As if trial lawyers didn’t already have enough good friends in the U.S. Senate, Democratic challenger and former state attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse is making a strong bid to unseat incumbent Lincoln Chafee for a Senate seat from Rhode Island. (Jim Baron, “Poll: Senate race even; Gov. surges”, Pawtucket (R.I.) Times, Oct. 3; “Democrats bet on former attorney general to take back Senate seat”, AP/WPRI, Sept. 14). Of the fifty state attorneys general, Whitehouse was the only one willing to sign up for the Motley Rice law firm’s crusade to attach retroactive liability to former makers of lead paint and pigment; see Jun. 7, 2001, Oct. 30-31, 2002, Mar. 5-7, 2003, Feb. 23, 2006, etc. For more on Whitehouse’s enthusiasm for such creative litigation, see Oct. 26, 1999 (latex gloves).
Posts Tagged ‘Motley Rice’
Motley Rice and its 9/11 cases
September 11 litigation as an industry, courtesy of the asbestos/tobacco zillionaires from South Carolina:
While other lawyers have resolved most or all of their cases — at least 32 of the roughly 90 total lawsuits have settled — Motley Rice has settled only three. …According to several lawyers and plaintiffs in the case, Motley Rice has made unusually high settlement demands, often 5 to 10 times higher than similar plane crash cases. The higher demands stem from Motley’s calculations for what it calls “terror damages” — compensation for the amount of time frightened victims knew they were fated to die — of between $750,000 and $1 million a minute, according to those lawyers and clients, who requested that their names not be used because the settlement process is confidential.
The story deserves a place in the “Not About The Money” files because client after client informs the Boston Globe that their litigation stance is entirely unrelated to that disdained cash nexus; presumably it’s just happenstance that they have wound up represented by lawyers who are making monetary recovery a very high priority indeed. Somehow one is reminded of the character in Flannery O’Connor: “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.” (via Lattman)(cross-posted from Point of Law).
R.I. jury finds former lead paint makers liable
“A Rhode Island jury today found Sherwin-Williams Co. and two other paintmakers guilty of creating a ‘public nuisance’ by manufacturing lead paint after it was found to be dangerous.” If upheld, the verdict will force the companies to contribute millions toward abatement of existing paint; a judge will also consider demands for punitive damages. The ruling, the first of its kind, is also expected to encourage the filing of more suits against the industry; the cities of Chicago and Milwaukee are among those with suits in progress. (Maya R. Payne, “Jury finds against three paintmakers”, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Feb. 22; AP/Boston Globe; Reuters). Blogger Jane Genova has been covering the three-month trial from the scene.
The verdict is an unfortunate confirmation that the “tobacco model” of mass tort litigation remains alive and well. In particular, contingency-fee private counsel have once again managed to 1) dream up a novel idea for litigation based on the idea that some category of public expenditure is really blameable on long-ago sales of a product; 2) sell the idea of suing to public officials who agree to front the action, and who thus provide (along with advocacy groups) a suitably public face for the lawsuit; and 3) manage to get liability attributed retroactively to businesses whose actions decades ago were plainly lawful under the standards of that time. In the Rhode Island case, in particular, the outcome represents the culmination of years of careful groundwork by South Carolina-based asbestos/tobacco powerhouse plaintiff’s firm Motley Rice (earlier Ness Motley), which some years embarked on a strategy of making itself a behind-the-scenes kingmaker in Rhode Island — one of America’s most politically insider-ish, as well as smallest, states. For details on how the Motley firm quickly established itself the number one donor in Rhode Island politics, with special generosity toward officials who could be helpful to its idea for a lead paint suit, see Jun. 7, 2001.
For more coverage of the Rhode Island suit, see Jun. 8-10, 2001; Jul. 2, Nov. 1 and Nov. 16, 2005; and various other entries.
Triggering the aero-litigation “cringe factor”
The law firm of Motley Rice has filed suit against Bombardier and numerous other defendants over the October 2004 crash of a Canadair regional jet operated by Pinnacle Airlines near Jefferson City, Mo., on behalf of the plane’s pilots. Aero-News.net editor Jim Campbell is decidedly critical of the suit. (“Barnstorming: Pinnacle Suit Pushes Aero-Litigation ‘Cringe-Factor’ Too Far”, Jan. 11).
Update: blame it on Riyadh
Even though the 9/11 commission (debunking certain widely circulated stories to the contrary) concluded that the government of Saudi Arabia did not fund al-Qaeda, several institutional victims of the terrorist attacks, including Cantor Fitzgerald Securities and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, recently filed suit against a long list of foreign entities including the Saudi government and various financial institutions for their alleged role in the attacks (Larry Neumeister, “Port Authority to Join Suit Against Saudi Arabia Over 9/11 Attack”, AP/Law.com, Sept. 13). The U.S. government has been highly critical of the freelance use of private litigation to second-guess the state of U.S.-Saudi relations, which has in no way deterred colorful asbestos-tobacco zillionaire Ron Motley from setting up his own mini-CIA-cum-State-Department-for-profit toward that end (Jennifer Senior, “Intruders in the House of Saud, Part II: A Nation Unto Himself”, New York Times Magazine, Mar. 14)(see Jul. 11, 2003). And in the New York Observer, Nina Burleigh in February profiled attorney Brian Alexander of the prominent plaintiff’s air-crash firm of Kreindler & Kreindler, who had “already filed a suit — on behalf of the families of more than 1,000 9/11 families?against a list of foreign entities hundreds of pages long.” (“Air Disasters, Legal Fees And Justice for the Victims”, New York Observer, Feb. 23).
Update: James Blair Down case
More developments in the Madison County case (Mar. 25, etc.) that Prof. Lester Brickman called “the most abusive class-action settlement of the decade, if not the century.” “Circuit Judge Phillip J. Kardis approved on Thursday a plan to notify potential claimants in the suit against Canadian con man James Blair Down.” However, New York attorney Jody Pope, representing objectors, says class members are not receiving proper notification of their right to make claims. The case involves prominent plaintiff’s firms Ness Motley (now Motley Rice) and Korein Tillery. (Paul Hampel, “Suit against con man nears settlement”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 9).
Update: Ness Motley and James Down
A feature from the Chicago Tribune on the Ness Motley sellout of its clients in the James Blair Down case (see Jul. 7 and follow-ups Aug. 24 and Jan. 17) is revealing about forum-shopping:
[Blair] Hahn told his clients he knew exactly where to find the class-action judgment they needed: in Madison County, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
In testimony later, [former Secret Service agent James] McGunn said Hahn assured them he could “manipulate” the court, and that “his wishes would be granted.”
“The reason that they selected Madison County was because the judge there looked very kindly on Ness Motley and would be very favorably impressed with whatever they said,” McGunn recalled Hahn telling him. “They would have no problem in Madison County.”
On February 18, Madison County Judge Phillip Kardis (Oct. 7) held a twenty-minute hearing and preliminarily approved a class action settlement that provided millions for the lawyers and little for the class. (Greg Burns, “The lawsuit capital”, Chicago Tribune, Mar. 8).
Update: judge upholds verdict against Ness Motley
Updating our Aug. 24 report: “A federal judge has upheld the $36 million malpractice verdict against Ness Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole. U.S. District Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer agreed that the defunct South Carolina firm put its fees above the interests of Irish client Interclaim Holdings.” Appeal is planned. (Lori Patel, law.com, Jan. 14; “$36 Million Malpractice Award Against Firm Upheld”, New York Lawyer, Jan. 13).
Daschle does the trial-lawyer hop
A Senate Minority Leader’s gotta drum up money, after all: he popped down to Jacksonville last Thursday for a fund-raiser hosted by plaintiff’s lawyer Wayne Hogan, part of the $3.4-billion-in-fees Florida tobacco team (see Apr. 12, 2000), and then yesterday attended an event at the Providence, R.I., home of Ness Motley’s Jack McConnell (see Jun. 7, 2001) (David DeCamp, “Party not big on bid from Weinstein”, Jacksonville Times-Union, Dec. 15; Liz Anderson, Scott MacKay and Katherine Gregg, “State House’s quick Thanksgiving food drive is no turkey”, Providence Journal, Dec. 1) (hat tip: South Dakota Politics blog)
Update: Ness Motley to fight misconduct verdict
Not unexpectedly, the billionaire tobacco/ asbestos plaintiff’s law firm says it will contest a jury’s $36 million verdict, including $28 million in punitive damages, for having allegedly placed its own financial interests ahead of those of its clients in a class action settlement over a Canadian telemarketing swindle (see Jul. 7). The verdict is said to be the second-largest against a law firm in the past ten years: “‘Anytime you see an award of that magnitude, you can expect the jury senses lawyer greed, and that angers them,’ said Joe McMonigle, a San Francisco attorney and former chairman of the American Bar Association’s committee on lawyers’ professional liability.” (Frank Norton, “Reputations hinge on Ness Motley appeal”, Charleston Post & Courier, Aug. 3; “Lowcountry law firm contesting verdict in legal ethics case”, AP/The State (Columbia, S.C.), Aug. 4).
Meanwhile, two lawsuits by former Ness Motley attorneys are painting an unattractive picture of life inside the giant firm, which is now known as Motley Rice (more than two dozen attorneys and employees quit and formed a second firm, Richardson, Patrick, Westbrook and Brickman.) In one case, dissident attorneys have asked a judge to ground a $13 million Dassault Falcon used by star lawyers Ron Motley and Joe Rice; in another, a female attorney charges a pattern of sexual harassment and misconduct at the firm, which it strenuously denies (Tony Barthelme, “Court filings shed light on Ness Motley schism”, Charleston Post & Courier, Aug. 22).