Judge Certifies Class Of Plaintiffs Lawyers To Sue Plaintiffs Lawyers
From Litigation Daily
Fee fights among plaintiffs lawyers aren't unusual. But the fight that has followed Bayer CropScience's $750 million settlement of litigation over rice crop contamination has entered rarefied air. In a battle over $72 million in fees, a St. Louis federal judge on Tuesday certified a class of plaintiffs firms to pursue unjust enrichment claims against another set of plaintiffs firms.
The dispute traces back to 2006, when Bayer revealed that traces of its genetically modified rice strain had contaminated other long-grain rice crops in the southern United States. Some 8,000 rice farmers filed suits against Bayer, and most of them were consolidated into multidistrict litigation. Bayer settled the MDL in 2011 for $750 million. Other suits, including some in state courts, produced separate settlements. (We named Don Downing of Gray, Ritter & Graham and Adam Levitt of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz our Litigators of the Week for the MDL settlement. Levitt is now with Grant & Eisenhofer.)
U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry in St. Louis, who presided over the MDL, ordered the establishment of a fund to reimburse Downing, Levitt and others for legal work they did that benefited all of the plaintiffs. The judge required that the farmers' lawyers contribute a share of any money they got from Bayer, on the theory that they were able to use and benefit from discovery and other work performed by the MDL lawyers. But this requirement didn't explicitly apply to all actions outside the MDL, including the state court cases.
Problems arose when the lawyers who led the MDL litigation—Gray, Ritter & Graham and Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz—claimed that some firms weren't contributing their fair share to this collective fund and brought a lawsuit in 2013.
The defendant law firms include Texas-based Goldman Phipps, which had unsuccessfully pushed for a $13 million share of the $72 million fee award. The firm struck out at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which also found that Goldman Phipps could be forced to contribute to this common fund. The firm's attempt to get the Supreme Court to grant cert fizzled.
Read more in our daily News Update...
From Litigation Daily
Fee fights among plaintiffs lawyers aren't unusual. But the fight that has followed Bayer CropScience's $750 million settlement of litigation over rice crop contamination has entered rarefied air. In a battle over $72 million in fees, a St. Louis federal judge on Tuesday certified a class of plaintiffs firms to pursue unjust enrichment claims against another set of plaintiffs firms.
The dispute traces back to 2006, when Bayer revealed that traces of its genetically modified rice strain had contaminated other long-grain rice crops in the southern United States. Some 8,000 rice farmers filed suits against Bayer, and most of them were consolidated into multidistrict litigation. Bayer settled the MDL in 2011 for $750 million. Other suits, including some in state courts, produced separate settlements. (We named Don Downing of Gray, Ritter & Graham and Adam Levitt of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz our Litigators of the Week for the MDL settlement. Levitt is now with Grant & Eisenhofer.)
U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry in St. Louis, who presided over the MDL, ordered the establishment of a fund to reimburse Downing, Levitt and others for legal work they did that benefited all of the plaintiffs. The judge required that the farmers' lawyers contribute a share of any money they got from Bayer, on the theory that they were able to use and benefit from discovery and other work performed by the MDL lawyers. But this requirement didn't explicitly apply to all actions outside the MDL, including the state court cases.
Problems arose when the lawyers who led the MDL litigation—Gray, Ritter & Graham and Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz—claimed that some firms weren't contributing their fair share to this collective fund and brought a lawsuit in 2013.
The defendant law firms include Texas-based Goldman Phipps, which had unsuccessfully pushed for a $13 million share of the $72 million fee award. The firm struck out at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which also found that Goldman Phipps could be forced to contribute to this common fund. The firm's attempt to get the Supreme Court to grant cert fizzled.
Read more in our daily News Update...