Opinion
Master File No. 00 Civ. 2843 (LAK).
June 14, 2005
PRETRIAL ORDER NO. 384 (Motion for Relief from PTO 67)
Of the 312 plaintiffs in the cases referred to above, 294 have settled with defendants. They now move for an order, pursuant to PTO 230, for a determination that they derived no benefit from any work done by the Plaintiffs' Executive Committee and, in consequence, that the 6 percent withheld from the amounts that defendants have paid in settlement of their cases — which was withheld to fund any award the Court may make for common benefit work — should be paid to them now. The Court is not disposed to entertain this application at this time.
To begin with, there is no suggestion that these plaintiffs have sought to resolve the issue with the PEC. Were the PEC to agree that these plaintiffs did not benefit from any common efforts and that they should not bear any part of the cost of any common benefit fee award that the Court eventually may make, there would be little or no need for court intervention.
Second, the administrative burdens of dealing with applications such as this would be unwarranted at this stage of the proceedings. According to the most recent status report, over 11,400 plaintiffs have been involved in this MDL of whom approximately 6,300 already have settled their cases. Were the Court to entertain this application now, it would open the door to similar applications, perhaps numbering in the thousands, and thus potentially require a vast investment of time in resolving questions concerning the extent to which individual plaintiffs and their attorneys benefitted from the efforts of the PEC. This effort, moreover, could well prove to be an entirely unnecessary enterprise. Should the Court ultimately determine that no common benefit awards are to be made, the monies withheld from the settlements reached prior to that determination will be paid to the settling plaintiffs.
Accordingly, this motion is denied. Plaintiffs may renew their application on a showing that they have sought unsuccessfully to resolve the issue with the PEC and that they will suffer unusual hardship is resolution of the issue is deferred until later in the proceedings. Absent such an application, the matter will be resolved, if necessary, at a later time.
SO ORDERED.