PITTSBURGH (Legal Newsline) – An asbestos lawyer accused of submitting false claims in order to take millions of dollars from a lightly supervised asbestos trust has reached an agreement on what materials he will hand over.
Honeywell, which funds the North American Refractories Company trust, and Maryland lawyer Peter Nicholl submitted their plan to end a feud over the company’s subpoena in Pittsburgh bankruptcy court on Feb. 1.
The NARCO trust, like dozens of others created by once-popular defendants in asbestos lawsuits, was established to pay claimants in a more expedient and less costly manner than litigation.
In September, Honeywell filed its complaints that the NARCO trust is paying millions of dollars to claimants who do not have credible evidence of exposure to NARCO products. A return to accepting simple form submissions from claimants has created a windfall for lawyers, the company says.
A subpoena targeted Nicholl, who has earned more than $85 million for his clients from the NARCO trust, Honeywell says. The company wanted documents regarding more than 1,600 of Nicholl’s clients.
Nicholl’s clients are remarkable for their pristine memory of NARCO products at their worksites decades earlier, the company claims. It thinks he fills in the blanks for them, then files requests for compensation with the NARCO trust that are rubber-stamped.
Nicholl, meanwhile, said Honeywell is attempting to evade the terms of the deal it made to fund the NARCO trust and trying to keep him from being able to represent his clients with full effort. He also pointed to an audit of 550 claims that found no wrongdoing.
He will produce all documents relating to those 550 claims, as a result of the agreement, instead of the 1,600 originally sought by Honeywell. He will produce all exposure affidavits filed with other asbestos trusts for 160 of those claimants.
Should this information ever make its way into a public proceeding, Honeywell is to redact some of the information.
Since the trust began accepting forms again, Nicholl has made $46 million in two years, Honeywell says. The company’s litigation filed in September seeks to end the acceptance of forms, and it says it needs information from Nicholl to prove its case.