Pamela Gilbert on Four Decades of Consumer Advocacy

This transcript of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR was generated using AI transcription and lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, and speaker labels are approximate. The audio recording is the authoritative version.

Welcome to Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, the podcast where we elevate the stories of the plaintiff's bar and dive into the key trends shaping the civil justice system today. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and in each episode, we'll bring you insightful interviews with leading attorneys, expert perspectives on current legal events, and in-depth discussions on the issues that matter most. Now, let's jump in.

Antitrust is having its moment. We have an anti-monopoly movement in this country that we never had before, and it's fabulous, and it's made up of people and small businesses who understand that if we don't have strong antitrust enforcement, consumers and small businesses can't get a break.

Ray: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to a new episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. Today, we are joined by Pam Gilbert. I'm just very honored to have one of the most renowned, celebrated consumer advocates in our nation's history. I don't think that's too far, Pam. I know you won't agree to that, but whatever. She's a name partner with Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca in Washington, D.C., and does a great deal of government affairs work, antitrust work, and consumer protection work. And in this moment in time, and what's happening in Washington, D.C., antitrust has been having a moment for quite some time. So Pam is a perfect guest to talk about a lot of these issues with us. So, Pam, thank you so much for joining the podcast today.

Pamela: Absolutely. It's nice to be here, Ray. I think that was a little bit of an overstatement, but I'll take it.

Ray: A little hyperbole here and there is fine. So, just to start this off, Pam — how did you get into being a consumer advocate? I know you had a really interesting sort of come-up at college. Just walk us through that.

Pamela: Sure, sure. So, thank you for asking. So, this is a long time ago now, but I went to college at Tufts University outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and this was the late 1970s. I was just into being a political activist. I had seen, you know, sort of during the 60s and the early 70s, the anti-Vietnam War stuff, and I thought college meant political activism. Little did I realize that that time had passed a little bit by the time I got to school, but I just wanted to do some of that advocacy and activism. I got myself into something called the Tufts Political Action Coalition and worked for three years during college doing South African divestment work, anti-nuclear power work, that kind of stuff. And I really loved it — I loved it more than the subjects I was studying.

And so I approached my mentor as I was graduating from college and I said, so who pays you to do this kind of work? And he essentially said Ralph Nader hires young people to do this kind of work. So anyway, I picked myself up and went to Washington, D.C. No job, no nothing. My parents were helping me out for a little while, and I pounded the pavement, and I was lucky enough to get a job at a nonprofit group. I was the office manager at a group called the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, but it was a really great location to see a lot of important people come in and out, including Ralph Nader and others. And I realized then that all the people who were doing the kind of work that I wanted to do were lawyers.

So that was it. I said, well, I'm going to go to law school and I'm going to come back and I'm going to do this work. I was fortunate enough to get a Root-Tilden Public Interest Law Scholarship at NYU. That really helped, because it paid for summer jobs, so I did work at public interest groups, paid for during the summer while I was at law school. That helped me get what was my dream job out of law school, working for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington, D.C., as essentially a consumer lobbyist in Congress. I worked very, very long hours, and I remember this because I was so proud they were paying me $13,000 a year when I graduated from law school. One of my friends from school used to say, you know, that's Pam Gilbert, she's making in the five figures — because, of course, I was just barely making in the five figures. But anyway, I've stayed in the consumer protection world really ever since. It's been over 40 years now.

Ray: So fast forward a bit from your days at PIRG — and I know you were at Public Citizen for some time — you ended up being executive director of the CPSC. What was that job like, and that responsibility, when every consumer product, you have a hand in? I mean, it just seems like a tremendous responsibility. But also, from someone who was outside of government, and sort of the resistance to being inside the government, how was that transition?

Pamela: Right, right. Yeah. That is a great question. So I loved being at the CPSC, but it was a big transition, because I went from Congress Watch, which was part of Public Citizen — I was the executive director, I had 20 employees and like a million-dollar-a-year budget — to running the agency. So that was a little adjustment, to go to running a 500-person agency with a multi-million-dollar budget. But what I loved was the mission of the agency, which is to keep people safe from unsafe and defective consumer products. And really, in the moment we're having now, I do look back on that time and think what a crime what's going on now is. Because my impression of government employees is that they go to work every day with one idea in mind, and that is to serve the public. And at the CPSC, it's to protect the public from dangerous products.

We would hear of deaths or injuries, especially to children. There was a pall over the agency when we would find out about something that happened due to a consumer product that we thought we should have prevented, but we didn't. And these were people who really knew they were being paid by the taxpayers, and they owed a duty to that public to work as hard as they could every day to keep them safe. It was really a privilege to work with those people and to be there.

And one big difference between what I had done on the outside and inside is that on the outside I'm an advocate. In government, I was the implementer. I was implementing the laws that I had been advocating for, and it was very, very satisfying to do that and to actually see real results from your work. So it was different. I loved it.

Ray: You know, I'm not sure if you had this attitude, but I think people who are outside of government and who are advocating for something often get frustrated with the process and say, it's so obvious, why don't they do X or do Y? And I'm curious if you ever had that attitude, and then when you went inside government, how your perceptions changed of how it works.

Pamela: That is such a good question, and you are exactly right. Because then I was being lobbied by the consumer advocates I had just worked with. And they did come, and they were so frustrated: why haven't you recalled this product already? Why haven't you passed this rule already? And I pushed back, because once you know how it works and everything that has to go into making those decisions and getting it actually done, there's just much more to it than you know as the outsider. And I did take that with me since.

So now that I am again on the outside, it's not that I'm not demanding — because that's our job as advocates, to be demanding — but I think in a much more understanding way, to know that as the federal agency, you answer to more than just those consumer advocates, honestly. You've got laws that you have to follow, you have rules and standards that have to be met, hoops that have to be gone through, and then something that's going to last through the litigation process and the political process. So there's just much more that you have to take into consideration. In many ways, being an advocate for one point of view is the easy part. So the rest of it is harder.

Ray: I'm curious about when you helped with President Obama's transition team at the CPSC. There were eight years of the George W. Bush presidency — someone who wasn't exactly known for consumer activism and a strong regulatory state. You had that eight-year break in between. When you went to help with the transition, what was your reaction to, like, what are we looking at here?

Pamela: Well, one thing — and again, this is why it's so sad what's happening with the federal government right now — is that there's usually great staff retention. So it might have been eight years, but I went back and mostly the same people who had worked for me were still there. That's a nice thing about the government: even as the political people come and go, the career staff don't come and go in quite that way. And so there's a base at these agencies that keeps grinding on no matter who's in charge. A lot of the basic work gets done pretty much the same no matter who's in charge. There are only a few things that are more political that rise to a different level.

But the other thing that was interesting about that particular moment in time is that in those eight years, the Bush administration didn't have very strong leadership at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and they went through what was a big scandal for the agency. It was discovered that household products that everybody knows about, like Barbie dolls and Thomas the Tank, had very high levels of lead in them. They had come from China with these enormously high levels of lead. It became a huge bipartisan scandal, and the most important reform of the CPSC since it had been founded was passed in 2007. And so when the Obama administration came in not very long after, there were a lot of good reforms underway. It was a good opportunity for the Democrats to come in and make a lot of changes, which they did.

Ray: I want to pivot to your current role and your current law firm, Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, which is an interesting law firm, and unlike any in the plaintiff's bar, in that you guys do a lot of consumer protection work and antitrust work, which I want to get into, but you also have a governmental representation, governmental affairs flank. And I think that's really interesting. Tell me a little bit about how that started, and the genesis of it, and why it makes your firm such a unique beast.

Pamela: Sure. Thanks, Ray. And we are very proud of that. So that really came from our founder, Jonathan Cuneo, who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. He founded this law firm as the Law Offices of Jonathan W. Cuneo, basically just put his shingle out, after he had done a stint at the Federal Trade Commission and then as antitrust counsel on the House Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives. And so when he started, he intended really mostly to be a lobbyist, to work in front of federal agencies and before Congress. He started to build his firm, and one of the practices that he developed was representing groups of plaintiffs' lawyers — plaintiffs' lawyers who bring securities and investor protection lawsuits or who bring antitrust lawsuits.

And as he developed and the law firm started growing, he started doing some litigation and some lobbying. And then the litigation practice started growing, and he started to build that practice. At some point, the litigation practice was much bigger than the lobbying practice, but the interesting thing about John is he never wanted to give up the lobbying practice. Our office was on Capitol Hill at the time. He had all that great experience, and he really thought there was a great synergy between a plaintiff's class action practice and a government relations or policy practice. And so he kept that going, and I'm very proud to say now it's bigger than ever.

So we have a government affairs team that brings to the table expertise in antitrust, in healthcare, access to the courts, workers' compensation, and a benefits practice. So it's pretty broad expertise on the government affairs side, which dovetails very, very nicely with our consumer, antitrust, civil rights, and labor practice in the litigation space.

Ray: I always have this saying — I think the biggest, most consequential issues, if you're trying to move them, it's like a three-legged stool. It's the litigation side, the government affairs side, and the media and external relations side. And obviously we do one leg of that stool, and you guys have two of those legs. But I think there's something, especially these days, if you're looking to get something changed in rulemaking or policy-wise, it's going to be challenged. So how do you approach it when a client says, hey, this rule is bad, it's not protecting people, how do we change it? How do you think about the five-to-ten-year plan that it may take? Because maybe you get it changed tomorrow — you never get it changed tomorrow — but then it's going to be litigated for a few years. How do you get your arms around all that?

Pamela: Right. Well, it's not hard for me, because now, being a creature of Washington, D.C., I do know that nothing happens right away. Everything has a drawn-out process. Explaining that to the clients is hard, because they just don't really realize how slow it is. We're in a democracy, and in general — except for what the Trump-Musk administration is doing right now — it moves and grinds pretty slowly because of all the due process and the checks and balances. At the end of the day, it's probably a good thing.

But you are exactly right that, as the expert, it's my job to educate my clients about, A, how the process works, and B, why all these different institutions are important. So you can't just look at Congress. You do have to also consider: well, if we're going to pass something, who's going to implement it? You have to look at the federal agency side as well, and then always be aware that things get challenged — so how is this going to work when it goes into the courts? And then your expertise is that you have to bring the public along every step of the way, especially on the issues we work on, where we are representing generally the broader public interest against more special or private interests. Our opposition usually has more money than we do, and so what we have to rely on is public opinion on our side. So we always have to have that piece of the puzzle as well.

RebuttalPR is a strategic communications firm that works exclusively with the plaintiff's bar to market their firms and win high-stakes litigation. For more than 15 years, the nation's leading plaintiff law firms have turned to RebuttalPR to create winning communications campaigns, ranging from billion-dollar mass torts and class actions to positioning attorneys in their markets to grow their businesses and make a bigger impact. What sets RebuttalPR apart is the unique skill set of our team, which combines legal knowledge with public relations expertise. Our team's ability to understand the facts and law of a case, as well as the media landscape, means we can develop compelling, narrative-driven campaigns that resonate with key stakeholders and support your firm and legal strategy. Visit our website, rebuttalpr.com, to learn more. Now, back to our episode.

Ray: Again, we're joined here by Pam Gilbert of Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about antitrust. So I know you run an organization called COSAL. Can you take a minute and explain to those listening at home what COSAL is and sort of its special place in the litigation world?

Pamela: Sure, thanks. So COSAL is the Committee to Support the Antitrust Laws. It was founded almost 40 years ago — we're about one year shy of that. It is an association of plaintiffs' class action law firms that prosecute antitrust claims. And again, it was helped to be founded by my law partner, John Cuneo, who had worked in Congress as antitrust counsel. When he was there, he realized there were very few outside organizations lobbying for strong antitrust enforcement. He was surrounded by lots of corporate lobbyists coming in all the time to work to weaken the antitrust laws, and the only people there who wanted to strengthen them were a bunch of academics and the staff themselves, the Capitol Hill staff who cared. They pushed back, but it wasn't a fair fight.

So he talked to and helped organize the plaintiff's bar to say, you need to be up there on Capitol Hill countering big business's messaging, to be on the other side of that, to be for strong antitrust enforcement. And we're very proud that we are stronger than ever 40 years later. That's what we do: before the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission and Congress, we lobby for and support strong antitrust laws. But I'll also say that for maybe 35 of those 40 years, we were pretty much alone. And now antitrust is having its moment. We have an anti-monopoly movement in this country that we never had before, and it's fabulous.

It's made up of people and small businesses who understand that if we don't have strong antitrust enforcement, consumers and small businesses can't get a break. The prices are too high, quality is low, we don't have choice in the marketplace. And we see it. Big tech is a big part of that reason, but it's not just big tech — it's big food, it's big pharma. The egg prices are skyrocketing, and a lot of people think a lot of that is because of the consolidation in the egg industry. Everywhere we turn, we have fewer choices than we did before, and that's just bad for our economy, and it's bad for people.

Ray: So I'm glad you mentioned COSAL has been around for about 40 years, and maybe for 30, 35 of those, it felt like, in terms of private enforcement, Microsoft was kind of it. And I know that's a very broad generalization, but why did it go dormant so long, or feel like it went dormant? And why is it on the rise now as an area of such intense interest?

Pamela: You know, your first question is a good one, and I'm not sure I have a good answer for it. Why was it so quiet for so long? We had trustbusters, right? Teddy Roosevelt and FDR. And that was kind of a big thing in America. Maybe it's because we do have strong antitrust laws, and we did have a lot of those trusts busted up, so maybe people thought that the problem had been solved and that we pretty much have good competition now. But I think what happened more recently is that the antitrust cops really were taken off the beat.

We had good private enforcement, but public antitrust enforcement — and I'm not proud to say this, but for both Democratic and Republican administrations — was just not what it needed to be. And then we had enormous consolidation in airlines, right? And everybody sees the effects of that, and in food, and in healthcare. And what do they all have in common? Prices have skyrocketed, and service and quality have gone down. And then I think the thing that pushed it over the edge are the big tech platforms that, in the beginning, gave us services we never had before, and they were like a miracle, right? Apple and Google and Facebook.

And then they got so big and so powerful that people saw that they were now being taken advantage of by these same big tech corporations, who seem to live in a world of no guardrails, very little government regulation, and very little antitrust enforcement or litigation. I think that's the thing that people started realizing: hmm, some of these companies have gotten too big and they're crowding out the competition. And it became like a public education. I think we're still going through that moment right now.

Ray: So there's been bipartisan — interesting, not usual — lines on antitrust issues. J.D. Vance, when he was in the Senate, where he wasn't very long, was a big proponent of antitrust enforcement. Now he's vice president. Are you optimistic about public antitrust enforcement? Or are you expecting the private bar to have to pick up some slack in this administration? Where do you see it going? I hate to ask anyone to predict what's going to happen over the next four years, let alone four weeks. But where do you see it going?

Pamela: Right, great question. So I will say, to give President Biden's administration its due, there was a resurgence in government antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration, both at the Justice Department and at the Federal Trade Commission — bigger and better than I had ever seen it in my career. And what's very interesting now is that it looks like the Trump administration wants to keep up the antitrust pressure. We've heard from particularly the new antitrust chief at the Justice Department, who was just confirmed — her name is Gail Slater — and then the person who's going to be the head of criminal for antitrust, Omeed Assefi. They've both been making public comments lately about how they want to keep up the strong antitrust enforcement of the Biden administration, and they want to continue the high-profile cases like the cases against Amazon and Google that were launched by the federal government.

They are going to keep those up. There are the merger enforcement guidelines from the Biden administration, stronger anti-merger guidelines than we had seen before, and the Trump administration just embraced them. So we are cautiously optimistic that we're going to keep pretty strong public enforcement on the federal level. But having said that, we don't know. And that's why private enforcement is always so important, because we don't change from administration to administration. We're always there to go after the antitrust violators.

Ray: So you've testified in front of Congress more than 50 times, I believe, in front of committees chaired by Republicans and Democrats. You've worked across multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat. What's your approach, when you're at the center of these major policy debates, to find common ground and reach people who just may not have the same sensibilities you do on some of these issues?

Pamela: Sure, yeah. So I have always approached all the issues that I work on from the consumer protection angle. And that shouldn't be liberal or conservative or Democratic or Republican. Everybody's a consumer, everybody's out there wanting safe products, high quality, low prices. And so I always like to talk about the issues from the perspective of just ordinary people, or also small businesses.

And over the course of my career, one of the things that I've ended up specializing in is bringing victims of some kind of corporate abuse or bad behavior to Congress to tell their stories. And I don't ask what party affiliation those people have when they come to Washington, D.C., and it doesn't matter. I take them to Capitol Hill and they tell their stories, and it doesn't matter who they're talking to — people are affected by real people's stories, and then they want to help. So it's partly that I feel fortunate to have fallen into the kind of issues that I work on, but they really are and should be cross-cutting. They shouldn't have a party.

Ray: As you look back on 35 years or so of consumer advocacy, what's the one issue that you worked on that stands out to you, or means the most to you?

Pamela: Oh my goodness. That's like asking which child you like the most. So this is maybe going to be a little unfair as an answer, because it's pretty cross-cutting. But at the bottom, the basis for most of the work that I have done I put under the category of access to justice. And that is really in my blood now. That's the ability of people who are harmed to be able to use the court system to get a remedy. And I feel so strongly about that concept for anybody, however you are a victim — and I've dealt with a large range of them.

The court system that we have in America is unique, and it's kind of magic, because it does so much in one system. You get the facts out — it helps people get the facts out. You have the ability to go before a jury, which takes no campaign contributions, isn't bought or sold by anybody. And you have the ability for people to be compensated, and it also provides a deterrent effect, which helps to regulate the entire marketplace. So in one system, you've got the information, the compensation, the regulation, and fairness all wrapped up. And I'm not sure you could say that about any of the other institutions that help to govern society. And so I work very, very hard to keep that access open, and sometimes it's easier than other times. But I think that's what I enjoy the most.

Ray: For any young lawyers who may be listening to this — let's say law school students who want to get into public interest law — what advice would you give them before doing so? Many look at government, regardless of party, and may be frustrated that nothing gets done, that it's bickering, it's slow-moving. What would you tell them?

Pamela: So I'd say, first of all, it's a great area to go into if it's something that you think you're going to love. And to me, the most important thing is to find something that you love and that you really care about and are passionate about. That's how you overcome the bad days or the obstacles or the challenges, because at the end of the day, you're just really passionate about what you're working on, and that's what keeps you going.

And also, I think, find a community. I feel like I live and work with a community of people who are working on issues that they care about, and that makes it easier too, to sort of take the dark times, because you can turn to friends. There's a very strong community both in the plaintiff's bar and in the public interest community, of people that have each other's backs.

Ray: Once again, Pam Gilbert with Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca. Pam, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. Really appreciate the conversation and your perspective.

Pamela: Absolutely. It was really fun. Thanks a lot, Ray.

Ray: Thank you. Take care.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. Don't forget to subscribe and follow to join us next time. See you then.