Meet the lawyers who earn billions on pelvic-mesh injuries while their clients get the scraps.
In the fall of 2015, a horde of lawyers from across the country descended on Las Vegas and beelined for the Bellagio Resort and Casino. They weren’t in town to hear Britney Spears, immerse themselves in the Strip’s glitz and glamour, or answer the siren call of the blackjack tables.
But they did harbor gamblers’ get-rich goals. The draw: a conference called “Mass Torts Made Perfect,” held in the hotel’s grand ballroom, tucked well behind its famous musical water fountain. It was the nation’s largest gathering of attorneys who represent groups of people injured—or killed—by exposure to products like opioids or asbestos.Some of the attorneys, the insiders, were already rich beyond imagining. Others, like the Elvis impersonators roaming the streets, were wannabes, eager to tap into the mass tort gold mine. A mass tort is personal-injury litigation on steroids. It’s not just one fender-bender victim with whiplash out for a few thousand bucks. Nor is it a class action over $3 ATM fees that alerts consumers via junk mail. It’s hundreds, thousands, and sometimes more than 100,000 people suing over life-changing physical harm from asbestos-laced baby powder, from NFL concussions, from pacemakers, hip implants, and other medical products. Ordinarily, plaintiffs expect to file a lawsuit and have a suit-and-tie lawyer usher them through to trial, where they can tell the jury how corporate wrongdoing wrecked their health. But in mass torts, a panel of seven judges decides which federal judge will handle all federal lawsuits with similar facts. Then injured plaintiffs from Alaska to Maine find their cases shipped off to a single judge somewhere in the United States through a process known as multidistrict litigation. With thousands of cases mushed into a scrum, trials disappear and individuals become numbers on a spreadsheet.At the center of these mass tort cases are real people seeking justice from large corporations. None of those people was in Las Vegas. This gathering was for their lawyers, who paid $1,495 each to attend. This event was about money and power. Outside the Bellagio’s grand ballroom, three men registered for the conference. They’d jetted in on separate planes, lest one go down. Nine seasoned “spokesmodels” in electric-blue dresses sashayed around them in the hallway like roving disco balls.“They can’t do that,” snapped the woman behind the makeshift registration desk. “That’s like free advertising.” With a snort, the youngest of the three men peeled off $10,000 in cash, slapped it on the desk, and registered the strippers too. The evening’s party hosts were Vincent Chhabra, his son and front man Michael, and Ron Lasorsa, principals in a company called Alpha Law LLC.Though Alpha Law was billed as a law firm, Vince, Michael, and Ron weren’t lawyers, and their company was not a law firm in the usual sense. They were entrepreneurs who ran a call center that generated client leads. Their Florida-based business raised the hopes of women who’d been hurt, added their names to a giant database of “clients,” then collaborated with real lawyers willing to pay for the clients’ names—and to fork over 85 percent of their attorneys fees to Alpha Law, their new “co-counsel,” if they settled the cases.Vincent was a first-generation Indian immigrant and dot-com whiz kid. His early online pill mill had led to prison time, which got extended for running an online puppy scam. Out for a few years, he ventured into call centers that targeted women injured by pelvic mesh, a device intended to stabilize sagging organs and cure incontinence but which left many women in diapers and debilitating pain.Ron, a New Yorker from Long Island, was Vince’s stocky, tattooed business partner. He’d been a company commander at the Marine Corps School of Infantry, gone bald after two tours of duty in Kuwait, and done a long stint on Wall Street before getting fired, filing for divorce, and discovering mass torts. Rounding out the trio was Michael, the 20-year-old son Vince had been grooming to take over the business since he was 6. At 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, Michael was still growing into his lanky frame and taking classes at Ohio State. He looked nothing like his dad; he had light skin and blue eyes and was 6 inches taller. That night, in one of the Bellagio’s opulent suites, the three celebrated with a lavish house party. Just months before, they had sold the names of 14,000 clients to a Texas law firm for $40 million. Those clients were mostly women injured by pelvic mesh. And despite the sale, the trio had no intention of exiting the business.Music pulsed as lawyers crammed into the suite to ogle the performing strippers. Some elbowed their way closer, others puffed on cigars or weed, and a chosen few leaned back to enjoy lap dances—plus less stand-up activities. Glasses filled with amber liquor, neat, clinked and sloshed onto the billiard table. Late into the night, the guys draped themselves with barely clad women in a photo booth, memorializing the moment. Remnants of white powder stuck to tabletops and bathroom counters. And mobile IV hydration stations stood ready to serve cocktails of vitamins, amino acids, and anti-nausea meds to take the edge off in the morning.vary depending on whom you ask. Someone photographed prominent attorneyThe next day at the pool, which had a golden fountain spouting from the middle, was a scene straight out of: Polo club lawyers sipped bloody marys and mimosas on one side, and the Alpha Law crew wrestled like bawdy Delta House frat bros on the other.Led by “Savage,” a tough blonde, nine women clad in acid-blue bikinis and stilettos paraded through the Bellagio’s corridors. Advertising Alpha Law, they coaxed male lawyers to the rowdy poolside cabana. Mike Papantonio was among the invited conference-goers. Pap, as he liked to be called, presided as master of ceremonies. His law firm had invented “Mass Torts Made Perfect” and ran it as a conference for elite plaintiffs’ attorneys nationwide to rub elbows and strategize, making him the unofficial president of the polo club posse. Even as the upper crust regarded Alpha Law’s members as parasites, some of the elite in pelvic-mesh multidistrict-litigation leadership positions profited handily from their efforts.Pap was surely not amused by Savage’s party; he’d already gotten an earful about the previous night’s shenanigans. He sent out a reproachful email saying everything and nothing at the same time: “A group of individuals … were involved during the seminar in business practices that we do not condone and will not tolerate.” Above the Law, a clever, classed-up National Enquirer Ron, Vincent, and Michael, however, were on top of the world, the new fat cats on the rise. All the lights of Las Vegas, from Planet Hollywood to Caesars Palace, lay at their feet.The Bellagio’s grand ballroom felt much like its casino—ornate, windowless, sour with old cigarette smoke. Mike Papantonio strutted on a raised stage, his own face a hundred times larger than life on the screen behind him. With the gestures, voice, and pomaded hair of a televangelist, he introduced a panel of mostly white men in suits, a few female lawyers defending medical device manufacturers, and two illustrious senior federal judges wrangling big cases.Oblivious to the evening and poolside shenanigans, I sat about halfway back, embedded in a sea of plaintiffs’ lawyers who routinely earn more on a single mass tort deal than I’d take home in 15 years as a law professor. I’d long made noises about lawyers’ self-dealing—the stuff professors complain about over craft beer. I’d been invited to speak because I’m a national expert on mass torts, but no one really wanted me there. It was the inner circle, a cabal I’d tried to disband for more than a decade. Fighting nerves about my upcoming panel, I saw a text light up my phone. It was my boss, the law school dean. “How’s Vegas?” he asked. “SEAL Team Six on standby.”I was about to repeat a presentation I had given the previous week at Duke Law School, where I highlighted the astronomical sums awarded to a handful of lawyers chosen to lead mass tort cases by a good-old-boy network. That practice, I argued, enriched everyone except their clients, the regular citizens who suffered the actual harm. My remarks moved an apoplectic plaintiff’s lawyer to point across the room at his opposing counsel, leer in my direction, and ask, “So are you accusingThat lawyer was one of eight attorneys who’d led a massive multidistrict lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Propulsid, an acid-reflux drug popular in the 1990s whose side effects allegedly included deadly cardiac abnormalities. I’d unearthed plenty about the business side of this famous case that they’d all have preferred to keep buried. Lawyers claimed that the Propulsid settlements were worth between $84 million and $105 million total. But most plaintiffs—99.4 percent—got nothing. Only 37 of 6,012 plaintiffs received anything, and collectively it was less than $6.5 million. Lead attorneys like the red-faced lawyer had made money not only by settling their own clients’ cases but by spearheading the lawsuit. For that work,Now, surrounded by the Moulin Rouge feel of the Bellagio, I made my way up to the dais and laid out those damning numbers in the lawyers’ den, where I was the only thing standing between them and lunch with legendary running back Emmitt Smith.But nothing would change. The status quo benefited the key stakeholders: The in crowd of plaintiffs’ attorneys got richer. Corporate defendants found settlements cheaper by the thousand. And judges received accolades when massive cases settled quickly—despite secret terms that typically made the money impossible to follow. Plaintiffs were the ones who suffered. I knew because I’d spoken with them when their lawyers had not. Afterward, those titans of tort seemed to have retained only one thing: that they were ranked on a list of lawyers chosen to command these cases. Never mind that it was a roster of the infamous, not the famous.I wandered next door into the exhibit hall, where rows of tables were strapped with plastic banners and heaped with leaflets, mints, lens cleaners, highlighters, and tote bags. Herds of plaintiffs’ lawyers in suits, buttoned-down polo shirts, and the occasional high heels meandered past vendor booths hawking services for everything from medical records retrieval and client ads to law firm loans and settlement administration. Those were the invisible hands greasing the wheels of mass torts, hands that propelled injured people through a maze they knew nothing about. I’d written about the industry for well over a decade, but I had no idea how vast it was until I saw its inner workings on display. Only much later would I realize that it wasn’t so much a smorgasbord of vendors as it was the Gorgon Medusa: When one head is removed, more sprout in its place.Later, in the airport terminal, a slim, silver-haired conference attendee confirmed the snippets of hushed chatter I’d overheard in the Bellagio’s hallways. Something darker than lawyers’ self-dealing was stirring, and it involved pelvic mesh. An estimated 10 million women worldwide have pelvic mesh in their bodies, and hundreds of thousands of them were suing. The case would be bigger than the BP oil spill andcombined. Once the leviathan of profit for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, pelvic mesh was now the white whale of liability for mass tort plaintiffs’ attorneys.Pelvic mesh settlements were expected to total $11 billion, and everyone in the industry wanted a piece. Lead attorneys would receive $366 million of that in common-benefit fees for their work on behalf of all plaintiffs. With each plaintiff’s contingent fees ranging from 33 to 45 percent, non-lead lawyers would net between $3.63 billion and $4.95 billion, excluding costs. Though I’d escaped Las Vegas without needing a SEAL Team Six rescue, I soon found myself submerged in the legal system’s gritty underbelly, tracking a network of con men, bankrupt surgeons, chiropractors, medical funders, and lawyers who yearned to be insiders—all of them willing to do anything for a buck.
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