On August 22, Lee Brenner and David Fink spoke with The Recorder about the anti-SLAPP "Fee-Cutting." The following is an excerpt:
Lee Brenner and David Fink, partners at Venable in Los Angeles, say that since the infamous legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard launched in 2022, defamation claims have been steadily on the rise—and no more so than in 2025, which Brenner dubbed "The Year of Defamation."
"Everyone else is starting to jump on the bandwagon," said Brenner in an interview. "The cool kids are suing for defamation, and so now the rest of us are going to do it too. I'm just seeing defamation cases all the time."
One of the factors driving the explosion of cases, said Fink, is the role of social media, which reaches "more people faster with less oversight."
But a new trend to monitor in the defamation litigation space, said Brenner and Fink, is the fact that some courts are moving to reduce or eliminate fees awarded under the anti-SLAPP statute when losing plaintiffs claim indigency, which they claim undercuts the statute by shifting costs back to defendants.
The Recorder caught up with Brenner and Fink to weigh in on how this new trend might power a new wave of "frivolous" defamation claims.
Click here for the full article.