The Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC) has released a list of Triple Threat bills pending before the state Legislature, an effort to make people aware of bills that will expand opportunities for frivolous litigation while increasing costs for consumers.
"Triple threat bills, if passed, will absolutely hamper economic recovery,” Kyla Christoffersen Powell, CJAC president and CEO, told the Northern California Record by email. “Many of these bills will make it easier to sue by creating new ways for plaintiffs’ lawyers to come after businesses with abusive litigation.”
To determine the Triple Threat threshold, CJAC considered whether a bill:
“1. Attracts unwarranted or abusive litigation
2. Leads to excessive attorneys’ fees
3. Drives up costs for businesses, consumers and the state”
A CJAC news release states the Triple Threat bills include:
"AB 814 (Levine): New PRA [Private Right of Action] and expands attorneys’ fees. Creates overly broad restrictions on the use of data collected for contact tracing and creates new civil action and attorney’s fees entitlement.
SB 447 (Laird): New way to collect unlimited damages and more attorneys’ fees. For the first time in California history, allows unlimited pain and suffering damages to be awarded in survivor actions, on top of punitive and economic damages.
SB 606 (Gonzalez, Lena): Expands PRA and excessive penalties. Establishes a rebuttable presumption of retaliation for any adverse employment action that takes place within 90 days of a COVID test and safety reports and establishes new civil penalties.”
Committee hearings on these and other bills are currently underway.
“This is the last thing California’s businesses need as they try to recover from the challenges of the pandemic,” Powell told the Record. “The primary persons to benefit from these bills will be plaintiffs’ attorneys who will be able to collect more fees.”
SB 606, which would increase Department of Industrial Relations administrative costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, is currently before the Senate Appropriations Committee, according to the Senate Analyses, and is related to another rebuttable presumption statute, AB 685, which became law last year.
“The California Legislature should instead be advancing legislative proposals that will promote economic recovery, such as AB 247, which will provide protections for safety-compliant small businesses and nonprofits from lawsuits alleging COVID exposure,” Powell said. “To date, AB 247 has been denied hearing in Assembly Judiciary Committee.”