Hochul’s support for class-action lawsuits threatens to weaken NY businesses

Gov. Hochul claims she wants to make New York the “most business- and worker-friendly state,” yet she’s pushing to bury businesses in frivolous lawsuits.

Language tucked into Hochul’s budget proposals calls for a change to state consumer-protection laws to bump the minimum damage payout for class-action lawsuits from $50 a head to $1,000 — a huge gift to the legal sharks who drive these suits, who’ll use this nuclear weapon to muscle companies into settling even most ludicrous cases.

The Empire State is already a hotbed for consumer class-action suits thanks to the current minimum payout, as legal “entrepreneurs” drum up cases based on everything from sandwiches not completely filling their containers (a case filed against restaurant Pret a Manger in 2017) to Strawberry Pop-Tarts not made with “enough” actual strawberries.

In 2019-2020, nearly 100 New York suits were filed just over “vanilla” flavoring, reports The New York Civil Justice Institute; class-action cases over the marketing of products and services tripled in the state from 2017 to 2020.

This isn’t about major consumer gripes; lawyers typically go looking for potential targets, then recruit people to sign on as plaintiffs.

A business facing a suit has to judge the cost of fighting the case and the costs at risk if it loses; by vastly upping the minimum payout, Hochul’s move would make every company far more likely to settle.

Which also guarantees even more such cases, giving every business added reason to get out of New York or never come here in the first place.

With a “business-friendly governor” like Kat, who needs enemies? Is she that hungry for trial-lawyer donations?

Apparently so: In an added gift to the tort bar, she’d also mandate that lawyers get paid “reasonable” attorneys’ fees, where current law stipulates only that they may be paid.

The American Tort Reform Foundation already names New York as No. 4 on its list of “judicial hellholes”; the governor is apparently aiming to make it No. 1.

With the courts getting dragged in on cases because vanilla flavoring doesn’t come from real vanilla (read the ingredients if you care!), New York consumers plainly have all the “protection” they need now.

All Hochul’s shift would do is feed the already obscene legal “protection” racket.