The Consumer Attorneys of California — still called the Trial Lawyers Association by old hands and by the carrier lobbyists who would prefer the bar sound more like ambulance chasers — has spent the first half of the 2026 session in a posture closer to defense than offense. The MICRA deal of 2022 still has a decade of step-ups to run. Last year's PAGA compromise locked in defendant cure rights that plaintiff employment counsel are still working around. And the appellate courts have done as much policy work in the last twelve months as Sacramento.
What follows is a working read of where CAOC's stated positions sit as of mid-May: which bills the organization has put weight behind, which it is fighting, and where it has shifted since the session opened in January. Positions can move again before suspense file; this is a snapshot, not a final scorecard.
Bills CAOC Has Put Weight Behind
The arbitration-fee enforcement statutes — Code of Civil Procedure sections 1281.97 and 1281.98 — remain the most reliable plaintiff-side win of the last legislative cycle, and CAOC's 2026 docket is built around protecting them. The defense bar has spent two years asking for a "good faith" carve-out that would let employers and franchisors miss the 30-day payment window without losing their compelled arbitration. CAOC's position has hardened: no amendments, no extensions, and active support for clean-up language clarifying that a missed payment is a material breach without regard to intent. The organization is treating any "technical fix" bill as a Trojan horse.
On discovery, CAOC continues to back full enforcement of CCP §2023.050 — the mandatory $1,000 sanction for unmeritorious objections and misuse of discovery process that took effect in 2024. Member surveys this spring reported judges applying the statute unevenly, and the organization is supporting reporting bills that would require courts to track sanctions issued and waived. Whether such bills clear the appropriations process is another question; the Judicial Council has historically resisted reporting mandates.
Prejudgment interest under Civil Code §3291 is back on the priority list. The current statute runs only from a §998 offer date in personal injury cases. CAOC is supporting expansion to wrongful death and to bad-faith insurance recoveries, citing what its policy committee has called the "free float" defendants get on cases that linger four and five years through the trial courts. The proposal has not yet been calendared for a floor vote, and the carrier coalition is mobilized against it.
Bills the Plaintiff Bar Is Actively Opposing
Two defense-side packages are drawing the most opposition resources. The first is a renewed run at third-party litigation finance disclosure. The Chamber of Commerce affiliates and the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform have backed a bill that would require disclosure of any non-recourse funding agreement above a $25,000 threshold and would let defendants depose the funder. CAOC's position is that the proposal is a discovery-pressure tool disguised as a transparency measure — its policy committee briefing notes that funding terms have no bearing on liability or damages, and that mandatory disclosure would only widen the resource asymmetry that already favors institutional defendants. The organization opposes the bill in any form.
The second is a quieter but more dangerous package: a series of amendments to Business and Professions Code §6147 that would impose new ceilings and disclosure requirements on contingency fee agreements. The carrier-side framing is consumer protection. CAOC reads it as a direct attempt to reduce settlement values by squeezing the economics of case selection. For a refresher on what §6147 currently demands of practitioners, see our recent piece on contingency fee agreement compliance in 2026. The trade-press coverage of this push is in our PI Week roundup on the California fee threat.
CAOC is also opposing a narrow but consequential evidence-code amendment that would expand the §1115 mediation privilege to cover certain pre-suit settlement communications conducted under "structured negotiation" formats. The concern is that defendants and their carriers would route hard-bargaining communications through these structures specifically to bury them. The organization supports the underlying goal of more pre-suit resolution, but not at the cost of making bad-faith conduct unprovable.
Where Positions Have Moved Since January
Three shifts are worth noting for practitioners who built case strategy around prior CAOC positions.
First, on autonomous-vehicle liability. The organization opened the session leaning toward a strict-liability framework that would treat AV operators as common carriers. By April, after meetings with the rideshare-affiliated AV operators, CAOC moved to a negligence-plus-statutory-duties model that preserves traditional comparative-fault analysis while adding event-data-recorder preservation requirements with teeth. The shift was pragmatic: a strict-liability bill could not get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the current composition. The negligence-plus model has a path.
Second, on medical lien practice. The organization spent 2024 and 2025 backing a near-total ban on chargemaster billing in lien-asserted treatment. The position has softened. CAOC now supports a reasonable-value floor pegged to negotiated rates for the same procedure within the same MSA, with provider rebuttal allowed on a verified-cost showing. The change reflects pushback from independent provider groups whose lien economics would have been wiped out, not from carrier interests. Practitioners working hospital lien matters under Civil Code §§3045.1–3045.6 should track the moving language closely.
Third, on insurance bad-faith reform. The position has gone the other direction — harder, not softer. After a string of trial-court rulings narrowing Insurance Code §790.03(h) standing in the wake of last year's appellate split, CAOC moved from "monitoring" to active support for codifying a private right of action in defined categories of carrier conduct. The carrier lobby has matched the escalation, and the bill is unlikely to clear in this form, but the position itself is the news.
MICRA, Prop 213, and the Long Games
The 2022 MICRA deal — Assembly Bill 35 — set the non-economic damage cap on a ten-year step-up schedule, with the non-death cap rising from $350,000 in 2023 toward $750,000 by 2033, and the death cap moving from $500,000 toward $1,000,000 on the same arc. CAOC is not reopening the deal. The political capital spent to get the step-up is not available again this session, and the policy committee has explicitly told members not to circulate "MICRA 2.0" language under the CAOC banner. Practitioners running med-mal cases should plan around the scheduled cap, not around a renegotiation.
Proposition 213 — the Civil Code §3333.4 bar on non-economic damages for uninsured drivers and certain felons — remains in CAOC's "fight when we can" file. The organization tested a narrow carve-out for uninsured drivers who can show a good-faith policy lapse (premium nonpayment despite documented hardship) and pulled the trial balloon within three weeks after internal data came back unfavorable. The voters who passed Prop 213 in 1996 are not the obstacle the policy committee feared; the obstacle is that any meaningful amendment requires both a legislative two-thirds vote and a ballot return. The fight is on hold.
The auto-liability minimum-limits increase that took effect January 1, 2025 — raising bodily injury minimums to $30,000 per person and $60,000 per occurrence, with property damage at $15,000 — is finally producing the case-mix CAOC predicted. Practitioners report higher policy-limits demands clearing earlier and lower bad-faith exposure on small-policy cases. The organization is watching whether the next scheduled increase under the same enacting legislation holds, and whether carrier rate filings absorb the change without UM/UIM market disruption.
What to Watch Before Suspense File
Three items are likely to move before the appropriations suspense files close.
First is the §3291 prejudgment interest expansion. If the bill survives appropriations in anything close to its introduced form, plaintiff counsel should be re-running settlement calculus on cases over two years old. A 10% prejudgment rate compounded against case durations the trial courts cannot meaningfully shorten is a real number, and the math reorders late-stage 998 strategy.
Second is the litigation-finance disclosure bill. CAOC's opposition is firm, but the political reality is that some version of disclosure is likely to clear within two cycles. The fight is over scope, threshold, and whether defendants get any party-discovery access to funders. Practitioners using non-recourse funding should be papering files now with the assumption that disclosure will eventually be required.
Third is the post-Craft talc-verdict pressure on California venue rules. The Craft verdict in the J&J talc MDL — covered in our analysis of the MDL trial benchmarks — has the defense bar pushing for tighter venue and forum-shopping limits, particularly in mass-tort consolidation. CAOC's position is opposition to any narrowing of CCP §395 or the consolidation rules. The defense-side counter-push is the most credible threat to current consolidation practice in the last decade.
None of this is settled. Bills move, positions move, and the suspense file does what the suspense file does. The through-line for the 2026 session is that the plaintiff bar's policy committee is playing defense on more fronts than it has in three years, and the wins so far are coming from holding ground rather than taking it.