Scott G. Braden is a partner in Lynch Carpenter’s San Diego office, where his practice is devoted to complex consumer class actions. He represents consumers throughout the country in cases involving false and deceptive advertising, unlawful pricing practices, undisclosed product risks, and violations of consumer privacy, litigating in state and federal courts nationwide. Over the course of his career, Scott has been responsible for — or significantly contributed to — recoveries and business-practice changes delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in value to consumers.

Scott is at the forefront of plaintiff-side litigation involving kratom and 7-hydroxymitragynine (“7-OH”) — concentrated, opioid-like products sold for years in gas stations, smoke shops, and corner stores with little or no warning of their addictive potential. Scott saw the danger early and went to work while the industry was still operating in obscurity; federal and state regulators have since begun cracking down, only now catching up to what his investigations uncovered years ago. He leads a nationwide docket of class actions — spanning the Southern and Eastern Districts of California, the Eastern District of New York, and California state court — on behalf of consumers who allege these products were marketed as harmless botanical supplements while concealing effects that have turned lives upside down. Scott has converted that litigation into meaningful recoveries for the people harmed most, and real accountability for an industry that long avoided it.

Scott also runs a thriving false advertising and deceptive pricing practice. He has prosecuted class actions against some of the nation’s best-known retailers over fictitious “reference pricing” — phantom markdowns from prices at which merchandise was never actually sold — recovering millions of dollars for shoppers lured by fake discounts at outlet and factory stores. He leads the firm’s prosecution of In re Folgers Coffee Marketing Litigation (W.D. Mo.), a nationwide multidistrict proceeding challenging allegedly deceptive representations in the marketing and labeling of one of America’s best-selling coffee brands.

By instinct, Scott’s practice tilts toward what’s next. He devotes a considerable amount of his time to studying where consumer harm is headed — new technologies, new business models, new fine print — and turning that research into cases that are often among the first of their kind. As for what he’s working on now: you’ll know when it’s filed.

Scott was born and raised in California’s Central Valley, and completed his undergraduate degree at Fresno State, summa cum laude, with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Philosophy. In 2009, he relocated to San Diego to attend the University of San Diego School of Law, where he graduated in the top 6% of his class and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Before joining Lynch Carpenter, Scott spent years in the trenches of high-stakes civil litigation — personal injury, employment, real estate, and complex business disputes — handling matters from intake through resolution for clients whose livelihoods depended on the outcome. That ground-level experience, where every case was personal and there was nowhere to hide, shaped how he practices today: prepared, direct, and relentless on behalf of the people he represents.

Scott lives in El Cajon with his wife, Sarah, their two kids, Teddy and Neva, and their dogs, Luna and Lola. At home he’s the resident fort-building expert and the inventor of endless versions of the ‘monster’ game — which mostly means getting the kids completely wound up right before bedtime. Sarah is thrilled. He takes movies more seriously than he probably should (and has the trivia to prove it), is his own Guitar Hero, and travels with the family whenever they can swing it — most recently to Nicaragua (a trip that produced a new family travel policy: one parent, one kid, separate flights, same destination … the kids do not travel well together). Jokes aside, more than anything, Scott is curious — about other cultures and their food, customs, and history, and about big ideas of just about every kind, as his overloaded audiobook library can confirm. He’s a firm believer that curiosity and collaboration are the key ingredients for making anything better — his cases included.