Anti-Tobacco Lawyers Awarded $637.5 Million

Lawyers who represented California cities and counties that shared part of a massive national tobacco settlement were awarded $637.5 million in fees Tuesday by the National Tobacco Fee Arbitration Panel.

The fees, which amount to about 5% of the cities’ and counties’ $12.7-billion share of the settlement, will be divided among seven California law firms and two from out of state. Like the settlements themselves, the legal fees will be distributed over a 25-year period.

With Tuesday’s decision, anti-tobacco attorneys around the country now have been awarded $11.3 billion in fees. The tobacco industry has to pay that in addition to $246 billion in settlements to the states.

California’s share of the national settlement was $25.4 billion, and cities and counties around the state get half. Cities and counties representing about 85% of the state’s population sued the industry before the state filed its case in 1997.

California was the 37th state to sue the tobacco industry. Unlike most of his counterparts throughout the nation, Dan Lungren, then the state’s Republican attorney general, declined to hire private attorneys to represent California.

Several of the law firms that represented the cities and counties are led by Democrats and had made significant contributions to Democratic candidates.

Protracted negotiations were held between those attorneys and Lungren’s assistants before an agreement was reached that the city and county cases--as well as one major private case, Cordova vs. Liggett Group Inc.--would be settled en masse in December 1998, a month after the national settlement. (The tobacco companies separately agreed to pay the California attorney general’s office $25 million for attorney time and costs, a spokesman for the office said Tuesday.)

The 5% fee for the lawyers in the California case is considerably lower than the percentages collected by attorneys for the first few states that sued the industry: Mississippi, Florida and Texas. Attorneys representing those states were awarded fees of 19% to 34%.

John Calhoun Wells, a veteran labor mediator who is the arbitration panel’s chairman, said the work of the private attorneys in California was of “the highest order.” Charles Renfrew, a retired federal judge from San Francisco who is the tobacco companies’ representative on the panel, said the award was “higher than I would have awarded had I been the sole arbitrator,” but said he joined the decision “because I believe unanimity serves important and valuable purposes in these arbitrations.”

Attorney Harry Huge, who is the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ representative on the panel, said he would have awarded more. Huge emphasized the importance of the Cordova case, which was filed by San Diego attorney Patrick Coughlin of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach under the state’s unfair business practices statute in 1992.

“It was the first private enforcement action in California that advanced some of the theories of liability that would ultimately be pressed forward in other tobacco litigation around the country,” Huge wrote. The main theories centered on a massive, four-decade conspiracy by the tobacco companies to conceal the dangers of their products and the addictive nature of nicotine.

Among the law firms sharing in the award are Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein of San Francisco, which also specializes in class-action cases on behalf of plaintiffs; and two Southern California firms specializing in complicated personal injury litigation, Greene, Broillet, Taylor, Wheeler & Panish of Santa Monica and Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson of Newport Beach. The other California firms are Eisner & Hague, Los Angeles; McCue & McCue, San Diego; and Bushnell, Kaplan & Fielding, San Francisco.

Cuneo Law Group of Washington and Ness, Motley, Loadholt Richardson & Poole of Charleston, S.C., which was a driving force in cigarette litigation and the national tobacco settlement negotiations, also are getting slices of the pie. The firms declined to say how they are apportioning the money.