The Colorado Civil Justice League handed out its “Common Sense in the Courtroom Awards” to 43 bipartisan members of the Colorado General Assembly Thursday.

The CCJL focuses on limiting unreasonable lawsuits and preserving common sense in the courtroom. Former state Treasurer and state lawmaker Mark Hillman is the group’s executive director.

Three lawmakers were singled out for special recognition during the CCJL’s annual legislative awards luncheon, lawmakers “who went above and beyond to support CCJL’s issues and issues that matter to businesses across Colorado,” according to lobbyist Amy Attwood of Attwood Public Affairs.

In describing Rep. Shannon Bird, D-Westminster, Attwood said Bird is independent and fierce. “Groupthink is a common phenomenon at the Capitol … sometimes that makes sense. It can take a great deal of courage” to step up, and “Bird has the courage of a lion,” Attwood said.

“She sees the forest, she see the trees and she sees the bark,” and she’s a great thinker who can dive into the details, lobbyist Jennifer Mello said of Rep. Terri Carver, R-Colorado Springs. She also described Carver as “gently tenacious.”

The third award went to Sen. Paul Lundeen, R-Monument. Mello said she’s worked with Lundeen on education policy before he was a lawmaker. “He is a very steady, consistent, calm presence. That may be a weird thing to say of Paul Lundeen, but he slows down to understand the issue, and then moves very fast,” like when Mello asks him to go talk on the floor for a while so she and her colleagues can work out solutions.

Kyla Christofferson Powell, president and CEO of the Civil Justice Association of California was the luncheon’s keynote speaker. Several lawmakers commented that she would strike a cautionary tale about what could happen in Colorado.

Powell addressed legal reform, and when the legislature’s will doesn’t match the will of the voters. She explained that two laws in particular have driven substantial increases in frivolous lawsuits, the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), which allows employees and employers to take on part of the legal role previously assigned to the state’s labor agency, and the California Lemon Law, which primarily deals with motor vehicles.

Both laws have resulted in thousands of lawsuits in the California courts. For the PAGA law, more than 6,000 were filed in 2020, some of which are “shakedowns over minor technical violations,” Powell said. The lemon law has doubled the number of lawsuits filed in the last five years, now at 9,232 filed in 2020. Just five law firms are responsible for 43% of those lawsuits, Powell said.

With no luck getting reforms through the California Assembly, where one party (Democrats) hold a super majority in both houses, according to Powell, the Civil Justice Association is heading to the ballot. Powell indicated that is a difficult process, due to the cost and that ballot measures require more than 600,000 valid signatures. “It’s not a slam dunk,” she said. Polling, however, shows that the measures proposed by the association could be well-received by voters.