What if I told you that suing companies doesn’t necessarily require you to prove damages or find an injured client? By identifying everything as advertising fraud, lawyers can take anything—a watchdog report, a new or vague FDA regulation, a distant report of actual injuries—and turn it into a class suit.
The ease of advertising fraud claims has led to skyrocketing numbers of suits. A proposed New York law would make them even easier.
The model of a consumer fraud lawsuit is simple: A company makes a claim about its product, consumers buy the product because of the claim, but the claim was unsupported—if not downright misleading—so consumers sue to get their money back.
For example, in 2008, makers of the herbal supplement Airborne paid a $23 million settlement to customers who purchased the product because of false claims that it could prevent colds. Reasonable enough.
The success of this model now drives a booming industry. By one estimate, class consumer fraud suits in New York trebled between 2017 and 2021. This isn’t the result of a sudden spike in commercial misinformation. Instead, plaintiffs’ lawyers are increasingly converting other kinds of litigation into advertising fraud lawsuits.
Rather than pursue individual personal...
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