Kentucky

From Kentucky.com is story of two lawyer-witnesses who are testifying in the criminal trial of the three lawyers that they understood the settlement did not include future cases coming into the class:

Witnesses detail fen-phen settlement

Two Washington lawyers who represented American Home Products in a 2001 fen-phen settlement testified in federal court Thursday that the $200 million agreement was intended to cover the roughly 440 plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, and not future claims by others in Kentucky who had used the diet-drug combination.

The testimony by lawyers Jack Vardaman and Elaine Madonick appears to contradict a key claim by defendant attorneys Melbourne Mills Jr., Shirley Allen Cunningham Jr. and William Gallion, who have long maintained that they had to hold back large amounts of settlement money to pay off any other fen-phen claimants who might surface after the suit ended.



Cunningham, Gallion and Mills are accused of conspiring to commit wire fraud while pocketing millions of dollars in settlement money that should have gone to the plaintiffs they represented in the lawsuit.



The three filed the suit in Boone Circuit Court in 1998, and it later was merged with a similar suit filed by Cincinnati tort lawyer Stanley Chesley.



Chesley, a nationally known expert in class-action law, then joined Gallion, Mills and Cunningham in pushing the merged suit toward the settlement in which AHP agreed to pay $200 million. Chesley is not a defendant in the criminal case.