In the wake of the "#MeToo" movement, in 2018 California lawmakers enacted the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosure (STAND) Act, which sets out to promote greater transparency in the resolution of sex discrimination, harassment, and abuse cases. At the same time, the STAND Act also helps frame analyses of questions relating to "what exactly happens in the wake of [such a] reform."
In another installment from their on-going exploration of "secret settlements," David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford) et al., assess a quarter-million case filings from the Los Angeles County Superior Court for insights on how the STAND Act may have influenced litigation patterns.
Core claims reported in Shedding Light on Secret Settlements: An Empirical Study of California’s STAND Act include what the study did not find. Notably, "the STAND Act did not yield a sharp increase or decrease in case filings. Nor did the Act appear to significantly prolong cases or amplify their intensity." That is to say, the paper argues that evidence from the STAND Act implies that parties will still settle cases even without the inducement of secrecy. An excerpted abstract follows.
"... Analyzing more than a quarter-million case filings from the Los Angeles County Superior Court and deploying a mix of quantitative and qualitative empirical methods, including advanced machine-learning techniques and in-depth interviews with two dozen practitioners, we explore litigation patterns before and after STAND took effect.
Our findings tell a clear and consequential story. Contrary to critics’ fears, the STAND Act did not yield a sharp increase or decrease in case filings. Nor did the Act appear to significantly prolong cases or amplify their intensity. The upshot: cases still settle even when secrecy isn’t on offer. Further, and though our evidence is more tentative, interviews with employment attorneys indicate that STAND does not even seem to have depressed settlement sums. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it appears that positive effects did come to pass. Unlocking what we call a “liberation effect,” it appears that the STAND Act has improved the lives of many assault and harassment survivors, freeing them from the long shadow of an oppressive nondisclosure agreement. Taken together, these findings ought to reboot and recast the long-simmering debate about secret settlements, in California and beyond."