Attorneys for thousands of sickened 9/11 workers wrote a letter to a judge saying they would cut their share of the massive settlement, which has been held up in courts over concerns litigation fees would detract from the victims’ payouts.
In the letter to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is presiding over the case, lawyers with Worby Groner Edelman & Napoli Bern volunteered to relinquish $85 million of their anticipated $200 million payday – a third of the proposed $657 million settlement.
Hellerstein, along with thousands of the victims, excoriated the lawyers back in March after they reached a deal to net a third of the total payout. Hellerstein rejected the settlement because he believed the lawyers would get too much at the victims’ expense – a move some city attorneys believed transgressed his judicial bounds.
“We have …been influenced by the truly disheartening pressures visited upon us by the media and our own clients, both of whom seem to believe that we should have simply donated our time for these past seven years,” the attorneys’ letter reads, according to the Daily News.
“Our fees will be reduced under this court’s insistence that it would limit those fees to an even greater degree than we have voluntarily agreed to do,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers told the judge they are willing to cap their fees at 20 percent, leaving the rest of the money to be divided among up to 10,000 workers who have illnesses ranging from asthma to cancer.
Victims’ initial responses to the letter seemed optimistic that the attorneys’ effort would finally allow the settlement to move forward.
“There is only one pie, and everyone is looking for a piece of it,” cancer-stricken former cop Ernie Vallebuona told the News. “The judge has asked them to find ways to get more to the people who were sick. If that does this, then it is a good move.”
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One Response
One should ask why class action lawyers should receive a percentage (as in common of traditional American tort lawyers) rather than an hourly fee (perhaps capped at a percentage of recovery).
The logic of allowing contingency fees is that otherwise poor people would not be able to bring meritorious claims. However in a class action, it is the lawyers initiating the case, and they give (a usually small) “cut” to the victims.