Rfk Jr. Is Bringing The Gop And The Trial Bar Together

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s demonization of food and pharma has put the Trump administration on the wrong side of its traditional allies in industry – but opened a path to a new alliance with a longtime GOP nemesis: lawyers representing consumers who say they were harmed by companies.

Kennedy’s moves, from his disparagement of Tylenol and ultraprocessed food to his broadsides against vaccines, have lawyers who assemble aggrieved plaintiffs to sue deep-pocketed companies envisioning the sort of cases that turn attorneys into Hollywood heroes and billionaires. They’re citing Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement to buttress their personal injury tort suits. It’s another example of how President Donald Trump’s populist approach to politics, enhanced by his partnership with Kennedy, has turned longtime political relationships on their head.

“The pendulum has swung some in a pro-consumer, pro-plaintiff direction,” said Ashley Keller, a founding partner at Keller Postman, whose firm is spearheading a Texas suit against Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue, the manufacturers of Tylenol. The suit plays off Kennedy and Trump’s move last year to caution pregnant women against taking the pain reliever. Citing data that showed a correlation, but not causation, they warned that it increased the risk for childhood autism.

Business groups, who have long relied on GOP allies for “tort reform” to limit lawsuits and damages, are reckoning with the shift too. “The sort of traditional alliances that we think of in the Republican Party, things have really changed,” said Erica Klenicki, the National Association of Manufacturers’ vice president and deputy general counsel for litigation. “There's maybe not as many allies for tort reform as there used to be.”

Lawyers behind major settlements against companies told POLITICO that Kennedy’s sweeping anti-corporate agenda targeting food, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, along with rising public skepticism of industry, is creating a tailwind for the tort system to take on corporate power.

Signs of a new legal opportunity emerged earlier this month when Kennedy removed four childhood vaccines from the routine schedule – a move lawyers say could increase litigation against drugmakers. While patients can still receive the vaccines, they are no longer routinely recommended, giving the secretary a legal pathway to exclude them from the table of vaccines covered in the government-run vaccine-injury compensation program without needing congressional approval. That, in turn, would force vaccine-injured patients to sue drugmakers directly for compensation.

“If they remove various vaccines from the vaccine injury table, that would permit consumers to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable in instances where the company failed to warn that the vaccine causes a harm or where the company could have made the vaccine safer but didn’t,” said Aaron Siri, a trial lawyer who has worked with Kennedy.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was created by Congress in 1986 after a series of lawsuits against vaccine makers prompted many of them to pull out of the market. The no-fault program provided an immunity shield to vaccine makers while also lowering the burden of proof for people seeking compensation through the program compared to what they’d face in court.

“The tort system is like a tide,” said Paul Farrell Jr., a plaintiffs’ attorney from West Virginia and one of the leading litigators against Purdue Pharma and other companies for their role in the opioid crisis, securing more than $50 billion in settlements. “The flood wall is the artificial constraints put up by Congress. RFK Jr. is questioning the wisdom of those structures.”

Kennedy is a former trial lawyer himself, winning cases against Monsanto in 2018 for the health harms allegedly caused by its herbicide Roundup, and against DuPont for contamination of the town of Spelter, W.Va., in 2007.

Before his confirmation, Kennedy pledged to divest his financial stake in prominent law firms behind cases linked to his Make America Healthy Again movement. He committed to transferring to one of his sons his stake in Los Angeles firm Wisner Baum’s suit against Merck. Kennedy was referring clients for the case, which charges that the drugmaker failed to properly warn patients of the harms from its vaccine for human papillomavirus, Gardasil. Conor Kennedy is an associate at the firm. Kennedy also agreed to end his referral agreement and of counsel position with Florida’s Morgan & Morgan, where he was entitled to receive 10 percent of fees awarded in contingency fee cases he referred to the firm.

Morgan & Morgan is now at the forefront of San Francisco’s landmark lawsuit filed last year against 11 ultraprocessed food manufacturers, including Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, Pepsico, and Nestle, as well as another case against the companies in Pennsylvania. Wisner Baum was one of the leading firms filing suits against Roundup over serious health harms, which has ballooned into one of the largest mass tort actions in U.S. history, and last year opposed a pesticide immunity provision in a congressional appropriations bill, which was later removed by Congress in a win for MAHA supporters and the plaintiffs bar.

Lawyers at Wisner Baum contributed to Kennedy’s 2024 presidential run, including Michael Baum, who donated $10,000 to American Values 2024 PAC, now known as the MAHA PAC, and Brent Wisner, who donated almost $7,000 to the Team Kennedy PAC. Kennedy later dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

“[MAHA] changes the way juries will look at this,” said Mike Morgan, an attorney at Morgan & Morgan. “If we brought this case ten years ago without the science, without the correlation, people could say, ‘Well, maybe.’....When you add in the new knowledge, which is definitely spurred by the MAHA movement, and give them a platform, that changes the game.”

Many longtime GOP allies in industry and proponents of tort reform decry the MAHA agenda, arguing it is enriching the trial bar and will raise prices for consumers. “At a time when affordability is such an important focus, it's important to recognize the impact that lawsuit abuse has on American families,” said Lauren Sheets Jarrell, a vice president and counsel at the American Tort Reform Association.

Kenvue, for one, has called the Tylenol suit it’s facing a “deliberate distortion of the facts being driven by the plaintiffs’ bar.”

Brian Leake, a spokesperson for Bayer, the German conglomerate that acquired Roundup with its purchase of Monsanto in 2018, said “ensuring a fair and impartial judicial system and curtailing mass litigation-industry-driven lawsuits…is necessary to ensure that courts are able to focus resources on valid issues rather than lawsuits built on misinformation and litigation industry profiteering.”

Under pressure from industry, Kennedy left agricultural chemicals off his list of priorities when he released a MAHA strategy in September. But Kennedy has long maintained Roundup is a driver of chronic disease. It is the world’s most widely used chemical by farmers, landscapers and homeowners to kill weeds.

Trial lawyers rejected claims they were profiteering, stressing that mass tort cases take years, with no guarantee of a payment, and that plaintiffs are often facing corporations with the resources to wage long legal wars and influence the courts and government. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Bayer’s case to end a wave of lawsuits over Roundup.

“These are very risky cases, and they cost a lot of money,” said Jayne Conroy, a partner at Simmons Hanly Conroy, one of the lawyers suing social media companies, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, over addictive algorithms, an issue that Kennedy did mention in his MAHA strategy. “Nobody’s lining their pockets. Nobody’s looking at that thinking of a quick win,” Conroy added, referring to the social media case, which starts trial in a California federal district court later this month.

Some plaintiffs’ lawyers downplayed MAHA’s influence, arguing the new suits reflect a string of mass-tort wins against industry and the collapse of other mechanisms for accountability. “MAHA is merely benefiting from a long history of events that have taken place in America,” said Mike Papantonio, a trial lawyer who secured a $12.5 billion settlement against industrial manufacturer 3M over water contamination in 2023 and who worked on cases and co-hosted a radio show with Kennedy.

There’s little evidence yet that trial lawyers are directing more of their political war chest to Republicans. The attorneys’ Washington lobbying group, the American Association for Justice, gave 2 percent of its more than $2 million in political action committee contributions to Republicans in 2024. That was in keeping with its preference for Democrats going back decades.

And many trial lawyers are skeptical of Kennedy and whether the GOP has sided with consumers. “It's always good to allow injured people to sue…but the goal of what is being done is to scare people and stop them from administering important vaccines to children,” said Hunter Shkolnik, a trial lawyer and partner at Napoli Shkolnik. “This is just craziness.”

The golden age of tort suits, when attorneys had asbestos and tobacco companies to go after, may be over. Tort cases have remained low over the past decade, representing only 6 percent of incoming state trial court civil caseloads in 2024, compared to 7 percent in 2014, according to the Center for Justice and Democracy’s comparison of data from the National Center for State Courts. “The arc of American civil litigation bends not toward expansion but toward contraction,” said Nora Freeman Engstrom, an expert on tort law at Stanford University.

When it comes to vaccines, personal injury lawyers who specialize in using the existing compensation system say most plaintiffs alleging they were hurt by a vaccine are likely to do worse in court. Courts will require a higher burden of proof than the compensation program and damages may be too small for a trial lawyer to be interested in pursuing a case, they said.

“The focus on vaccine injury has been dulled and blurred and politicized,” said Robert Krakow, a vaccine injury lawyer who has worked with Kennedy on past litigation, including suits against Merck over the Gardasil vaccine.

“It would be impractical to sue…[Manufacturers] have tremendous resources. They're going to fight very vigorously.”