Opinion: CAUTION -- Warning Label Overload

(Jan. 15) -- The Foundation for Fair Civil Justice each year releases its annual Wacky Warnings Award. My personal all-time favorite was the stroller that warns: "Remove child before folding." Another is an iron label that warns the user to not use it on clothes that are currently being worn.

I was reminded of this when I read the recent news that San Francisco's mayor and a lawmaker in Maine want to require labels on cell phones warning users about the risk of brain cancer -- despite the lack of any credible evidence that such a link exists.

It would be one thing if these warnings were mere jokes, but they are evidence of a real problem in our society -- a problem driven mainly by the legal system -- that costs consumers money and actually makes us less safe.

In a recent class-action case, a group of plaintiffs sued manufacturers of Bluetooth cell-phone headsets, alleging that they failed to warn that loud volumes could cause hearing loss -- something anyone with common sense knows. To make the case go away, the manufacturers agreed to add verbiage to the existing warnings and pay the trial lawyers $850,000. (My organization, the Center for Class Action Fairness, represented consumers who objected to the lawyers' rip-off; our objection is currently on appeal.)

Apple faced a similar lawsuit over its warnings about hearing loss, and successfully fought it in federal District Court and on appeal -- but probably cost itself more money in legal fees than it would have paid if it had simply given in to the extortionate demands and settled.

The only ones who benefit from lawsuits like this are lawyers. Consumers just pay higher costs and suffer from the jobs lost because of the expenses of meritless litigation.

There are other negative effects from these failure-to-warn lawsuits. When lawyers insist that trusting a consumer's common sense is not enough to exonerate a manufacturer, manufacturers have little choice but to load up their products with warnings, wacky and otherwise. After all, no one gets sued for having too many warnings on a product.

Take, for example, the effects of California's Proposition 65, which required property owners to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" that an area contained chemicals that could cause cancer or birth defects. After trial lawyers and the courts got through with it, any business could be sued for any amount of any chemical on California's list, no matter the actual risk to the public or the degree of exposure.

Plaintiffs sued owners of buildings without warnings because they had parking facilities (after all, parking lots contain car exhaust) or roofs with roofing materials that might be carcinogenic if eaten. Now, as any visitor to California knows, virtually every business in the state has a Prop 65 warning sign.

But more warnings do not necessarily make consumers more safe. Quite the contrary. When there is a warning on everything, there might as well be no warning at all.

Psychologists call this warning overload. When people are confronted with too many warnings for meaningless things, they tend to ignore all warnings, a fact known as far back as Aesop and the boy who cried wolf. Auto manufacturers have been forced by the risk of litigation to inflate their user manuals to hundreds of pages to include dozens of warnings that are self-evident to anyone with common sense. As a result, the manuals go unread, and drivers miss out on important warnings that could actually make a difference to their safety.

Despite this, there are politicians and lawyers who regularly insist on new regulations or new laws to increase the number of warnings consumers receive.

While some safety warnings are important, the public, its representatives in government, and the courts should realize that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.
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Ted Frank (http://tedfrank.com) is a Washington, D.C., attorney and the president and founder of the Center for Class Action Fairness.