Our civil justice system rests on a simple premise: Every claim represents a real person, with a real injury, who chose to seek redress. When that premise fails, everyone pays, beginning with the people who were actually hurt.

For decades, the fight over lawsuit abuse has centered on what happens once a case is underway: damage caps, jury anchoring, junk science in the courtroom. Those fights matter. They share a blind spot. Almost nothing governs how mass lawsuits come to exist in the first place — who recruits the clients, whether those clients understood what they signed, and whether anyone checked that a claim was real before it was filed.