BALTIMORE (Legal Newsline) - The judge overseeing Baltimore’s asbestos docket will hear from plaintiff lawyers and defendants Wednesday on his order suspending status conferences that were eliminating hundreds of cases a month, as the Angelos law firm promises to dismiss at least 350 cases a month on its own.
In an order earlier this month, Judge W. Michel Pierson of Baltimore City Court said he would halt conferences scheduled for September and October at which plaintiff lawyers would have been required to supply information supporting as many as 500 pending lawsuits or dismiss them as lacking evidence.
The Angelos law firm has by far the most cases pending in Baltimore City Court, having signed up tens of thousands of clients in the 1990s, apparently with little evidence of actual asbestos exposure or disease. Those cases once represented valuable bargaining chips when Maryland courts allowed them to be consolidated for mass settlements. But courts eventually halted the consolidation approach after defendants complained it was unfair.
After trying and failing to convince Maryland legislators to revive it, Angelos last month admitted defeat and said it would begin dismissing 350 cases a month “for a significant number of months.”
Defense lawyers urged Judge Pierson to continue the status conferences, which were modeled on a program in federal court in the early 2000s that eliminated more than 100,000 poorly supported asbestos lawsuits from the docket. With the court selecting which cases to be presented at the monthly hearings, plaintiff lawyers were forced to scramble for documentation quickly on hundreds of lawsuits, instead of picking the ones they wish to dismiss.
In a June 1 letter to the court, a lawyer for MCIC Inc. said if the Angelos firm “is in a position to identify a large group or class of cases” to dismiss, “they should do so now, not over the course of many months.” MCIC urged the court to require Angelos to dismiss all of its cases lacking documentation by Sept. 1.
“After nearly two years of status conferences, it is now undeniable that the majority of the cases pending on this Court’s docket are not viable,” wrote MCIC attorney Louis Grenzer, of Bodie, Dolina, Hobbs, Friddel & Grenzer. “There is no reason to slow-roll 350 dismissals a month in return for status conference relief.”
The Angelos firm, in its May 20 letter to the judge, said halting the status conferences would “give the parties the ability to review the process thus far …and establish a way forward with plaintiffs and various defendants to resolve additional cases amicably.”
Lawyers representing Wallace & Gale, another asbestos defendant, asked in a letter to the judge:
“How can the Angelos firm commit to dismissing `at least’ 350 cases per month for a `significant number of months’ without already knowing what can and cannot be dismissed today?”
In a June 17 filing, the Angelos firm listed more than 1,100 cases dismissed so far this year, many of them decades old. Many of the lawsuits Angelos is dismissing now may have been moneymakers for the firm already, however. Most asbestos manufacturers and distributors have gone bankrupt and set up trusts to pay claims with minimal documentation. Plaintiff lawyers argue the tradeoff is fair since their clients get only a small fraction from the trusts of what they would win in a successful trial.
After earning hundreds of millions from asbestos litigation, the Angelos firm may be turning its attention elsewhere. According to an analysis by consulting firm KCIC, the law firm filed 54% fewer asbestos lawsuits in 2019 than in 2018, bringing a virtual halt to filings outside of Baltimore. That report found 4,062 asbestos lawsuits were filed nationwide last year, roughly flat with 2018, but plunged 49% in the once-hot Baltimore market.
The Angelos firm didn’t even appear in the Top 10 for asbestos billings, which was led by Simmons Hanly Conroy. Simmons Hanly also is taking a lead role in what could be the biggest tort litigation of the current century against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains.