Coffey Modica founding partner, Michael Coffey, was featured as an expert in Los Angeles Times, Yahoo Finance, MSN, The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The News & Observer, and The Telegraph, where he provided insight on the landmark verdicts against social media giants Meta and Google, including the insurance implications as litigation continues to evolve.

By Sonja Sharp | March 28, 2026

Experts predict the outcome of several recent court cases will change the fate of social media.

• Jurors in a Los Angeles case found Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive for young users.
• Social media companies have vowed to appeal the decisions but may be forced to change how they operate due to mounting legal costs.

Two of America’s largest tech companies suffered stunning defeats in court this week, sustaining early jolts in what could prove to be a seismic shift in how social media operates amid a new landscape of legal risk.

Meta and Google both vowed to appeal verdicts that were handed down by civil juries in Los Angeles County and Santa Fe, N.M., brushing off the losses as a bit of bad luck. But attorney Mark Lanier framed the surprise victory in L.A. for his client — who alleged Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive for young users — as nothing short of a cosmic triumph.

“You’ve seen the photographs of Atlas with the world on his shoulders — it’s like that weight’s been set aside,” Lanier said. “This is a righteous moment.”

Few experts believed the test case would succeed. Fewer still thought it would spark a reckoning for the tech titans this spring.

But things began to tilt on Feb. 27, the day after 20-year-old plaintiff Kaley G.M. testified in Los Angeles, when a Delaware court ruled insurers were off the hook for the defense of Instagram parent company Meta in her suit and thousands of related cases claiming social media apps hurt kids.

Then, on Tuesday, a New Mexico panel awarded $375 million in damages against Meta for child engagement. Less than 24 hours after that, 12 Angelenos delivered $6 million to Kaley G.M.

Now, some predict the constellation of rulings could change the fate of social media and rewrite the future of American tort law.

“This is what we’ve all been hoping for,” said Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation.” “If we can win on social media, I think humanity has a chance.”

A Jeremiah figure among millennial and Gen X parents for his warnings of impending social media doom and ruin, Haidt didn’t mince words when forecasting the impact of the recent court cases.

“The world is changing its thinking about this,” Haidt said. “These verdicts coming when they do are going to shift it further.”

Many legal experts agreed.

“The broader signal to the marketplace is that the shield is wearing thin,” said Peter Jackson, a privacy and cybersecurity attorney in Los Angeles. “Seeing the richest and largest companies unable to fend off a litigation like this expands the scope of plaintiffs lawyers who will be willing to mount similar cases.”

A powerful 1996 law called Section 230 has long barricaded internet platforms against most civil liability. The L.A. case tested the argument that injuries arose not from content the apps hosted but design functions engineered for maximum engagement — even if, as Kaley G.M. alleged, those designs were known to carry risks for children.

This week’s wins could unleash a barrage of new lawsuits, even if the verdicts are overturned in the appellate courts, as the companies, their supporters, and many 1st Amendment experts expect.

The Delaware decision is different. Unless it’s reversed, which isn’t as widely predicted, the cost of defending those suits now falls entirely on Meta.

“This is going to fundamentally change engagement on social media,” said insurance defense attorney Michael Coffey. “The insurance industry is going to say, ‘We’re not paying for that.’ You shouldn’t make billions and try to put the bad product cost on the insurance companies.”

Algorithms that funnel users to harmful content or keep them hooked on the platform could leave the apps exposed to expensive litigation, he and others said. Meta and Google each had multiple partners from white-shoe firms at the defense table every day for eight weeks in Los Angeles, attorneys who can command thousands of dollars per billable hour.

“Maybe the numbers were manageable today, but the precedent is not,” Coffey said of the judgment. “It’s really going to change a lot of these algorithmic-driven business models.”

The insurance law expert predicted more defensive default settings, stricter age verification, more stringent parental controls and new alerts to nudge users off the platforms will all flow from the courtroom.

Other observers warned of potentially cataclysmic consequences in court for Meta and other Silicon Valley giants.

“If you look at $3 million in damages, it’s not that much to Meta or Google, but 2,000 or 3,000 cases at a time, that’s an existential crisis,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The response from app designers could be swift and dramatic: Think universal TikTok-style censorship and aughts-era chronological scroll, experts said.

“It could just be that social media becomes totally useless,” Cohn said.

Others see the sea change as less a legal tsunami than a tidal cultural shift — one jurors in New Mexico and California are riding, not speaking into existence.

Pluralities of young users now say they spend too much time on the apps. Roughly half of teens say social media is bad for people their age, according to a study last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Parents are even more convinced, studies show.

Moms like state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), author of California’s crusading 2022 social media age restriction bill, agreed that society has hit a tipping point.

“I’ve got a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old, so I’m living and breathing it, too,” she said of the fight to keep kids off the apps. “It’s the No. 1 thing that parents talk to me at pickup and drop-off and soccer practice. It’s the thing.”

Wicks said she worked with the companies on the 2022 bill, only to see them go to war to stop it once it passed. With age-verification tied up in court, she and other parent-legislators from both parties have joined forces to push through a suite of stronger laws this year.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who was called to testify in both the L.A. and New Mexico trials, and his peers have long argued there’s no workable mechanism to root out millions of existing underage users or keep new grade-schoolers from creating accounts.

Jurors found those claims unconvincing.

“Some of his testimony was — he changed it back and forth,” said Victoria, one of the 10 jurors who voted for liability in the case, who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons. “That didn’t sit well with us.”

On Friday, the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, announced it had filed suit against Meta, TikTok, Snap and Google, as well as Discord, Roblox and X, citing reporting by The Times about the stark rise in eating disorders, depression and teen suicide to support its claim that social media’s child-addicting features and negligent design make it a public nuisance.

That suit joins hundreds of others already consolidated in federal court in California’s Northern District. The first bellwether there is set to begin in Oakland this summer.

Where school districts go, school shooting survivors could soon follow.

“Investigators can see exactly what content a platform served to a school shooter in the weeks and months before the attack,” said James Densley, criminologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University. “If we’re saying that a platform’s recommendation engine is a defective product, that digital forensic trail, which used to be just evidence of radicalization, could now be evidence of liability.”

Experts on all sides agree the awards reflect growing public anger at tech oligarchs who seem to profit off other people’s children in an era of shrinking opportunities and sharply rising costs.

“Just make the products safer,” Wicks said. “That’s what parents want, that’s what the lawmakers want, that’s what the judges want, that’s what the juries want: Make these products safer for our children.”

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Coffey Modica founding partner, Michael Coffey, was featured in Commercial Observer, one of the leading commercial real estate trade publications read by owners, developers, brokers, lenders and investors, examining why New York’s Scaffold Law is long overdue for reform and its impact on construction and housing costs.

By Michael Coffey | March 26, 2026

On June 17, 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor. Shipped from France in 350 pieces and packed in over 200 crates, the iconic monument made its grand entrance in America. That year was also when a law took root that has since shackled New Yorkers to high and unnecessary housing and construction costs for over 140 years.

As an affordability crisis continues to challenge the New York housing market and the regional cost-of-living surges, the construction industry — a major leg of the economic stool — is losing billions of dollars each year that must be planned and dedicated specifically to countless slip and fall legal claims.

The underlying reason for this is simple: New York Labor Law Sections 240 and 241, also known as the Scaffold Law, holds all property owners, general contractors and subcontractors responsible for all injuries resulting on a job site, regardless of who is to blame.

This outdated law, which hasn’t truly been modernized since Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the first Democratic president since the Civil War, was crafted with good intentions back in the 1800s. However, it has negatively affected not only the cost of construction and housing affordability, but also the ability of the next generation of entrepreneurs to afford liability insurance coverage.

A recent study from the Buildings Trade Employers’ Association (BTEA) found that insurance premiums in New York are 200 percent to 500 percent higher than those of states of similar size and population.

This surge is because the Scaffold Law dictates that if there is an accident that results in injury, even if due to the negligence of the worker or another party, the contractor and property owner or developer is still ultimately held responsible. Therefore, the question does not become who is at fault, but rather how much will it cost in a payout.

Despite calls from elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Nick Langworthy, to change the long-outdated law, New York continues to place complete and total liability on developers and contractors.

As a result, housing projects across New York — including those ultimately meant to be affordable housing — are seeing 8 percent to 10 percent of their development costs go directly toward insurance premiums, according to the BTEA analysis.

By comparison, across the river in New Jersey, that legal calculus determines that only 2 percent to 4 percent of development costs must be spent on legal and insurance coverage thanks to their “comparative negligence” standard. That means developers in the Garden State can purchase more bricks, hire more construction workers, and, in the end, sell or rent their properties at lower rates.

After all, every other state has their own form of “comparative negligence” that shares liability of the parties in proportion to their responsibility for the injury.

So, what is stopping New York from changing this outdated law to still provide protections, without straining the state’s economic growth?

The shared liability laws in states with comparable markets directly result in far more affordable underwriting terms for construction and infrastructure projects, making them a more ideal place to build.

As the Scaffold Law continues to be abused, countless housing, infrastructure and other vital construction projects are being delayed, scaled down, or even prevented altogether in the state of New York. This is something that can be fixed and should be corrected, because it is costing everyone in New York and sapping our economy.

In a 2022 interview with Commercial Observer, former BTEA President and CEO Lou Colletti said, “With the Section 240 Scaffold Law, New York state has the highest insurance rates of any state in the nation. … It just becomes easier to build somewhere else. That is what I believe is the major threat to the city’s economic viability.”

Coletti’s own concerns and viewpoints are as relevant now as they were five years ago, just as the outmoded law he referenced hasn’t changed in the last century and a half.

New Yorkers are burdened today with a law designed to adapt to issues in 1885. It is long overdue, for the sake of every New Yorker, for this law to receive a much-needed upgrade.

Michael Coffey is the founding partner of Coffey Modica, an insurance litigation firm. He previously served for two years as zoning commissioner for the City of Norwalk, Conn.

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Coffey Modica founding partner, Michael Coffey, shares his expert perspective in Risk & Insurance, on the liabilities and risk management lessons from the August 2025 Clairton, Penn. coke plant explosion, which tragically claimed two lives.

By David Weldon | March 17, 2026

On August 11, 2025, less than two months after Nippon Steel purchased U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion, a blast ripped through U.S. Steel’s Clairton, Penn. coke production factory. Two workers were killed and 11 others were injured in the explosion.

Twenty EMS agencies, 14 local fire departments, and 15 ambulances rushed to the plant that day. Damage was so severe that it took hours to locate the bodies of the deceased workers.

The full ramifications of the event are yet to be understood, but the calamity has resulted in significant safety violation fines, wrongful death law suits and multiple insurance claims. It could also result in significant reforms in how such plants are managed, monitored and insured. Or, at least that is the hope of some industry watchers.

“Tragedies like this must lead to change,” U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board member Sylvia Johnson said following the event. “Our investigation will identify not just what went wrong but what must be done to ensure workers across this country are protected from similar hazards.”

In the meantime, Nippon Steel must not only repair but substantially upgrade the Clairton plant. It must also come to terms with the fact it will pay far more for the plant than it anticipated.

The role of coke and the Clairton plant

Coke is a critical raw material used in the making of steel. Produced by heating coal in ovens at 2000 degrees Farenheit, it acts as the primary fuel and chemical reducing agent in blast furnaces that convert iron ore into molten iron in the steel making process. The Clairton plant is the largest coke producer in the United States.

Coke manufacturing is also highly detrimental to local air quality. Clairton routinely records some of the worst air quality days in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Details around the Clairton blast and the plant’s overall safety practices are under federal investigation, including the decades in which U.S. Steel owned the plant, and assumed liability by Nippon Steel as the new owner. Neither U.S. Steel or Nippon Steel responded to requests for comment.

The Clairton Coke Works has a documented history of safety and environmental issues. There have been other gas leaks and explosions at the plant in recent years. A smaller explosion in 2009 killed a contract worker, and a fire in 2018 injured 14 workers.

Wrongful death law suits have now been filed by relatives of the workers killed in the 2025 explosion. Both suits allege that U.S. Steel, and subsequently Nippon Steel, failed to properly and safely maintain gas valves that were found to have failed, resulting in the explosion. Subsequent injury claims and emotional distress suits could be filed by injured workers and their families.

A long road ahead likely for claims resolutions

Generally, the insurance claims resolution process for an industrial accident of this magnitude could take years, says Eric Kingsley, partner at Los Angeles-based Kingsley Szamet Employment Lawyers. This is especially true if the investigation reveals safety issues.

“Insurers have scrutinized underwriting disclosures, maintenance history, and whether known conditions were properly addressed,” explains Blaine Rogers, partner at Davis Levin Livingston, personal injury lawyers in Honolulu, HI. “A poor safety record can increase settlement pressure, influence regulatory findings, and shape how both courts and insurers evaluate foreseeability and risk management practices.”

These developments are legally significant in insurance disputes, as regulatory findings can influence causation analysis and impact discussions around punitive damages or enhanced exposure, Rogers said.

Companies have to maintain an overarching coverage architecture and have transparent claims handling, Rogers added. For insurers, fair adjustment of clearly covered losses is essential to maintaining trust in the risk transfer system. Any unreasonable delay or denial can expose carriers to a bad faith liability.

In the case of Clairton, “Claims handling is still ongoing. This is extremely complex where there are multiple insurers and policy layers,” Rogers explains. “We have seen reservation of rights letters issued early in the process, as well as declaratory judgment actions that follow. Third-party liability claims by injured workers’ families and contractors have created additional coverage obligations. Where insurers delay, underpay, or deny claims without a reasonable basis, bad faith allegations have started to arise.”

Loss prevention lessons being learned

While some loss prevention strategies are already emerging from the plant explosion, final conclusions will depend on completed investigations. Rogers says industrial catastrophes of this nature show the importance of redundant safety systems on high-energy equipment and enhanced process hazard analysis and management of change protocols.

“These are indicators of whether an employer met its duty of care,” Rogers explains. “When systems are inadequately implemented, exposure expands beyond primary liability and can influence coverage disputes, as well as bad faith claims if insurers or the insured mishandle resulting losses.”

Meanwhile, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) did issue preliminary findings, and cited several safety violations. Fines of $118,000 and $61,000 respectively were levied against The Clairton Coke Works, and MPW Industrial Services Inc., which had been hired to clean a gas isolation valve the morning of the explosion.

“This event really typifies the kinds of risks associated with these large industrial operations,” explains Michael W. Coffey, founding partner of Coffey Modica LLP, an insurance defense firm headquartered in Tarrytown, NY.

“This disaster opens U.S. Steel and other impacted entities to property damage claims, personal injury and wrongful death liabilities, and business interruption losses, which presumably had downstream effects on customers, as well as environmental remediation obligations.”

One of the clear lessons from this event is that equipment upgrades and modernization can save money, and more importantly, human lives, Coffey explains. Failure to do either can have the opposite result.

The impact of safety history on insurance claims and legal suits

A history of prior safety incidents can have a considerable impact on the way in which an organization is scrutinized, especially in terms of litigation potential, explains Kingsley. Previous incidents, including fatalities and citations, may be investigated to assess whether there was a pattern of non-compliance or unresolved safety issues.

The Clairton plant received more than $57 million in local fines for safety violations since 2020, plus $10.6 million in federal EPA fines. The company also agreed to spend $24.5 million on upgrades and clean air programs in 2018 as part of a federal settlement for failing to control air pollution.

In terms of litigation potential, prior incidents can have an impact on the way in which the organization responds to and addresses potential issues, especially in terms of foreseeability.

In addition, plaintiffs argue that a pattern of similar incidents demonstrates prior knowledge of hazards and failure to remediate them, said Rogers. This will definitely trigger heightened regulatory scrutiny, OSHA obviously investigates fatal incidents and may issue serious or willful violation citations if systemic deficiencies are found. State labor authorities and environmental agencies may also conduct inquiries if emissions or hazardous releases occurred.

At the core of cases filed against the plant so far is the issue of the 70-plus year-old gas valve and whether it should have been swapped out long ago, Coffey said. The valve was manufactured in 1953, Coffey explains. The plant itself was built in 1916.

MPW contractors were conducting maintenance on the gas valves when the explosion occurred. Another company, Valves Incorporated of Pittsburgh, had refurbished the value 13 years earlier. Inspection after the blast revealed that valve body had fully split open, and other valves also showed signs of damage.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

“If this was a case of deferred maintenance, any money saved will probably now be lost in settlements or verdicts,” Coffee said. The event also acts as a cautionary tale for companies to fully assess the risk they are acquiring with any business dealing.

An expected blame game

Since the explosion, the firms involved have gone on defense and engaged in a bit of blame game over who is ultimately responsible. The Chemical Safety Board (CSB), the federal agency responsible for investigating major chemical incidents, is still performing its investigation into the incident. But they did release preliminary findings in September 2025, identifying a cast-iron gas isolation valve as the source of the incident. This was followed by the CSB issuing two safety recommendations in late December 2025.

The first calls on U.S. Steel to perform a thorough investigation of the entire facility and identify any potential hazards, Coffey explains. The second recommendation calls on U.S. Steel to address and reduce any safety risks that are discovered through their evaluation.

Meanwhile, Engineering Design & Testing Corp (EDT), the firm retained by U.S. Steel to conduct their own independent investigation, released its own preliminary findings in mid-October, Coffey said. According to them, U.S. Steel’s procedures call for using low-pressure steam to clean the valves, not high-pressure water, as was used immediately prior to the explosion.

Fostering a culture of safety and accountability

Industrial explosions are typically the end result of a series of systemic problems related to safety culture, maintenance practices, and internal reporting practices, Kingsley said. Organizations that have an open reporting system in place, protect their employees from retaliation for reporting safety concerns, and treat safety concerns as critical compliance issues rather than operational inconveniences are more likely to be able to prevent catastrophic losses.

“From an employment law standpoint, encouraging employees to voice their safety concerns without reprisal is not only good business practice, but essential risk management practice as well,” Kingsley explains.

Coffey agrees, saying the Clairton explosion was a wakeup call to similar industrial plants to re-examine their own safety standards and protocols in order to best protect their facilities and their workers, heading off any large-scale events that may leave the company liable.

U.S. Steel appears to be taking some steps to strengthen safety protocols, as reported in October. The company said it is prohibiting the use of high-pressure water to clean valves, and training employees to prevent similar disasters, according to Coffey.

Overall, what will now be needed at the Clairton plant – as well as other similar plants – will be continuous hazard monitoring; transparent reporting and accountability; a culture of safety in which workers can identify and report risks; and the modernization of outdated equipment and processes.

“In the wake of this incident, companies may prioritize examining older equipment that can create unnecessary risk when operated past their use-by date,” Coffey explains. “The American steel industry has also already been shifting away from blast furnaces like those used at Clairton, to cheaper, electric arc furnaces. This incident may further hasten a shift that has already been underway.”

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Coffey Modica founding partner, Michael Coffey, authored an insightful opinion piece in Insurance News Net analyzing recent California insurance legislation and its potential impact on the state’s already strained insurance market.

By Michael Coffey | February 17, 2026

The fundamental basis of insurance — pooling risk as a safety net for communities and industries alike — has been around for thousands of years. Since the days of ancient Babylon, policyholders pay a fractional cost of the value of their business or home to a third party, insulating themselves in the rare instance of a claim.

Even the American insurance market predates the Revolutionary War. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin created the colonies’ first fire insurer in 1752, and its first life insurer in 1759, both using inspection and mutual principles.

However, three bills introduced in California’s legislature look to rewire the equations and calculus of risk, rates and payouts determined. This proposed legislation risks the solvency of the Golden State’s already-battered insurance industry and further limits the number of firms able to continue underwriting sector and customer policies in the most populous state in the nation.

The January 2025 Southern California Wildfires were among the costliest disasters in U.S. history, creating a significant “stress event” for the state’s insurance sector. More than 13,000 homes were destroyed, affecting roughly 100,000 people. The estimated insurance loss was estimated to be at least $40 billion.

As of January 2026, 94% of the 42,121 claims have been fully or partially paid, but the deep, decades-old cracks in the foundation of California’s insurance market are now fully exposed.

Insurers had already been fleeing the state since the passage of Prop. 103, the 1988 law that empowered the state’s Department of Insurance to approve or even reduce insurance rates, rather than let the rates be determined by actuaries and traditional risk factors.

Amid growing inflation and increasingly destructive wildfires and other weather-related events, the statistically reliant insurance marketplace has become fractured by government bureaucracy and red tape. In California, adjusting rates in response to a clearly increased risk portfolio is now a months-long process for insurers looking to issue policies.

Unable to respond to changing market conditions in a dynamic manner, many of the country’s largest insurers, have either ceased or severely limited writing new policies in California.

As insurers departed the California marketplace, state residents became increasingly reliant on the California FAIR Plan, established in 1968 as an insurer of last resort. In September 2025, the FAIR Plan reported 645,987 policies in force with more than $696 billion in exposure, a 319% increase since 2021.

Legislators take aim at California insurance woes

The legislative thumb already on the scale for setting rates is now aimed at the other side of the equation — insurance payouts — despite the abundance of evidence that state intervention in the insurance market has only added to Californians’ woes.

State Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), Chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, has proposed SB 876, which would expand upfront payments by mandating that actual cash value and structure replacement costs be paid quickly, and with interest, following a total loss. It would further double the cost to be paid for the living expenses of policyholders whose homes were destroyed during a disaster during the rebuilding process.

Additional clauses include applying mandatory building code upgrade coverage at the time of rebuild, rather than the time of loss, and requiring insurers submit “disaster recovery plans” to the Department of Insurance.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra) has proposed SB 877 and SB 878. The former requires insurers to fully disclose all loss estimate documents and revisions to policyholders, along with explanations of the changes, while the latter imposes automatic 20% interest penalties when insurers delay payments required by law, including stringent 30-day deadlines to pay any undisputed parts of a claim.

If passed, these heavy-handed bills might just serve as the final nails in the coffin of California having a truly independent, free market insurance industry.

By creating these onerous mandates, California continues to try to make insurance a guarantee, instead of a pooled risk.

Losing your home is an unimaginable tragedy, but expecting to pay the bare minimum in underwriting premiums in return for a greater than maximum payout is not fair; it’s a punitive action against an entire industry.

These bills are irresponsibly superimposing unreasonable deadlines and penalties on insurers no longer granted the tools to operate their businesses effectively.

The insurance industry simply isn’t designed for such frequent natural disasters of this kind, year after year. Risks such as fires, floods and earthquakes are supposed to be rare events. As certain risks increase in a particular state or county, so would actuarial risk assumptions that determine insurance rates.

The risk of wildfire has increased incrementally in California, and now one in eight properties across the state face “very high” fire risk. As state and municipal agencies themselves confront a wide class action lawsuit for their own alleged actions and misdeeds exacerbating January’s wildfires, the state of California should focus on creating programs to help mitigate disasters, protect property and business owners rather than make a villain out of the entire insurance industry.

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