Plaintiff lawyers have filed hundreds of lawsuits under a law waiving the federal government’s immunity from claims over contaminated drinking water at the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base, even as a judge works out details on how the litigation will proceed.
Spurred in part by the elimination of caps on contingency fees, lawyers have spent more than $100 million on ads recruiting veterans to sue under the PACT Act passed last year. The law covers anyone who spent more than 30 days at Camp Lejeune between 1953 to 1987 and has since contracted any of a number of diseases including cancer.
Since more than 300,000 vets have filed claims 3M over military earplugs, lawyers anticipate Camp Lejeune litigation might become one of the biggest mass torts ever with a half-million claimants.
Congress designated a federal court in North Carolina as the sole venue for Camp Lejeune cases. A four-judge panel there late last month notified lawyers the court will set up a master docket and select a plaintiffs’ steering committee to guide the litigation. But some law firms including Bell Legal Group have already started filing lawsuits, with the docket showing nearly 1,000 cases so far.
Republicans in Congress and the American Legion have protested the lack of fee caps in the PACT Act, saying that by designating a list of “resumptive diseases” linked to exposure to toxic water at the base, cases should be easy to win. The law prohibits punitive damages and requires the government to recover whatever it has already spent on Medicaid, Medicare or veterans’ benefits, potentially leaving plaintiffs with little after they pay legal fees and expenses that often exceed 40%.
Early versions of the PACT Act had a 25% fee cap, as specified in federal law elsewhere. But that provision disappeared amid heavy lobbying by law firms including Bell Legal Group. The lack of a cap contrasts with federal law that limits fees in lawsuits against the Veterans Administration less than 33% and fees under the Tort Claims Act to 25%.
The American Legion criticized high legal fees in Congressional testimony last year, saying veterans were already being inundated with lawyer ads that failed to disclose how any settlement would reduce their payments from other government programs. The law requires any award to be “offset by the amount of any disability award, payment, or benefit” from the VA, Medicare or Medicaid.
“Failure to educate potential clients on this clause may result in them agreeing to fees that they would not otherwise agree to,” the Legion said. “While firms have promised veterans awards in the millions of dollars, they have declined to inform them that even one of these offsets, depending on the interpretation, could result in the veteran having to forfeit their award.”
Federal law already allows the government to recover Medicaid and Medicare payments from personal injury settlements. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed this last year in a decision allowing Florida to collect $300,000 out of a plaintiff’s $800,000 accident settlement, citing more than $800,000 the state had spent on her medical care after an accident. Assuming 40% of the money also went to legal fees, that could have left the plaintiff with only $20,000.