Rebecca Mowbray, The Times-Picayune
Attorneys working on the litigation dealing with the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil plume can expect to deal with novel questions of punitive damages, economic injuries, and the interaction of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 on the existing body of state, federal and maritime law, participants in the Gulf Coast Oil Symposium said Tuesday.
The symposium, organized by the New Orleans Bar Association at the Sheraton New Orleans hotel, is a measure of just how engrossing the legal issues facing plaintiff and defense attorneys alike are expected to be. “We’ve never done a seminar in response to a specific event,” said Loretta Larsen, executive director of the bar association.
Attorneys who represented plaintiffs in the litigation over the Exxon Valdez tanker grounding in 1989 offered their words of wisdom.
Minneapolis attorney Karen Hanson Riebel said that time is the enemy. By the time the litigation settled, 20 percent of her 32,000 class members had died. After nearly two decades of litigation, class members received an average of $15,000 each for their losses.
Riebel said that fishing catch records from the state will be extremely important for establishing people’s economic damages. She and her legal team also used population loss, fishery closures and impact on the market and seafood prices.
Richard Lockridge, a principal of the firm where Riebel works, recounted what he described as the “disgraceful” path of court rulings that knocked down the punitive damages from the original 1994 jury verdict of $5 billion to $507.5 million in 2008.
In its 2008 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said that for maritime cases, there must be a one-to-one ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages. But Lockridge said that the opinion also noted that reckless steps to enhance profits could make an argument for greater punitive damages, and he believes that the nation’s high court might support punitive damages of three times the compensatory award in the Deepwater Horizon case, because early investigations show multiple corporate mistakes. The 3-to-1 ratio is what most states with caps on punitive damages allow.
“A careful reading of that case suggests that if the facts are more egregious than in the Valdez, the ratio might go as high as 3:1,” Lockridge said.
