| Trial lawyers who represented the states during the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s were scheduled to receive contingent fees of $750 million per year for the first five years and $500 million annually thereafter, in perpetuity. Estimates as to the total amount they will get vary from $10- to $15 billion to as much as $30 billion.
Arizona Senator Jon Kyl reported in a May 2003 press release that trial lawyers had by that time already “hauled in $2.5 billion from tobacco taxes used to pay the settlement.”
In Texas, Mississippi and Florida—three of the four states that reached separate settlements with the defendant companies-- 12 trial lawyers received $8.2 billion in legal fees (Florida - $3.43 billion; Mississippi - $1.43 billion; Texas - $3.3 billion). Cato Institute scholar Robert Levy calculates that, assuming the lawyers worked 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for 42 months, they were each slated to get $7,716 per hour.
California trial lawyers were awarded the largest amount in the multi-state settlement agreement: $1.3 billion (5 percent of California's $25 billion share of the settlement). It was the only fee award that the tobacco industry challenged.
In New York, which also garnered $25 billion from the Master Settlement Agreement, the six firms who represented the state in the settlement won $625 million in fees.
In Massachusetts, trial lawyers were unsatisfied by the original $775 million they were awarded and sought an additional $1.3 billion. They ended up with an extra $100 million, instead.
Trial lawyers have used the billions of dollars they got through the tobacco settlement not just on personal luxury items but to fund new litigation campaigns and to make campaign contributions and other political donations.
"The sheer volume of that [tobacco settlement] money makes those fees the most destabilizing event in U.S. legal history," James Wootton, then-president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform, told U.S. News & World Report in December 2001. "It gives lawyers more money for R&D, more money to pour into the political system, and more leverage to force settlements."
Lawyers and law firms were the top industry donors in the 2003-2004 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (which reported on FEC data released October 4, 2004). Lawyers and law firms collectively gave nearly $139 million, 73 percent of that to Democrats.
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