A bill that would have altered long-standing court procedures for discovery in California lawsuits was passed by the Senate but failed in the Assembly earlier this month, even with intense lobbying by trial lawyer advocacy groups.
Most bills are continually negotiated with amendments, but that didn’t happen with the lawyers and other advocates who backed SB 1149, Jaime Huff, Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC) vice president and counsel, public policy, told the Northern California Record.
“We have well-established, well-functioning discovery processes in California,” Huff said. “There is no need to blow those up when we have regulatory bodies that function for public safety.”
Bill proponents maintained that SB 1149 was necessary to inform the public about product safety and hazards to the environment. Opponents said the bill lacked specifics and would clog the court system, an unnecessary disruption given the slate of regulations now in place.
“Everyone's in the same boat of wanting to build, manufacture, and produce the safest products possible and keep the public safe,” Huff said.
That the SB 1149 proponents wouldn’t consider other amendments to it has raised questions about what the intent was.
Public Justice, a joint sponsor of the bill, did not reply to the Record’s request for comment.
Consumer Attorneys of California (CAOC), which advocates on behalf of trial lawyers, did not answer questions about SB 1149 amendments but provided the Record with a statement by email.
“The legislature’s failure to pass SB 1149 puts consumers and their families in harm’s way,” Craig M. Peters, CAOC president said. “The current system will continue giving corporations a blank check to hide the truth about dangerous product defects and environmental hazards; Californians will continue to suffer. CAOC is committed to bringing deadly corporate secrets into the light and will always lead the fight to protect consumers.”
The bill language was so broad and all-encompassing that it did not provide equal protection to the defendants in these cases, Huff said.
“There were many unintended consequences – it was literally taking a sledgehammer to kill an ant,” she said.
And it was too much to persuade lawmakers, many of whom are also attorneys.
“When we are talking about the discovery phase, we're talking about the beginning of a trial. Nothing has been proven – everything at that stage is alleged,” Huff said. “So why would we put a business in a situation where they are going to lose real financial equity, their ability to move forward, when it hasn't even been proven that a defective product and/or environmental hazard even exists?”
Huff added that SB 1149 didn’t make clear what would constitute an environmental hazard.
“It’s so broad it’s not workable,” Huff said. “Because if you don’t have a definition for what that is, then it could be anything a creative plaintiff attorney says it is.”
But it also would have likely amounted to more money for the plaintiffs’ attorneys bringing the lawsuits.
“At the end of the day, it’s a due process issue,” Huff said.