Attorney John Gardella  was recently interviewed by Kathryn Hopkins, reporter for Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), for her article that was published by Yahoo! Life regarding the recent trend of beauty industry companies being targeted for personal injury and consumer fraud lawsuits, including the impact that MoCRA will have on the future of litigation for the industry.

For the complete article and Ms. Hopkins’s thought content, please view the article here.

An excerpt from the article is below:

“While beauty suits are nothing new with a class action suit brought against Los Angeles hair stylist Chaz Dean’s brand Wen in 2016 among past cases, John Gardella, a shareholder at CMBG3 Law, believes that a focus on ESG practices also means there is likely to be an uptick in suits similar to the one against Sephora that is currently playing out in court. (The L’Oréal and Olaplex cases are considered product liability suits, while Sephora is involved in a consumer fraud litigation.)

“There’s a big push in the U.S. on that particular topic and it’s caught the attention of many plaintiffs’ attorneys in terms of how various industries are marketing their products and whether or not they are truly as they say,” he said.

“I think almost every company markets their products in some way being safe to use, environmentally friendly, clean, things like that,” he continued. “The nature of the beauty industry at the moment is such that there are many synthetic products or components in those products. So the plaintiffs’ attorneys have certainly taken a closer look at exactly what’s being said as compared to what is in those products and that’s driving a lot of lawsuits that we’re seeing.”

Gardella was more on the fence when it came to MoCRA. “There are some labeling requirements that are going to take effect and those could impact future lawsuits in terms of beauty companies having to disclose the detailed information about the ingredients in their products,” he said. “But I hesitate to say it will cause an explosion of lawsuits or anything of that sort only because I don’t know how aggressive FDA is going to be in pursuing companies in disclosing ingredients….It’s just too early to tell.”

Indeed, the FDA has yet to announce how it will monitor companies and is expected to make that clearer in the coming year.”