Madison County, Illinois lawyers say the asbestos debacle in Mississippi involving National Service Industries (NSI) and N & M Inc. will not affect them directly, but does damage the credibility of all future asbestos litigation.
NSI lawyers, filing on Feb. 9, 2009, under federal racketeering (RICO, or the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) provisions, charge that Molly Netherland and Charlie Mason of N & M conspired with radiologist Ray Harron and his son, Andrew Harron, and others, to defraud the company by enlisting at least 10,000 claimants using falsified medical records. NSI is also suing Christopher Taylor, a former N & M employee, on the grounds that he was responsible for rounding up the prospective plaintiffs for the tort suit.
At least 4,000 claims were filed in Holmes County, Mississippi, beginning in 1995 naming NSI as a defendant. Ray Harron has since had his license suspended or revoked in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Florida and New Mexico. Both Harron and his son, Andrew, a Wisconsin osteopath, have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, declining to incriminate themselves.
According to NSI lawyers, N & M spent over a million dollars in advertising to attract litigants, even though most were never given proper medical treatment. Instead, employees lacking any medical training gave X-rays and breathing tests, which were signed off on by Ray Herron's assistants at his direction, netting N & M millions in referral fees while lawyers used the falsified medical reports to seek settlements.
Madison County legal experts are supported in their view that N & M's behavior will negatively impact asbestos litigation by a study conducted by Lester Brickman, a leading expert in asbestos litigation and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. Brickman writes that:
"If there were an award for the most abusive class-action settlement of the decade, if not the century, this settlement would be an odds-on favorite to gain the prize."
Fortunately, Herron is not a figure behind any current Madison County asbestos cases. Additionally, according to Madison County Judge Daniel Stack, the County had already protected itself from many of these abuses by creating an inactive docket which removes all plaintiffs who are not ill from active docket roles.
This is a direct reversal of the situation in Madison County in the early part of this decade, when asbestos claims earned it the name "Mad County" as filings rose from 65 (in 1996) to 953 in 2003, with a preponderance of claimants coming from elsewhere.
The heart of the matter, as jurists note, is badly needed tort reform. A classic example is tort lawyer Richard Scruggs and his cases against the tobacco industry, which netted lawyers millions and victims little but lost time. In asbestos tort filings, massive screening and inclusion of clients from far afield leads to a situation where legal claims skyrocket, unscrupulous lawyers profit, and those actually suffering from asbestos-related illnesses may never be able to claim their share of the pie, even though asbestos bankruptcy trusts still have roughly $40 billion left to pay plaintiffs.
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