This op-ed was authored by ATRA’s Lauren Sheets Jarrell and was originally published by the Daily Journal.
A Los Angeles jury recently delivered a billion-dollar verdict in a case alleging that talc baby powder caused an elderly woman’s mesothelioma and death. While the family’s loss is undeniably tragic, this verdict is just the latest in a trend of trial lawyers weaponizing “made‑for‑litigation” science.
It’s the trial lawyer playbook at work — forum shopping, pervasive trial lawyer advertising, and judicial acceptance of junk science all feed a never-ending cycle.
California long has been one of the nation’s worst Judicial Hellholes®, but Los Angeles County is cementing itself as the worst of the worst, showing how difficult it will be to break this litigious cycle.
Forum Shopping
Plaintiffs’ firms prefer filing cases in Judicial Hellholes® thanks to low evidentiary barriers and plaintiff leaning judges in those courts. In California, instead of seeing the label as a call to action, the situation is growing more dire. For the second consecutive year, Los Angeles County ranked among the Top 3 jurisdictions for mesothelioma filings. That’s not by coincidence; it’s by design.
When courts repeatedly deliver outsized verdicts with little scrutiny of the science behind them, plaintiffs’ lawyers take note — and follow the money.
Trial Lawyer Advertising
To bolster this litigation machine and drum up the client base, California’s airwaves, billboards, and more are flooded with legal services ads. Between January 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, lawyers spent nearly $464 million on 3.9 million legal ads across California markets.
In 2024, Los Angeles was the top media market in the country for these ads, with nearly $165 million spent. More than 725,000 ads ran, encouraging potential claimants to call hotlines, fill out forms, or join mass tort actions — often before any credible evidence of harm has been established.
Beyond recruiting clients, this constant stream of alarmist messaging serves a two-fold purpose for the trial bar by biasing potential jurors. By the time they enter the courtroom, many jurors have been subjected to months of misleading ads peddling junk science claims.
Junk Science in the Courtroom
Once the docket is full, plaintiffs’ lawyers turn to “experts” whose testimony often strays far from the scientific mainstream. In the Moore talc trial that produced this billion-dollar verdict, the plaintiff’s expert, Dr. Steven Haber, testified that spontaneously occurring mesothelioma is “exceptionally rare” and that virtually every case stems from asbestos exposure.
However, peer-reviewed research overwhelmingly contradicts this assertion. The World Health Organization has noted that in North America, only an estimated 20% of mesothelioma cases in women are related to asbestos exposure.
While Dr. Haber is not a mesothelioma expert outside the courtroom, one of the two articles he has authored on the topic also undermine his own claims in court. Dr. Haber documented a case of an 83-year-old woman who developed mesothelioma without evidence of past asbestos exposure. The woman in the Moore case was 87 at the time of her diagnosis. Age is a known risk factor for mesothelioma, regardless of exposure.
Allowing Dr. Haber to testify about the purportedly “exceptionally rare” nature of naturally occurring mesothelioma skewed the facts during this trial. The court failed in its gatekeeping duty and should have ensured that only reliable, scientifically grounded evidence reached jurors, rather than disproven theories.
Read the full piece by Lauren Sheets Jarrell in the Daily Journal here.
