The trial bar is having its moment.
Earlier this month, juries on opposite ends of the Southwest handed plaintiff’s attorneys two verdicts that shook Silicon Valley. A New Mexico jury found Meta liable under state consumer protection laws and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties. The next day, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in designing and operating their social media platforms, awarding $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta paying 70% and Google 30%.
The contrast is worth noting.
New Mexico extracted $375 million from a single defendant. Los Angeles, the higher-profile case with a longer trial and the bellwether that plaintiff’s attorneys built their entire litigation strategy around, produced a $6 million verdict split between two of the wealthiest companies on earth. This was a small fraction of the billion dollars in punitive damages counsel had sought.
Before anyone declares this the accountability reckoning Silicon Valley has long deserved, one question deserves a straight answer: Will any of it actually make teens safer online?
Almost certainly not.
The $375 million New Mexico verdict will generate substantial attorneys’ fees but do little to make teenagers safer online. The 1,600-plaintiff consolidated litigation in Los Angeles spanned years of discovery, depositions, expert witnesses, and settlement negotiations, all billable, without improving online safety.
A verdict rendered in two courtrooms in 2026 does not improve the online experience of teenagers on social media tonight. A settlement fund does not change how a product works for the teenager using it now.
Litigation extracts money from companies for past conduct, not a tool for reshaping it. The tobacco analogy, invoked confidently in opening statements, illustrates the problem: the master settlement took over thirty years to execute, required Congress to finish what courts could not, and made a few law firms extraordinarily wealthy.
Litigation proponents argue that discovery compels disclosure and that damaging internal documents in courtrooms eventually force legislative action. That may be true. But it is a twenty-year theory of change, while parents and teenagers seek help today.
The verdicts themselves are only part of the story. Plaintiff’s attorneys emerged from the Los Angeles courthouse and declared the outcome “a referendum, from a jury to an entire industry.”
What they meant, translated from litigation-speak, is that the bellwether worked: juries will buy it. This theory will spawn copycat lawsuits across the country. Every verdict, however modest in dollar terms, is proof of concept and a prospectus for the next wave of contingency-fee litigation.
The $6 million Los Angeles award is not the point; the point is the liability finding. It tells plaintiff’s firms from coast to coast that the theory clears juries, even when, as The Associated Press reported, cross-examination established that the plaintiff was suffering from decades of emotional abuse at home and had been self-harming well before she ever had access to social media.
If the theory survives that, it survives anything.
Discovery will produce damaging internal documents. Companies with trillion-dollar market caps will eventually find it cheaper to settle than fight. Once set in motion, the machinery is self-financing. The teenagers it claims to help become inventory in this calculus.
Will any of this make teenagers safer when they go online?
The plaintiff’s bar has no incentive to address that question honestly, and the structure of contingency-fee litigation ensures it never has to. Lawsuits are not an internet safety policy. They are a method of wealth transfer, moving wealth from Silicon Valley to a handful of law firms, with a small fraction briefly reaching the plaintiffs whose suffering made the enterprise possible.
Teenagers whose stories filled six weeks of testimony deserve a policy that moves faster than an appellate docket and remedies that apply across an industry, not just to one carefully selected plaintiff. Instead, they face a self-financing war of attrition that will occupy courtrooms for a decade.
The trial bar is having its moment. Teenagers are still waiting for a real solution.
