A new federal lawsuit alleges the Golden State Warriors are liable for allowing advertising that exposed the plaintiff to a business opportunity that ultimately went bankrupt.
The complaint was filed last month in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
It would be unusual for such litigation to go beyond the initial filings, Baird D. Fogel, a partner with Eversheds Sutherland, told the Northern California Record.
“Most of these lawsuits are very frivolous, they’re attention-grabbing,” Fogel said. “There may be a little bit of a public image hit, initially, but they tend to dissipate because the lawsuits themselves tend to not go anywhere.”
If someone who was at an auto-racing event, for example, got a DUI on the way home and tried to sue the event’s sponsor for having an alcoholic beverage advertising sign up at the arena, it’s unlikely to gain ground, Fogel said.
“Think of all the things that are hanging in an arena or that appear at a football stadium; think of all the banners on, for instance, Google and Facebook for people that advertise with them – if you were able to somehow hold Facebook and Google and the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors of the world liable for the actions of all of their advertising partners, you would shut the media industry down overnight,” Fogel said. “You would completely ruin that entire model.”
There’s also the question of whether a marketing partnership constitutes an endorsement.
“These companies, these teams, they vet their partners very carefully at the outset,” Fogel said. “But they can't control the actions of their partners, there's just no ability to do that.”
“It’s a very hard bridge to cross, legally, and I think judges would be very reluctant to do so because of the impact, the precedent-setting that it would have; it would be very bad for a lot of folks.”