“Ideally, this should be handled by the legislative and executive branches, our federal government, and our state governments. They haven’t seemed to have done a whole lot. So it’s here.”
That's the candid opinion expressed by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster with regard to the multidistrict litigation he's overseeing in Cleveland against opioid manufacturers and distributors.
Polster supports a negotiated settlement, and one of the biggest opioid manufacturers, Purdue Pharma, is reported to have floated offers with the states.
If the resolution of the opioid problem rightfully belongs to the legislative and executive branches and the defendants might be ready to settle, why get the courts involved in setting up an MDL? Who benefits from that?
There is one group. It's an “old boys (and girls) club,” consisting of the lucky few attorneys who consistently get picked to participate in an otherwise unproductive process that leads to their enrichment without benefiting the clients much at all.
It’s the same gents and ladies, mostly, who split the millions in attorneys fees in the $200 billion tobacco settlement in 1998 and profited again and again in big tort cases involving VW diesels, Vioxx, the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, and more.
There’s men like Paul Hanly of Simmons Hanly Conroy, who was appointed by Judge Polster to serve as one of two lead counsel overseeing the plaintiff side of the opioid litigation, and women like his law partner Jayne Conroy.
“The same five lawyers are involved in practically every proceeding,” says University of Georgia School of Law Professor Elizabeth Burch. She argues that this “oligopoly” exhibits “systemic pathologies” that lead to large fees for plaintiffs attorneys but minimal payouts to plaintiffs. They make millions signing off on a settlement that the defendant and the government possibly could have negotiated without them.
As Judge Polster noted, the process could and should be handled by the legislative and executive branches of government, but, if it were, there'd be no big payday for Paul Hanly, Jayne Conroy, and the other pathological oligopolists in the elite MDL club.