Tobacco/11 inches/-dp1st/mark2nd
By PETER BRENNAN
Orange County Business Journal
Two Southern California law firms that represented L.A. County in its lawsuit against tobacco companies each stand to pick up as much as $112 million in fees as part of the mega-settlement.
Newport Beach attorney Mark P. Robinson Jr. said his nine-lawyer firm of Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson, and the Santa Monica-based firm of Green, Briollett, Taylor, Wheeler and Panish, could collect the huge payoffs.
A third local firm, Esner, Higa & Chang of Los Angeles, is expected to receive about $14 million for its role in the litigation, according to Robinson.
L.A. County won $3.5 billion as part of the historic tobacco settlement that involved government entities across the country. Robinson said the initial agreement called for the three local firms and a fourth firm in South Carolina to receive 25 percent of the settlement. That could have resulted in a total of $875 million in attorney fees, with Robinson’s firm standing to get $280 million.
Exact fees in the complex case will be worked out by an arbitration panel. But Robinson expects the final legal fees in the L.A. County case to be about 6 percent, based on percentages received by lawyers for other government plaintiffs around the country.
Some are crying foul at the high legal costs.
Lawrence B. Kraus, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute of Legal Reform, called a recent agreement for $8.2 billion to be paid to lawyers in three other states an “unconscionable money grab that should outrage all Americans.”
Robinson countered that the payoff likely will be far less than the usual 33 percent contingency fee. He also said his firm took a risk by working on contingency and that by getting a trial date, his case helped force tobacco companies to settle. In addition, the work for L.A. County kept him from taking on other counties as clients.
“Look at the risk we took. We paid all the costs. L.A. County didn’t pay any costs for experts. We spent literally millions of dollars of our time,” Robinson said.
Robinson acknowledged that the lawyers were concerned about the huge fees, and that’s why they set up a special system of payments. Under the plan, the tobacco companies will pay $500 million annually into a pot that will be divided among all the lawyers nationwide who represented plaintiffs. The pot is expected to last at least 25 years or until all legal fees have been paid.
To be sure, the states will get their share of the total settlement an estimated $240 billion over the next 25 years.
Robinson argued that it is the tobacco companies that should shoulder the blame for the litigation. “Tobacco companies had shifted burden to the states. They were causing these diseases,” he said. “If they had revealed all this information back in the ’60s, you’d have had the government requiring them to pay a lot sooner.”
