Cowboys, margaritas and toxic trash: Some sour on lawyers in lucrative L.A. landfill cases

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Set us as preferred Val Verde is a place with few strangers.Forty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, the tiny foothill community of 3,000 has one main road, spotty cell service and a lone local market.Yet nobody could remember ever seeing the man in a cowboy hat before 2024, when he was spotted talking to residents about lawsuits against the local dump.At the time, the neighboring Chiquita Canyon landfill had never smelled worse.

For more than a year, an uncontrolled fire had burned in the bowels of the dump, broiling old garbage and sending nauseating fumes into nearby homes.Oshea Orchid, a local lawyer, filed the first class-action lawsuit in 2023 against the operators of the county’s second-largest landfill, alleging the fumes were sickening her neighbors, causing headaches and heart palpitations.For months, she said, she’d been the only lawyer taking on the cases.But as she passed the town’s market Feb.

4, 2024, she spotted the cowboy promising lawsuits to patrons, according to a complaint Orchid later filed with the State Bar of California.The man, she said in the complaint, told her he was hired by Downtown LA Law Group, a firm under criminal investigation by L.A.County’s district attorney over claims that some of its clients made up stories of sexual abuse in juvenile halls in order to sue.“He admitted he was an actor and that the DTLA Law Group had paid him $5,000 to drive from Las Vegas, put him up in a hotel, given him Western attire and directed him to pretend to be a local cowboy to solicit residents of Val Verde in front of the Fast Stop,” Orchid recounted in the April 2026 complaint.

“Before agreeing to leave, he gave us the chaps he didn’t know how to use.”The brown leather chaps, Orchid said, are still stuffed in her office.California bans non-attorneys from directly soliciting or pro...