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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scion who wrote (8825)	8/22/2005 9:21:09 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12465

OK, now everything is starting to make sense. I recall seeing a segment on 60 Minutes about forum shopping-- where sleazy lawyers in Texas would file lawsuits in Jefferson County, usually Beaumont, against huge corporations and extract billions from them. The following all comes from overlawyered.com First we see Beaumont's reputation: ===== July 21, 2003 Beaumont and its reputation Lawyers and judges in Beaumont, Texas are far from pleased to hear their city called a "judicial hellhole" and "the Barbary Coast for class-action litigation." "Defense lawyer James R. ("Jay") Old Jr. says the county has unfairly gotten a reputation as a place where 'the plaintiffs and defense bar work together to combine for the greatest amount of billables for the defense lawyers and the greatest recoveries for the plaintiff'". Why, sir, the very idea is preposterous! Besides, there's a silver lining in the city's reputation as a forum-shopping destination for lawyers around the state and country: "In fairness, it represents to us an industry. It puts a lot of people to work here," says Jim Rich, who heads the Beaumont Chamber of Commerce. overlawyered.com ===== Here is your originally cited story (the dates are hyperlinks in the original): ===== June 18, 2004 John O'Quinn for Texas governor? The Houston-based mass tort specialist, who has long played a prominent role in these columns for his exploits in asbestos, tobacco, silicone implants and most recently fen-phen (Apr. 28, Feb. 26 and many more), is now being talked of by activists as a potential Democratic candidate for governor of the Lone Star State. overlawyered.com ===== We go to this story on April 28: ===== April 28, 2004 Fen-phen: O'Quinn extracts $1 billion from Beaumont jury "A jury awarded $1 billion to the family of a woman who once took the Wyeth-made diet drug Pondimin, part of the now-banned weight-loss combination fen-phen." Cynthia Cappel-Coffey, who died last year at 41 of primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH), did not develop symptoms of PPH until more than four years after using the Wyeth drug. According to Bill Sims, a lawyer for Wyeth, the Beaumont judge refused to allow the company to introduce evidence that Cappel-Coffey had taken four other diet drugs in the intervening years, although all four of the other drugs warn of a risk of PPH. Wyeth has already set aside nearly $17 billion for fen-phen litigation. ===== It's not about fairness, it's about the money. - Jeff