Loyola Law School professor and civil procedure expert Georgene Vairo emphasizes the enormity of what’s on the line for both sides. “For a single-event type of incident, this is the biggest we’ve ever seen, just in the range of claims, the government and private-party actions, the cost of claims, the insurance aspects,” she told the LA Times. “It’s just the whole nine yards. It’s huge.”

What’s most surprising (or perhaps entirely unsurprising) is how transparent the oil companies have been in trying to get the cases heard in Houston, their home base where judges and the public may be more sympathetic to their claims. BP has even petitioned in favor of Judge Lynn N. Hughes who, like a handful of regional judges, has a record major investments in the oil industry.

Plaintiffs, on the other hand, are hoping the lawsuits will move forward in Louisiana, where residents are more likely to have personal connections to the spill and vilify BP and its affiliates.

Over the past months, plaintiffs and consumer advocates have expressed concern that maritime laws cap BP’s liability at $75 million. In reality, that number is expected to be much higher considering that the company is liable for unlimited clean up costs. And if plaintiffs’ attorneys can show that the companies were willfully negligent, all bets are off. Charlie Tebbutt, an Oregon attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity said the maximum penalties for BP and Transocean could reach $4,300 per barrel spilled, up to $20 billion, “if we can prove gross negligence or willful misconduct, which we expect should be relatively easy to prove in this case.”

Due to the volume and diversity of lawsuits against BP and its affiliates, many plaintiffs’ attorneys expect the company to catch some heat from whichever judge is assigned to the suits. But there’s no doubt that location will have a large impact and could be the deciding factor on whether BP sinks or swims when the suits are complete.

Photo credit: USCGD8

Girls Just Want to Have Funds

Date: Upcoming
Number of plaintiffs: 1 million
Total Award: Potentially $300 billion

Let’s start with WalMart. By a close 6-5 decision in April, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals approved the class action, saying that WalMart, the world’s largest employer, must address the claims that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and is less likely to promote women for management positions. It is important to note that gender discrimination in the workplace is regrettably prevalent throughout society. Even in 2010, women earn on average 79 cents for every dollar men earn.

In a somewhat anemic official statement, a WalMart spokesman said “we do not believe the claims….WalMart is an excellent place for women to work and fosters female leadership among our associates and in the larger business world.” It’s unclear how much cash #1 on the Fortune 500 could be on the hook for, but some estimate up to $300,000 per instance of discrimination, for a total $300 billion if all one million women receive payments. I guess that’s the cost of the first half of their slogan (and apparent business model) “Save money. Live better.”

Department of the Inferior

Date: December, 2008
Number of plaintiffs: 300,000
Total Award: $3.4 billion

In a long-standing class action lawsuit settled last year, a group of Native Americans sued the United States government for grossly mismanaging their assets derived from oil, gas, and mineral rights, resulting in significant loss of income. The original complaint alleges that the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs failed to keep records and destroyed documents proving their breach of trust to cover up their negligence. In the largest ever class action lawsuit against the government, more than 300,000 individuals initially asked for $27.5 billion in 1996. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder agreed to pay the plaintiffs $3.4 billion, $2 billion of which would be set aside for a land consolidation scholarship program to benefit Native American investments.

“If it was me, I would fight on for another 100 years, I was not tired,” said Elouise Cobell of Montana’s Blackfeet Tribe. “I wanted to continue to fight on, but the deciding factor was, I live in Indian country and I see every single day people dying without their money and you just can’t take it anymore.” She added “We’ve suffered too long in the government’s hands and now it’s time for change.”

Breast. Settlement. Ever.

Date: February, 1994
Number of plaintiffs: 10,000
Total Award: $4.75 billion

About two decades ago, women with breast implants began noticing a correlation between their implants and a rise in illnesses such as lupus, scleroderma, and arthritis. The plaintiffs sued three major implant companies, Dow Corning, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Baxter International, for medical fees and related damages. In 1993, a partnership of the defendants agreed to pay $4.75 billion over thirty years, one of the largest medical payouts ever. The class action lawsuit consolidated the claims of 10,000 patients, including 3,500 from California.

In a statement at the time, the companies maintained that their breast enhancing products were safe, adding that they settled the lawsuits in order to prevent additional legal action. It seems like quite a price tag for a safe product, which threw Dow Corning into a 9-year bankruptcy protection, ending in 2004.

Erroneous Enron

Date: September, 2008
Number of plaintiffs: 1.5 million people and entities
Total Award: $7.2 billion

Remember when the sub prime bubble burst two years ago and a handful of Wall Street firms sent the economy into disarray? Well that happened a decade ago, too, on a much smaller, but much more sinister scale. In 2001, it was revealed that Enron lied about key financial information to keep investments coming in. When the scheme was uncovered, the company quickly went bankrupt amidst a deluge of lawsuits from angry investors. Plaintiffs originally asked for $40 billion, but after a six year legal battle, Enron agreed to pay $7.2 billion in the largest ever settlement for securities litigation. The second largest was in a related WorldCom accounting scandal, which the company settled for $6.1 billion.

Plaintiff awards ranged from $6.50 per share to $168.50 per share, depending on the size of the original investment. Plaintiff attorneys were also pleased with the result, especially considering that a judge awarded the firm managing the class action $688 million. “We’re pleased that the court recognizes the tremendous amount of work, skill and determination required to overcome significant obstacles in this complicated case and recover over $7 billion for defrauded investors,” said Patrick Coughlin, the firm’s chief trial attorney.

Playing the Market

Date: December, 1997
Number of plaintiffs: 1 million +
Total Award: $1 billion

In another financial malfeasance class action, a group of plaintiffs took on more than 30 brokerage firms for fixing prices to squeeze out more cash from investors. Among others, the class action targeted Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs (yeah, those guys) for keeping the gap between buying and selling prices of stocks artificially wide to promote additional investments between 1989 and 1994.

Three years later, the Wall Street cohort agreed to pay $1 billion to duped investors, the largest civil antitrust settlement in history at the time. Still, the brokerages denied wrongdoing. “Although we believe our practices were entirely proper, it made no sense to continue litigating the merits of practices that are no longer followed when the matter could be resolved on an industry wide basis,” said Merrill Lynch spokesman Bill Halldin. It seems, however, that the events of the last two years indicate that the settlement wasn’t enough to get Wall Street to clean up its act.

Up in Smoke

Date: July, 2000
Number of plaintiffs: 700,000
Total Award: $144.8 billion (revoked May, 2003)

In 2000, a Miami jury awarded $144.8 billion, by far the largest class action settlement in history, to more than 700,000 plaintiffs who claimed they suffered from tobacco-related diseases. To their dismay, the plaintiffs never got their hands on the full amount, since an appeals court ruled three years later that the amount was excessive and “fundamentally unfair.” The 68-page report was peppered with strong language and concluded that “mere participation in the tobacco industry does not does not destine a corporation to legal suicide on the shores of bankruptcy.”

Flying the Crooked Skies

Date: June, 1992
Number of plaintiffs: 12.5 million
Total Award: $410 million

In the early days of the Internet, users weren’t quite as smart about technology and privacy as we are now. When it appeared that a group of four major airlines exploited this fact between 1988 and 1992, millions of plaintiffs lined up to target American, Delta, United, and USAir airlines in a massive class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs alleged that the airlines manipulated an online website, Airline Tariff Publishing Co., to fix prices for flights departing from 34 airports nationwide.

In 1992, the airlines settled for $44 million in cash and $365.5 million in travel coupons. Though this cash award is lower than some other suits on this list, it was one of the largest class actions ever filed at the time, including about 12.5 million angry customers. “While damages are not huge for the individual ticket buyer – for the whole class together are massive,” said an attorney who represented the plaintiffs. “That was the genesis of the lawsuit and we’re very pleased that the matter has been solved.”

Photo credits: mjb84, BIA, DonaldsonPlasticSurgery, hannoeria, Aar0on, lanier67, Olastuen

But the jury ruled that although Mehserle was criminally negligent for shooting Grant, the evidence did not support claims that the shooting was intentional. As the San Francisco Chronicle opined yesterday soon after the Los Angeles verdict was announced, the jury would have needed to draw “conclusions about Mehserle’s state of mind that were not sufficiently supported in trial.”

This is likely the reason that Grant’s family has said that while it is “extremely disappointed” by the decision, it blames our legal system as a whole, not the jury. In August, a judge will decide how much time Mehserle will spend in jail, many estimates predict four to five years. Meanwhile, Oscar Grant’s family and girlfriend will continue to pursue multi-million dollar wrongful death lawsuits against BART.

Last year, the victim’s mother, Wanda Johnson, filed a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit against the transit agency. So far, BART has settled to pay $1.5 million on behalf of Grant’s daughter, and is still in settlement discussions with Johnson, Grant’s father, and Sophina Mesa, the mother of Grant’s daughter. Like Mehserle’s sentencing hearing, the next civil proceeding in the wrongful death suit is scheduled for August.

“The position of BART has always been that the shooting was a mistake, and now the jury has found that it was a negligent mistake,” said Dave Allen, a lawyer hired to defend BART in the wrongful death suits. “We will see if there are reasonable grounds to settle the case. Reasonable minds can find common ground.”

Grant’s family has welcomed support from peaceful demonstrators who view the verdict as insufficient justice, but has consistently denounced violent acts against policemen and the city of Oakland. On the anniversary of Grant’s death, for example, the family teamed up with BART to issue a statement calling it “a day of celebration not demonstration…a peaceful day to remember Oscar and the others who have been lost to violence.”

Photo credit: JacobRuff

For these reasons, writes Emily Savner in The San Francisco Recorder (sub req), the US government must expand funding intended for legal aid as part of its financial recovery package. But with budgets tight across the board this year, the Legal Services Corp. has less cash to distribute among a larger population seeking legal aid. And the state-based Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts, which collects interest from funds that lawyers hold temporarily for their clients to be distributed to people in need of legal aid, dropped 75 percent from $371 million in 2007 to $92 million in 2009.

State by state, IOLTA budgets are dropping so severely that chapters must eliminate important staff positions and local offices to stay afloat. Last year, for example, IOLTA revenue in Wisconsin dropped 92 percent from the year before, and in New Jersey, 2010 IOLTA funds are 92 percent lower than 2008.

California shares these states’ pain when it comes to lack of funding for legal aid. The California IOLTA office says it received only $7 million in 2009, down from $22 million in 2008. And so far this year, the agency has collected only $3.35 million, on track for a decline of seventy percent in only two years. To help the six million Californiains that IOLTA doesn’t reach, the State Bar of California has established the Justice Gap organization, which gives donors an opportunity to give what they can toward legal aid. Hopefully, as Savner suggests, the federal government will also step up to close the gap.

Since each of the partners of GJEL Accident Attorneys started his or her career at a legal aid clinic, we know how important they are, especially during a recession. Visit the Justice Gap website if you would like to provide financial support to a clinic, and check out our interactive map of free legal aid clinics here in the Bay Area.

“Common sense alone should prevent adults from giving alcohol to teenagers, but teens continue to die from alcohol poisoning under adult supervision” said Mike Feuer, the Assembly Judiciary Committee Chairman who authored the bill. “This bill promotes responsible behavior by acting as a deterrent to adults who might otherwise provide alcohol to teens. It will keep kids safer.”

But a parental responsibility for their child’s drinking habits extends beyond refusing to provide alcohol.  GJEL Accident Attorneys frequently urges parents to take away their child’s keys if they are attending a party that could involve alcohol.

Photo credit: cayusa

• On June 25, Michael Jackson‘s father filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the king of pop’s doctor Conrad Murphy for negligence and secrecy. Jackson seeks more than $75,000 from the doctor who allegedly gave his son a mix of sedatives at his Los Angeles mansion on a regular basis. In February, Murray pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter charges and his attorneys have said that Jackson did not take any medication that “should have” killed him. The complaint indicates that Jackson’s wrongful death suits won’t end with Murphy. “Mr. Jackson believes there are other parties responsible for Michael Jackson’s death, but has not yet gathered sufficient information regarding their potential liability or responsibility,” it states.
• The wife of popular actor David Carradine has launched a wrongful death lawsuit against French film company MS2 S.A. In the lawsuit, Anne Carradine alleges that the company was “negligent in failing to follow industry standard and provide David Carradine, the performer, with sufficient assistant during the course of filming” the movie Stretch in Thailand. Carradine, best known for his roles in Kung Fu and Kill Bill, was 72 when he was found dead in his hotel room last June.
• Rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight is suing Kanye West for providing insufficient security at a 2005 party in which Knight was shot in the leg. “I figured I could sit him down, man to man, and get this resolved,” said Knight, the founder of Death Row Records. After the six hour meeting, he told a reporter “I’m disappointed.” Suge Knight has been named in every one of these lists; he was arrested last month for assault with a deadly weapon; and in April he was named in a wrongful death lawsuit by the Notorious B.I.G.’s mother.

Photo credit: National Archives

Clearly, this is not the case. I can say from firsthand experience that the lawyers here at GJEL Accident Attorneys are passionate about helping their clients through difficult times caused by wrongful death, car accidents, or other physical harm. For this reason, I was dismayed to read a vitriolic Washington Times editorial claiming that layers are “due to get more moolah from Toyota and BP than victims.”

The editorial by Lawrence Schonbrun, executive director of Class Action Watch, an anti-lawyer non-profit, provides no firm facts or figures that show what type of profit lawyers have made in past major class action lawsuits, saying only that lawyers are “jumping over themselves to cash in on corporate wrongdoing” and their lawsuits amount to nothing more than “feeding frenzies with legal piranhas jockeying for lucrative committee positions from which to dole out patronage… to the many lawyers’ mouths that need to be fed.”

Schonbrun then asks, “how many of the best $750- to $900-an-hour lawyers are needed to resolve the Toyota legal claims?” This question makes the unfortunate implication that each of the lawyers working on the Toyota litigation are being paid on an hourly basis. In reality, civil litigation firms are frequently paid on a contingency basis, meaning they don’t get paid unless their clients’ case is successful. And when they win the case, civil litigation firms are often paid a percentage of the reward, not based on the number of hours spent on the case.

Schonbrun concludes saying class action lawsuits, against Toyota, BP, or other irresponsible corporations, “should be about people who are the most injured getting the most money, but unfortunately, the current class-action system does the very opposite.” This seems an odd final note to strike considering that the editorial demands less legal representation for the victims of Toyota’s vehicles plagued by brake problems and BP’s oil spill.

If you’re in need of help following an accident, get the true facts about civil litigation attorneys by calling GJEL Accident Attorneys for a free consultation.

“The mounting evidence clearly demonstrates that this tragedy was preventable and the direct result of BP’s reckless decisions and actions,” said Anadarko CEO Jim Hackett in a statement last week. “BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement.” (emphasis mine)

As TPMmuckraker’s Rachel Slajda notes, use of the phrase “gross negligence or willful misconduct” is very intentional. But, needless to say, BP doesn’t expect to shoulder all the responsibility for the spill. “Other parties other than BP may be responsible for costs and liabilities…We expect those parties to live up to their obligations,” a BP spokesman told TPM.

In a word, this is going to get messy. As we’ve written before on the GJEL blog, the BP oil spill has set off a bevy of tough class action lawsuits claiming injury and economic damage in the months following the spill. And even before Anadarko jumped into the mix, defendants and plaintiffs waged a turf war, each side attempting to get a “home court advantage.” BP, for example, wants the class action suits and multidistrict litigation (MDL) tried in Houston, which one Louisiana lawyer called “the epicenter of the oil and gas business worldwide” where “almost every one of those judges there would be related in some way to the oil industry.” Meanwhile, plaintiffs continue to push for New Orleans, which has suffered the vast majority of the spill’s damage and could be more sympathetic to victims.

Thanks to its 25 percent ownership of Deepwater Horizon, Anadarko would have surfaced as a potential defendant sooner or later. But unless the company can prove that BP is responsible for all of the “gross negligence or willful misconduct” that contributed to the spill, Anadarko will become another public punching bag in addition to jumping feet first into the legal firestorm about to engulf BP.

We’ll keep you posted.

Photo credit: ideum

“When you’re dealing with children with birth defects that’s a concern for the company,” said Jamie Sheller, one of the lawyers defending GSK. “GSK gave it their all at that trial…Despite that, the plaintiffs were successful in the case and that set a tone for their analysis. Even though they’ve mounted an excellent and strong defense they weren’t able to overcome the plaintiff’s position.”

Settlement aside, GSK maintains that it was not responsible for any wrongdoing regarding Paxil and the alleged birth defects. “GSK believes it acted properly and responsibly in conducting its clinical trial program for Paxil, in marketing the medicine, in monitoring its safety once it was approved for use and in updating pregnancy information in the medicine’s label as new information became available,” said a spokesperson for the company. And in post-trial motions, the company claimed “there is no established — or even speculative — link between Paxil and interrupted aortic arch,” a common birth defect listed by plaintiffs.

But in opening arguments for the Philadelphia lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ attorney Sean Tracey read a 1997 memo by GSK executive Bonnie Rossello to the court. “If neg, results can bury,” the memo ordered, implying a clear intention to conceal results that would harm the drug maker’s profits. “They said if there’s any doubt, take it out,” Tracey told the jury. “They do not want to scare anybody. It’s a very competitive marketplace. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry.”

In 2008, Paxil generated $943 million for GSK, more than 2% of the world’s second largest drug maker’s revenue. These settlements indicate that more jury decisions like the $2.5 million award in October would be too harmful to the company’s image to risk.

Photo credit: jenlight

UPDATE: Following a meeting with administration officials this morning, BP announced that it would accept the $20 billion escrow. According to the New York Times, the “preliminary terms would give BP several years to deposit the full amount into the fund so it could better manage cash flow, maintain its financial viability and not scare off investors.”

President Obama got tough on the British oil giant turned Gulf spill villain BP last night in a nationally televised primetime speech detailing the administration’s plan to contain the spill and prevent similar disasters in the future. Behind the scenes, the Obama administration has been making legal postures, which some say overstep its authority. But BP is already facing a set of tough legal challenges, federal and otherwise, and might not have the political strength to take the administration to court.

On Monday, the president backed a letter co-signed by 54 Senators asking BP to “establish a special account of $20 billion, administered by an independent trustee, to be used for payment of economic damages and clean-up costs.” In addition to helping victims of the spill, the letter said that it would be a first step for BP to show that it’s serious about taking responsibility for the spill.

The Obama administration has taken this request even further, saying it will legally demand that BP set up the $20 billion escrow account. “We want to make sure that money is escrowed for the legitimate claims that are going to be made and are being made by businesses down in the Gulf, people who have been damaged by this,” said Obama advisor David Axelrod on Meet the Press. “We believe that BP has the resources to meet the claims. And we’re going to make sure that they do.”

Legal experts, including University of Pennsylvania law professor David Zaring, who writes for The Conglomerate blog, have said that the Obama administration does not have the legal authority to force BP to establish the escrow account. After all, federal law has set a liability cap for the company at $75 million (not including non-government lawsuits). But White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton has brushed these concerns aside. “We’re confident that we have the legal authority to compel BP to make sure that the folks that they have affected here are made whole,” he said. “The signs from BP aren’t that there is going to be a protracted legal battle over this or anything like that.”

He’s right. BP will mostly likely appease the administration and set aside the $20 billion. But that’s not necessarily because they are legally bound to do so. To this point, the Obama administration has been generally supportive of BP, at least on a policy level. So BP would be foolish to risk turning the US government into an enemy and appearing even more villainous to the public by refusing to help oil spill victims. Then again, anything can happen, and foolish hasn’t stopped BP before.

Photo credit: USCGD8