Due Justice

Chapter 21

I whistled. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, especially to the lawyers. How will the legal fees be paid?”

“Well on the plaintiff’s side, I want to limit transaction costs to twenty-five percent of the total settlement amount. Of course, the plaintiffs are squealing like stuck pigs over that because they’re used to forty percent fees, exclusive of costs, and the defendants are objecting that it’s too high because they’re the ones that get to pay it.”

The figures he quoted were staggering. Following the money seemed to be the first rule for lawyers as well as murder investigators. “And what about defense attorney fees?”

“Defense attorneys will be paid by the defendants through whatever arrangements the defendants have made for paying them. I haven’t gotten into that because the defendants haven’t asked me to. I don’t see how I could resolve that anyway.”

“There seems to be some new urgency in my courtroom by the plaintiffs to get these cases on for trial. I noticed today that I’ve got ten trials set every jury term for the next twelve months. Do you have any idea why?”

“I think that’s happening all over the country, partly because it pressures the defendants to settle and partly because in the last several months the scientific studies that have come out have all been supporting the defense side. The plaintiffs feel they’re playing beat the clock. If they don’t get their judgments soon, they’re worried the defendants will start trying the causation issues and winning. The defendants are pushing the cases to trial because they think they can win or at least they can make the plaintiffs work and then the plaintiffs’ will get more reasonable. If I don’t get this settlement put to bed pretty soon, I’m afraid the whole thing will fall apart.”

I thanked Steve for his help, and went back to studying my list. I noticed that Grover had all of his cases set for trial, but none of Johnson’s were scheduled. Worthington’s cases were all set, but they ran into the next three years, pretty evenly spaced out. The remaining attorneys seemed to be either behind the curve in requesting trial dates or, perhaps, not prepared for trial.

I did some quick multiplication in my head. If each of the plaintiffs Grover represented would settle, it looked to me like just the cases on my docket would net him attorneys’ fees of $270 million under Florida’s forty- percent fee rule. Of course, he could have made arrangements to accept lower fees based on the volume of business, and he probably owed referral fees to a number of lawyers who had sent him their cases to handle as well. Still, he stood to gain a tremendous sum of money if these cases were all tried and won. Not as much as the tobacco lawyers would get, but certainly enough to keep him and his four ex-wives off food stamps.

More realistically, setting the cases for trial would force settlements and Grover would get the money more quickly. He’d have to discount the value of the claims to settle them now, but he probably wouldn’t have to discount them much, considering the costs of defense. It was curious that Grover’s partner, Johnson, hadn’t done the same math.

And I couldn’t see the advantage to the defendants in pushing the cases to trial. Agreeing to prompt trial dates would put a significant amount of pressure on most of the defense law firms. They just didn’t have the manpower to do the work required to defend multiple, four-week trials. And even if they did have enough lawyers to put on the trials, their other work would suffer. A defense firm that puts all its eggs in one client basket makes big money while it lasts, but can’t withstand the business loss when the cases are over. And why did only two of the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to take their cases to trial now?  Why not the rest of them?  Both Grover and Worthington were in a game of high stakes poker and I wasn’t at all sure which one was holding the better hand.