Two private law firms with a pattern of heavy donations to state and local politicians will collect up to $27 million of the $260 million Johnson & Johnson is paying the State of New York and county governments to settle opioid litigation.
In an agreement reached days before a trial began this week, J&J agreed to pay the state and its counties $230 million over several years and immediately wire another $10.8 million to Napoli Shkolnik and Simmons Hanly Conroy, outside law firms representing Suffolk County and other New York counties in lawsuits filed in state court.
The private firms stand to earn another $16.6 million in fees and expenses over the next several years, with those payments accelerated if the state meets a number of conditions including passing legislation to create a special fund to disburse the settlement money for treatment-specific purposes.
The settlement announced June 26 by New York Attorney General Letitia James dismisses one of the deepest pockets from the state’s opioid litigation as well as offers a possible template for resolving thousands of similar lawsuits nationwide. As part of the agreement, New York will try to persuade or force other public entities including fire and hospital districts to join the settlement and move to dismiss their cases if they refuse.
The settlement also reveals the payday awaiting private lawyers who recruited state and local governments by the thousands as clients to sue the opioid industry and force a multibillion-dollar global settlement. Buried in the agreement is a description of J&J’s share of fees that would be paid under a contemplated settlement of federal multidistrict litigation now pending in the court of U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Ohio.
That agreement, still being negotiated by state attorneys general and private lawyers, includes a 35% fee allocation to private attorneys, or some $308 million out of J&J’s share alone. The fee bonanza will reward a collection of law firms that tend to dominate multidistrict litigation and contribute heavily to the politicians who hire them.
Napoli Shkolnik and its partners have contributed more than $100,000 to New York politicians in recent years, including $5,000 to the campaign of Suffolk County executive Steven Bellone in June 2018, equal to the firm’s contribution to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo the year before. Most of the firm’s money flows through Lawpac of New York, which distributes contributions to state and local campaigns.
Simmons Hanley Conroy is a much more prolific contributor according to Followthemoney.org, spending $1 million since 2017 on a profusion of races, primarily in Illinois, including $130,000 on an unsuccessful effort to keep Thomas Kilbride on the Illinois Supreme Court in 2020. Kilbride was also supported by Michael Madigan, the long-serving speaker of the house who was ousted this year amid allegations of corruption. The firm also spent $20,000 on the Andrew Cuomo campaign in 2020.
Napoli Shkolnik and Simmons Hanly represented a number of New York counties under largely identical contracts granting them a sliding-scale percentage of any recovery from 10% to 40%, depending upon how far the litigation had progressed before settlement. The firms agreed to rescind those agreements in exchange for payments under the J&J settlement, although they are presumably still in effect for continuing litigation against other defendants.