Mass Tort Litigation

Mass Tort Experience

National Coordinating Counsel: Clients often retain LCBF as national counsel to develop national standards for work product such as pleadings, discovery, and routine motions and litigation and case processing standards, as well as to ensure consistent defense and expert strategy. We have been retained as national coordinating counsel for thousands of institutional abuse claims, and as regional coordinating counsel for over 400 talc claims.

Trial Counsel: Our deep bench of trial attorneys bring their substantial history of trial excellence to the firm’s local cases and are regularly retained to step in as trial counsel in jurisdictions across the country. Some of our representative trial work is outlined in more detail below.

Trial Consultation: LCBF has been retained to provide consultation to local trial counsel on strategy, including trial motions and expert evidence, in light of our account knowledge and trial experience.

Local Counsel: Our clients have retained us as local or regional counsel for various mass tort accounts, relying on our jurisdictional knowledge and relationships with local stakeholders to bring about the desired resolution of cases.

Valuation Consultation: LCBF has been retained for the unique role of valuation consultant. In this capacity, LCBF brings its steeped knowledge of verdict and settlement values and resolution strategy, to provide background guidance to clients and their litigation counsel in advance of global settlements and dispute resolutions processes.

Why Choose LCBF

LCBF has well over twenty-five years of experience handling a wide variety of mass tort lawsuits, including mass casualty accidents and claims of exposure to asbestos, talc, lead, silica, mold, mercury, benzene, diesel exhaust and fumes, Legionella, E. coli, listeria, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide, as well as a various pesticides, chemicals, solvents, dust and particulates. Our firm has also developed a nationally recognized practice in the successful handling of cases of alleged sexual abuse.

When retained to handle any mass tort litigation, we take the time to identify the unique goals and variables of each type of litigation, and work closely with our clients to develop the litigation and resolution strategy that meets their needs. Critical to this assessment is recognizing the importance of early identification of key factual, expert and legal issues on which the outcome of the case will ultimately turn.

Our experience handling class actions, summary judgment motions, Daubert/Frye challenges, among many other litigation practices, has proved pivotal to the successful resolution of thousands of mass tort actions over the years. As appropriate, we mobilize and coordinate teams of attorneys, office staff and technicians, and establish document databases and extranet sites with the goal of containing the inherent costs.

As a result, we have successfully handled and tried a variety of mass tort actions. We represented a client in the trust distribution litigation resulting from thousands of institutional abuse claims arising across the nation. In this capacity, we served as local trial counsel and national counsel, and developed account-specific workflows and efficiency protocols tailored to consistently and vigorously presenting the client’s well-founded defenses and minimizing costs.

We represented a talc supplier in over 400 claims throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut alleging injury due to asbestos contamination. In that capacity, we tried the first talc cases to verdict in the State of New York. At trial, we developed a favorable appellate record through our technical understanding of the science and expert issues unique to the litigation. This resulted in the verdicts ultimately being overturned and the establishment of the clarified standard for expert causation proofs in the State of New York, see Nemeth. This decision and causation analysis is now cited in jurisdictions throughout the country.

In connection with its representation of Amtrak in the MDL arising out of the May 12, 2015, derailment in Philadelphia, which generated over 120 lawsuits on behalf of more than 150 passengers who suffered injuries and the families of passengers who died in the accident, LCBF negotiated a $265 million global resolution with the Plaintiffs’ Management Committee. On July 31, 2017, U.S. District Judge Legrome Davis lauded Mark Landman in a written opinion approving the settlement. He found Mark “instrumental to a timely and fair disposition of this MDL” and “Amtrak’s early acknowledgment of liability and … agreement to tender $265 million upfront, rather than four or five years in the future… allowed everyone to focus on settlement.” He thanked Mark and his counterparts for “exceptional” leadership and the parties for minimizing costs, “working together toward realizing shared goals and objectives as quickly as practicable,” and enhancing “the overall quality of the litigation process, and hopefully … public confidence in the court as an institution.”

As with our other practice areas involving complex information and discovery, our clients count on our skills at efficiently managing and assessing electronic discovery and very large volumes of documents, and protecting them from spoliation claims.