Legal News

The Vioxx Endgame: It?s All About the Fees

By Dionne Searcey

The ghosts of mass torts past have been popping up all over the place.

First came the decades-old fen-phen case and the matter of whether class-action guru Stanley Chesley will be able to continue practicing law. Now comes the old Vioxx drug litigation, where a battle royale has been raging over fees.

It's been three-and-a-half years since Merck agreed to a whopping $4.85 billion settlement over allegations of health problems stemming from its Vioxx painkiller. Last October, New Orleans federal judge Eldon Fallon set aside 6.5 percent of the fund, or $315.3 million, for attorney fees, according to this report on The American Lawyer's Corporate Counsel site.

Fallon appointed nine firms to allocate the fees among 109 plaintiffs law firms, the report said. Last month the committee filed its recommendations touching off a bitter dispute among the rank and file of plaintiffs' attorneys.

Why? We suspect part of the reason may be that the committee awarded its own members the bulk of the fees, $230 million or 70% of the pool, American Lawyer said.

The big winners: Seeger Weiss, Beasley Allen and Herman Herman Katz & Cotlar (the law firm of Mark Lanier of Vioxx trial and heart-healthy doughnut fame also got a nice cut).

The other attorneys – Daniel Becnel and Robert E. Arceneaux to name a few - who said they put in considerable time working on the case weren't happy. Factions have aligned; it's a complex web of who-wants-what and who's-turned-on-whom, and added to that are allegations of side deals and closed-door meetings. Read all about it in this filing here.

One filing before Barbier notes that according to the committees' calculations, some firms would receive an hourly rate of $2,205 while others would be assigned a $21 hourly rate for handling depositions, according to this Bloomberg report.

From Bloomberg: "Objectors like Turner Branch contend the committee's division of the Vioxx fees ‘is unjustified, inexcusable, and lacking any rational basis,’” according to a Feb. 9 court filing. Branch, a New Mexico-based plaintiff attorney, is seeking $3.9 million in fees. The committee initially awarded him about $281,000, yet listed zero in its recommendation to the judge, according to court filings."

Fallon has said the lawyers billed for 562,944 hours and took more than 2,000 depositions, argued more than 1,000 motions and pored over more than 50 million documents.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 03, 2011 (boomark / email).