It wouldn't surprise me if this is another case of lawyers, fronting themselves as a non-profit, enriching themselves. California, in an attempt to "do right", makes it all too easy for lawyers to scam the system.
I have a bit of a pet peeve here. The US often does what amounts to quality control ass backwards. Because we don't have good quality control in medical care - we're left with the most expensive kind of quality control -- paying for field errors -- as the de facto standard for the nation. Medical errors, especially in hospitals, kill about 30% of those who die. It might be even worse if not for the threat of legal action to eventually get rid of bad doctors -- but it would be a whole lot better and cheaper to fix the problems (sometimes as simple as washing hands or being sure it's the left leg you want to cut off) before people die.
Similarly, there is a sort of scam here of going around to public businesses, finding some problem for the disabled, and essentially doing a bit of lawyerly extortion. Cheaper and better to make this more of a routine building code, restaurant inspection, etc. thing. But we'd rather save that public expense and, instead, leave it to lawyers.
Same thing applies to a lot of industrial accidents, fires, chemical spills, etc. The fear of getting sued for being negligent after killing a bunch of people or ruining a water supply is somewhat of a deterrent -- but we really ought to be applying best practices in building, transporting, etc. from the beginning. Seems we'd rather gut things like OSHA and the EPA -- and then let lawyers remind us of the problems with million to billion dollar lawsuits.
You can add in safety. There's something wrong when GM knows a hundred of its customers will die from a bad ignition switch design -- and it takes a lawsuit to get that fixed. Ditto VW and emissions, Exxon and oil spills, BP and the Gulf, Flint and its water system, etc.
Apparently lawyers and financiers run in enough the same circles that we still haven't done more than slap a few wrists for the various frauds in the run up to the 2008 "Great Recession." The country is now doing pretty much nothing to avoid a repeat.
With respect to coffee, there's some evidence that it actually lessens the incidence of some cancers; as well as the evidence that the current roasting process might be a problem. Maybe sort of like decaf coffee when carcinogenic solvents were used to take out the caffeine. Shame that enriching slimy lawyers is our way of recognizing and dealing with problems like this.
Should add that I'm not anti-lawyer. Rule of law is a great thing -- a real competitive advantage for towns, states, and nations that do it right. Lawyers working to avoid future disputes, protect legitimate rights, and assure a just society are terrific. Glad we have them.
However, we've got about 10x the number of lawyers, per capita, than either Japan or Canada. Seriously, ten times as many. Those countries seem to be as honest and just as our own (yeah, no one is perfect). Unlike most jobs, lawyers don't have to sell their services -- they can concoct some marginal BS and force their "services" on to a "customer" via a lawsuit. As someone who has spent a lifetime in various aspects of new product development I've thought how come lawyers and not engineers can just walk up to a company and say "Your product kind of sucks, pay me $1,000,000 and I'll go away, maybe give you some tips on what to change."
If we did quality control right -- from toxic substances through equal rights to health care and finance -- we wouldn't need so many lawyers and wouldn't be hearing of this sort of excess.