Full piece in the Times Union
By Lauren Zelt
Two sisters on Long Island thought they were serving Blizzards. Instead, they got buried in one.
Patty DeMint and Michelle Robey poured their savings into building a Dairy Queen franchise in Medford, Suffolk County. Then a 90-year-old law they’d never heard of turned their American dream into a legal nightmare.
The sisters fired a problematic employee, who later sued them contending she was owed overtime pay. It soon spiraled into a class-action lawsuit over frequency of pay.
Class-action lawsuits are usually reserved for TV commercials about mesothelioma exposure or defective products. So how did a Dairy Queen on Long Island end up in one? Billboard lawyers had begun flooding Instagram with ads looking for anyone paid biweekly — like millions of Americans — who could claim they should have been paid weekly.
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The lawsuit threatened to put them out of business. Facing financial ruin, the sisters settled for $450,000; $305,000 went to the lawyers. The workers who sued got less than $200 each.
That’s not justice. That’s exploitation by a legal system that rewards lawyers for gaming century-old laws most small-business owners have never heard of.
This isn’t an isolated case: After a 2019 court ruling expanded liability, New York was flooded with class-action lawsuits over biweekly paychecks. Small businesses became easy prey for firms trolling social media to recruit “plaintiffs.”
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Billboard lawyers have long preyed on victims using flashy marketing to reel people in. Increasingly, the billboards on highways have moved online, to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where firms are advertising to target the next generation of clients.
The managing partner of America’s largest personal injury firm admitted as much in an interview to AdAge, stating, “When we’re going after someone who’s in high school listening to a podcast on the way to school, that person might not be a client of ours until 20 years later. It’s really about planting seeds and making sure people know about us. The next generation is crucial.”
In other words, the billboard lawyers are playing the long game — grooming future clients before they’ve even entered the workforce.
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We have to do more to protect the job creators. A good place to start is to recognize that New York can tackle lawsuit abuse, just as other states have done. Florida recently cracked down on the litigation racket fueled by billboard attorneys, and the results were immediate. Property insurance lawsuits fell dramatically, insurers began filing for rate decreases instead of hikes, and even major auto carriers — after years of steady increases — have lowered premiums for most drivers. State officials credit the reforms with stabilizing claims and reducing lawsuit risk across the board.
If Albany — and Washington — really want to protect working people, they should follow the lead of other states.