamulin law firm of Long Beach filed suit against dozens of Southern California nail salons for using the same bottle of nail polish on more than one customer.
Attorneys’ methods of combing state agency Internet sites for minor infractions and then suing is a mockery of the law, said state Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Oceanside.
“You probably have done nothing illegal,” Morrow told lawyers from the Trevor firm at a recent fact-finding hearing of the state Assembly and Senate Judiciary Committees. “The only reason why you are doing this, however, is because you can do it, and make a hell of a lot of money.”
Despite years-long public outcry over such frivolous-type lawsuits, the state Legislature has been slow in addressing the problem. Ask advocates for reform why, and they blame the politically powerful lobbyists who represent trial lawyers, also known as consumers’ attorneys.
“The trial lawyers are very clever and they’re having a field day making a lot of money off these types of lawsuits. Obviously they don’t want to make any changes to the law,” said Gretchen Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the American Tort Reform Foundation, based in Washington, DC.
State Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the joint Assembly and Senate Judiciary Committee that “a few bad actors” are using the law to sue small and minority-owned businesses and then exact hefty settlements from business owners who say they cannot afford to defend themselves in court.
But other than urging the State Bar to investigate the Trevor firm and others, state lawmakers say privately they don’t expect Lockyer, a former Democratic state legislator, to jump into the legal tussle given his plans to run for governor in 2006, for which, they say, he will seek the financial support of the trial attorneys’ lobby.
Even in light of what critics call flagrant abuse of the law, Lockyer told lawmakers: “We need a surgeon's scalpel and not a lumberjack's ax” to make the frivolous-type actions either impossible or at least unprofitable.
The Santa Monica-based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights agrees.
Like others against diminishing the scope of the watershed law, the Foundation’s consumer advocate, Carmen Balber, points to a range of successful actions filed under the UCA for such unfair business practices as tobacco ads targeted at minors and substandard care at some of the state’s nursing homes.
“The UCA is one of the few laws that have protected consumers from nefarious business practices,” Balber said. “The fact that a few bad lawyers have been taking advantage of business owners does not mean we should breakdown the protection.”
That argument doesn’t sit well with Fred L. Main, senior vice president and general counsel of the California Chamber of Commerce.
His organization is throwing its political muscle behind legislation that he said will help curb the sort of “financial shakedowns” that, in addition to auto-body shops and nail salons, have been experienced by dozens of San Gabriel Valley Chinese food restaurants and real estate brokers.
The most sweeping of the proposals is one introduced by state Assemblyman Bob Pacheco, R-Industry, that would require plaintiffs in representative lawsuits to have been personally harmed by the alleged wrongdoing.
But with Democrats and Republicans holding competing ideas of what the Unfair Competition Law ought to be, and with a Democratic majority in both houses of the Legislature, Pacheco doesn’t expect his bill to get far.
“There will probably be pieces of my bill that the Democrats will like and they will take them out and put them into a Democrat bill,” Pacheco said. “They don’t want a Republican to be out front on an issue that has generated so much media attention.”
The vehicle for reform that will likely to emerge this session, Pacheco said, is a bill that is still very much a work-in-progress by Democratic state Assemblyman Lou Correa of Anaheim, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Business and Professions.
Why Correa? According to observers, many of the auto-body shops targeted by the Trevor Law Group are in his Orange County Assembly district, which Correa later hopes to represent as a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, after he is termed-out of the state Assembly in 2004.
“Assemblyman Correa has got to show that he’s been responsive to the community that he wants to serve at the county level,” said Pacheco, an attorney.
Assemblyman Tom Harmon, R-Huntington Beach, calls the chances of Section 17200 reforms emerging this year “excellent,” citing three bills, in addition to Pacheco’s, already introduced.
The question, he said, in what form is it going to be.
“Everyone (in the Legislature) knows that all these frivolous lawsuits amount to is legal extortion, and everyone knows it needs to be stopped,” Harmon said, adding that significant reform is long overdue.
As a member of the state Assembly in 1997, state Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Norwalk, pushed through legislation that amended the UCA and California’s Fair Packaging and Labeling Act to quash the flurry of lawsuits against computer software manufacturers.
In that case, a group of consumers’ attorneys claimed the software products’ packaging was too large relative to the product enclosed -- thus, in violation of the state’s fair competition statutes.
As for the recent lawsuits against auto-body shops and nail salons, Escutia, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said the type of technical violations that the Trevor group, for example, are suing for are not worthy of the type of civil action the firm has taken.
“There is a significant basis to believe that these lawsuits are being brought in order to obtain quick settlements from the mass number of defendants who are pressured to ‘pay now or pay more late,’” she said in a statement.
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