Taking ‘Judicial Control,’ Judge Rejects 9/11 Deal and Questions Attorney Fees
A federal judge in Manhattan has rejected a settlement that would have paid rescue and cleanup workers at the destroyed World Trade Center up to $657.5 million using money from a federally funded insurance company.
At a hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the settlement was “not enough” and he was taking “judicial control,” the New York Times reports. Hellerstein pledged to supervise a renegotiated deal, to bar the two sides from choosing a claims administrator absent his approval, and to review attorney fees.
Hellerstein said proposed attorney fees of one-third of the settlement would take “a very large bite” of the proceeds.
Vanderbilt University law professor Richard Nagareda told the Times that Hellerstein is not the only judge to review settlements in mass tort cases, but their authority to do so had not been firmly established on appeal.
The proposed settlement would have covered about 10,000 plaintiffs who said their Ground Zero work preceded illnesses such as asthma and cancer. The deal wouldn’t have taken effect unless at least 95 percent of the plaintiffs accepted it. The payout would have ranged from $575 million if only 95 percent of the plaintiffs accepted the deal, to $657.5 million if 100 percent had accepted it.
