There is a significant word in the first line of the story that precludes common sense - California!
Nonsense. The American states have legal systems that are every bit as sensible as ours, just different. The UK press in particular loves to run stories about the idiocies of Americans and they are usually wildly inaccurate. Remember the cackling here some years ago when MacDonalds were sued "for selling coffee that was hot"? The truth was that the machine had malfunctioned, the coffee was close to boiling and the polystyrene cup prevented the customer from noticing until she spilt some in her lap and was badly scalded.
A couple of the different features are that civil litigation has always been conducted on a no-costs basis, so claimants have an incentive to start unmeritorious claims; and it is often funded by no-win no-fee arrangements where the litigator is allowed percentage of any award, which encourages claimants to over-claim the amount. And a particularly important difference is that working the publicity machine is seen as a legitimate tactic rather than contempt of court.
This is just someone beating the drum about a claim that they say they are going to make; far less a claim that has been made; and a huge distance from a claim that succeeds. Litigators regularly take unpaid cases which they expect to fail, even in the UK, as a form of advertising.
