Imagine a law allowing judges and law enforcement professionals– those potentially in harms way based solely on the hard work they do each day– to request removal of their home addresses and phone numbers from the internet and other distribution portals.

Sounds like a pretty decent law right?

Plus the law requires a 10 day notice period to a data provider to allow reasonable time for the deletion to take place.

And if the company refuses to comply there is a fairly minimal fee of $1,000.00 attached to the violation.

This all sounds pretty reasonable.

What could go wrong?

Well as defendants across the county are finding out as they fight frivolous Daniel’s law litigation– a lot.

New Jersey’s state Daniel’s Law is a good law with a good intent that is written in a way that leads to bad lawsuits.

The law was passed to help protect judges and law enforcement officials from being harassed or harmed in their homes following the tragic murder of a Judge’s husband at the hands of a disgruntled litigant who had been unhappy with her rulings.

We certainly want to prevent that.

But the law’s vague and loose language has lead to an avalanche of lawsuits– particularly as opportunistic “assignees” step in to bring these claims for profit on an aggregated basis on behalf of thousands of “covered persons” at a time.

Hypothetically, lets say a local police union signs up with a bulk assignee company and every member of the union–all covered persons by definition– follows instructions to make a few extra bucks. They email data providers, brokers, websites, directories– companies who might just aggregate data for sell privately and not even publicly disclose addresses– all identified by the company they have assigned their rights to. Then they sit back and wait.

After 10 days the assignee can file suit and seek $1,000 for every one of their thousands of “clients.”

Its exploitation of the legal process for profit–pure and simple– but this is what seems to be happening every day right now.

To be clear, I don’t know the inner workings of these bizarre relationships between thousands of “covered persons” and their assignees who file suits in mass. But this appears to be the latest trend in high-dollar mass litigation.

Making matters worse, many defendants have hired #biglaw firms to defend these cases and these firms have, predictably, tripped over their own shoelaces and made the wrong arguments (and bad law) in the process. (Maybe they were using AI? hahaha).

So now a law that probably only applies to a pretty narrow slice of conduct and definitely only applies to negligent or unreasonable failures to comply is a ship drifting far from its mooring and impacting thousands of companies across the nation.

Its a mess. But we’ll see what we can do to help straighten it out.

More soon.