ERIE, Pa. (Legal Newsline) – Honeywell International calls claims submitted by asbestos lawyers “copy-and-paste” allegations that they have had to spend $128 million to resolve.
The company on June 14 submitted a brief ahead of a hearing scheduled for June 22 as U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Agresti tries to decide if an asbestos trust funded by Honeywell is handing out millions to lawyers doing the bare minimum to show their clients were exposed to asbestos-containing NARCO products.
Honeywell funds the NARCO bankruptcy trust, one of dozens designed to pay asbestos claims without resorting to costly civil litigation. Honeywell is concerned no one in charge of the NARCO money is looking hard enough – or perhaps not looking at all – when they pay out claims.
Honeywell and insurers seek to show claimants told inconsistent stories across all their claim forms filed with trusts in order to pin as much fault on each company as possible. Honeywell’s brief finds fault with an audit already completed that found 99% of claims were honest.
The auditor relied “on the say-so of those same claimant firms (including, most notably, the Nicholl firm),” the brief says. “This was not an effective audit and did not resolve the concerns raised by formulaic exposure allegations across the affidavits.”
The audit was stymied by asbestos lawyers claiming privilege when trying to protect their documents. The auditor was supposed to evaluate “all documentation” to see if it supported the exposure allegations.
The audit found only 13 of 1,482 claims failed.
“Some of the claimant information, such as facts about work history and other biographical information, is plainly not privileged, but the Nicholl Firm refused to provide it anyway,” the brief says.
A subpoena targeted Maryland asbestos lawyer Peter 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.
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 those forms.
Honeywell says the trust has adopted a “refractory inference,” which allows it to infer exposure to NARCO products if the claimant shows exposure to generic refractory products.
Insurers allowed to intervene in the case noted that the trust advisory committee is comprised of members of six asbestos firms – Baron & Budd; Cooney & Conway; Kazan, McClain, Satterley & Greenwood; Goldberg, Persky & White; Motley Rice; and Weitz & Luxenberg.
They pointed to a ruling for transparency that resulted from Legal Newsline’s court fight in the Garlock Sealing Technologies’ bankruptcy. Legal Newsline was first not allowed in the courtroom before mounting a legal challenge that allowed public access to Garlock’s evidence of double-dipping by asbestos firms.
“A lack of transparency in the tort system and in the post-confirmation trusts established to pay asbestos claims has allowed certain counsel to file claims in multiple venues making inconsistent representations regarding the products to which claimants were exposed,” the insurers wrote.
“As the Garlock court concluded, this practice is ‘widespread and significant.’”