Our civil justice system rests on a simple premise: Every claim represents a real person, with a real injury, who chose to seek redress. When that premise fails, everyone pays, beginning with the people who were actually hurt.
For decades, the fight over lawsuit abuse has centered on what happens once a case is underway: damage caps, jury anchoring, junk science in the courtroom. Those fights matter. They share a blind spot. Almost nothing governs how mass lawsuits come to exist in the first place — who recruits the clients, whether those clients understood what they signed, and whether anyone checked that a claim was real before it was filed.
Val Verde, California, shows what happens when that gap is left open.
Since 2022, a rare underground chemical reaction at the Chiquita Canyon landfill has sent odors into the nearby town. The landfill has since closed to new waste. The response has proceeded under state and federal oversight. The operator paid roughly $25 million to help neighbors with relocation, utility bills, home hardening, and air filters. None of that slowed the rush to sue.
Residents deserved honest representation. According to a Los Angeles Times investigation, many got something else. The newspaper reported that one firm paid a Las Vegas actor to recruit outside the town’s only market, though California has long outlawed paying non-lawyers to round up clients. Residents described receiving cash, gift cards, and, in one case, a cellphone for signing what they were told was a “petition.” One such “petition,” captured on video, appears to have been a fee agreement giving the firm at least 40% of any recovery. In text messages reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, a firm partner told the recruiter: “Get ’em for me … all of them.”
The firm denies wrongdoing. The landfill’s lawyers now argue in court that the litigation may be tainted by fraud. Whether damages are owed is a question for the courts. Answering it fairly depends on honest claims. When the recruitment process is manipulated, no one — not the judge, the company, nor the residents themselves — can easily tell a sincere complaint from a manufactured one.
What happened in Val Verde is neither new nor confined to California. For two decades, courts across the country have confronted lawsuits assembled first and examined later.
In 2005, a federal judge in Texas reviewing some 10,000 silica claims found that the diagnoses “were about litigation rather than health care.” Twelve doctors had diagnosed more than 9,000 of those plaintiffs. One of them, Dr. George Martindale, was listed as having diagnosed 3,617, or 75 per day over 48 days. Under oath, he withdrew every one of them. He testified he had not examined the patients and did not know the criteria for the disease. Judge Janis Graham Jack wrote that the diagnoses were “manufactured for money.”
After hurricanes battered Louisiana, a federal court suspended a Texas firm after state regulators found 856 letters telling insurers the firm represented homeowners it did not represent. Some of those homeowners learned they had a lawyer when the insurance company stopped talking to them. The methods change with each new case. The incentive to sign up plaintiffs first and ask questions later does not.
Much of this is already illegal. Yet the Val Verde recruiter told the outlet no one at the firm ever said his work broke the law. A rule rarely enforced deters no one, and Americans pay the price. One economic analysis estimates that the inflation effect of excessive tort costs alone adds $2,437 a year to the average household’s bills through higher prices for insurance, medicine, and everyday services.
Courts are catching up, slowly. Rule 16.1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, effective December 2025, invites judges overseeing mass litigation to demand early proof that claims are real. It stops short of requiring it. States and Congress should finish the job.
AMERICA DOESN’T HAVE AN ENERGY SHORTAGE. WE HAVE A LAWSUIT PROBLEM
Before anyone is added to a mass lawsuit, they should receive a plain-language disclosure stating that they are joining a lawsuit and how their lawyers will be compensated. Firms should have to disclose the recruiters and marketers they pay — where such practices are not already illegal — and the firm itself, not just the hired hand, should answer for illegal solicitation. Claims should be vetted early, with basic proof of exposure and injury required within months, not years. And the outside investors who often bankroll mass litigation should also be disclosed.
As a prosecutor and attorney general, I learned that the most damaging fraud is the kind that happens before anyone thinks to look. None of these reforms would keep a single injured person out of court. They would ensure the people in court chose to be there, and that real victims are not crowded out by those recruited under false pretenses. Protecting those victims and protecting honest businesses are the same work.
Curtis Hill served as Indiana’s attorney general from 2017 to 2021.