CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Legal Newsline) – Bankruptcy Judge Laura Beyer ordered 330 clients of asbestos firm Shrader and Associates to pay $100 a day starting May 9, as a sanction for failure to answer questionnaires of Georgia Pacific entity Bestwall.
Shrader operates in Houston with an office in Edwardsville, Ill.
Beyer’s April 25 order applied to 163 other plaintiffs including 52 clients of the Gori firm in Edwardsville and 19 clients of SWMW in St. Louis.
Beyer held 2,140 plaintiffs in contempt earlier this year but she withheld sanctions so they could purge their contempt by answering the questionnaires.
About three fourths of them purged their contempt.
Those who didn’t purge it will start paying on May 9, according to Beyer.
She wrote that she would enter a further order about who to pay and how.
Georgia Pacific created Bestwall in 2017, by dividing into New GP as an operating company with assets and Bestwall as a debt entity with asbestos liabilities.
Georgia Pacific moved for a hearing to estimate its liabilities and Beyer granted it.
Plaintiff lawyers claimed she should estimate future liabilities on the basis of past settlements, but Bestwall claimed fraud inflated past settlements.
Bestwall claimed some plaintiffs alleged one set of exposures in private asbestos trusts and another set of exposures in civil court.
Bestwall crafted a questionnaire to detect such double dipping, and Beyer ordered firms to fill them out for their clients.
Responses came slowly and Bestwall moved for a contempt order.
Beyer granted it in February, and she posted names of law firms and plaintiffs who didn’t comply with her order.
John Simmons’s firm in Alton represented 457 clients, the biggest group on the list.
Shrader ranked second with 409 clients.
Maune Raichle of St. Louis represented 76, the Gori firm represented 71, the O’Brien firm of St. Louis represented 30, and SWMW represented 20.
All clients of Simmons and O’Brien had purged their contempt by the time Beyer imposed sanctions, and all but one Maune Raichle clients.
Among Shrader clients, 79 purged but most didn’t.
Among Gori clients, 19 purged but most didn’t.
Among SWMW clients, one purged and 19 didn’t.
Clients of Cooney and Conway in Chicago, who numbered 346 on the February list, all purged.
Clients of Weitz and Luxenberg in New York, who numbered 219 on the February list, all purged.
Beyer removed from her list five plaintiffs who orally moved for reconsideration of her contempt order at a hearing on April 6.
She identified them as Gori clients Stanley Bunting and Katrina McCandless, Maune Raichle clients John Dunn and Jay Goodman, and Shrader client Henry Moity.