The Wall Street Journal reported last week that a Kentucky judge has recommended that a Cincinnati based plaintiff’s attorney, Stanley Chesley, be disbarred due to conduct pertaining to fee division in a class-action pharmaceutical case. The litigation concerned the diet drug fen-phen, which allegedly caused heart valve damage to many people who took it. After a post-settlement dispute arose over fee division, the presiding judge accused Chesley of "strong-arming" his way into the litigation over the protests of the initial counsel, driving up the fee percentages in order to maximize his personal fee recovery in the case, and defrauding his clients of $7,500,000. Chesley’s fee was $20,000,000.
This is not the first such fee dispute in the fen-phen litigation. Two other Kentucky lawyers have received prison sentences over misrepresentations about the settlement. Similar disputes have arisen in many other mass-tort cases throughout the country. In many, if not most, class action cases, the interests of the plaintiffs are subordinate to the interests of their counsel, who appear to fight not only the defendants, but each other and now, even their clients in order to maximize their personal windfall. Instances such as this are the inevitable result.