ANALYSIS: Social Media Won’t Face Big Tobacco’s Forum Chaos

The class action environment in the 1990s put Big Tobacco through the wringer, but that doesn’t mean social media is doomed to the same fate. Changes in mass tort rules on jurisdiction and venue will consolidate social media lawsuits in more centralized forums and may rein in a lot of what made tobacco litigation unsustainable.

Big Tobacco Was an Outlier, Not a Template

To understand the shift in settlement incentives between social media and Big Tobacco, we need to go back to the mid ‘90s. Tips were frosted, JNCOs were baggy, and tobacco was facing accumulating lawsuits from states and ...