Hi, Brent Coon here. I wanted to tell all of our clients, as a preface to our quarterly newsletter, some highlights of activity that's been going on at the firm. As you guys know, we handle a lot of different dockets around the country with the lawyers at our various offices specializing in those particular litigations. And I wanted to go over some of the things that have happened over the last few months. You can click on the links below to get detailed updates on specific litigation, but I want to share with all of our clients basically a lot of good news.
These big litigations take many years to come to fruition. There's a lot of paperwork and documents and discovery that takes place, many times hundreds, if not thousands of depositions, millions of pages of documents are exchanged. And so, it just takes a long time for all this, get to a finish line through a resolution or trials.
The good news is a lot of our dockets that we've been involved in for some years now are all starting to get to finish lines almost simultaneously. So, I want to talk very briefly about those as part of a recap of our first quarter newsletter.
We have our ITC litigation, that was the international terminal in Houston, which caught fire three
or four years ago and caused a lot of people to have particular respiratory problems in areas that lived around it because the fire lasted for two or three weeks and impacted neighborhoods with shelter in place, etc. We have a settlement with them now. We've entered into the master settlement agreement. We've selected the third-party administrators to handle the funding of the litigation with the court approval, and we're expecting that process to go through the rest of this year with the majority of the funding to occur on individual clients late this year. Again, more information at the link that you can go to, but that's a recap of what's going on there. All good news.
On our Boeing case - our Spanair plane crash, which occurred in Madrid over a decade ago, has finally gone to trial. Last month we were able to finally settle it at trial. So, again, good news there for our clients who had to wait very patiently for a number of years regarding international transfers of the litigation and the number of appeals in the Spanish courts before we were finally able to get it back for trial. But our legal team there and our experts did a great job of showing where the exposure was to Boeing in the case. And we were able to get that settled on very favorable legal terms under the circumstances last month. Funding on that one will occur again in the very near future as well.
Another one is our Boy Scout litigation. A lot of you heard the horror stories associated with what happened to a number of kids that were in these scouting programs over the years. I was in scouting and loved it and hated to hear that there were these kinds of problems systemically with predators in some of these organizations. But the good news is, through all the bankruptcy proceedings that there were some stays of the funding of the litigation, and we've won the appeals on that, and those stays have been lifted. So we're cautiously optimistic that the bankruptcy trustees will be able to start assigning numbers to those claims now. And hopefully we'll see funding later in 2024 on those cases as well.
Another one coming to a head soon is our Astroworld/Travis Scott litigation. That was the horrific incident which occurred in Houston as part of the annual Travis Scott - Astroworld festival. And we had over a dozen people that were killed when there was a crowd surge to the front of the crowd, to the front stage and lots of injuries, hundreds of injuries. And for our 200 clients that we're representing on that, we’ve completed most of the discovery. I hired the foremost expert in the world on crowd control out of Manchester, England, and I'll be tendering him for deposition next week in anticipation of the trials that start in May. So, we're cautiously optimistic again that once the court makes decisions on the final disposition and setting the table, so to speak, for the trials, that we'll hopefully be able to engage in serious negotiations with the defendants in that litigation through that trial and through other trials that we get set later in the year. And again, cautiously optimistic that that litigation may settle late this year as well.
Another good one is our 3M litigation. This was the one where 3M sold to the government defective hearing protection devices or our military personnel, and that was not uncovered until a whistleblower ratted them out a few years ago. We have over a thousand military veterans who have hearing problems of tinnitus and other hearing damage associated to the use of these defective products. And we've been in litigation for several years with them with that federal consolidated case pending in Pensacola. And the good news again with that one is that we were able to resolve that litigation completely at the end of last year. We entered into a master settlement agreement, the courts approved it, and 3M has started the funding. It's a several year funding program with 200,000 plaintiffs in that litigation. And the funding is going to take a period
of time on a FIFO or First In, First Out queue. But we've already gotten our first couple of hundred clients paid, and we're cautiously optimistic that most of our clients will be in line for payment at some point later this year.
Last and not least, one that is moving forward very positively and very quickly now is our TPC plant explosion case, which occurred in Port Neches, Texas, over two years ago. It's been tied up in bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware. And we've had our bankruptcy counsel involved in the planning and execution of the bankruptcy stage there. And the good news is that we were able to get some money out of TPC even though they were bankrupt, which will fund late this year. And better news than that also is that a product manufacturer that was involved in this case, that made the blend that clogged up and caused explosion, has agreed to meet with us in Boston in May to discuss resolution of our cases there. Again, we have two thousand clients there, many of whom had devastating property damages. We had a fatality involved in that and several other people that had serious injuries as well. And we're cautiously optimistic, again, that this mediation that the defendant actually requested will result in some positive discussions and possible settlement of the claims against them this summer. And if that occurs, there may be funding of the rest of this claim by the end of the year.
So, again, 2024 bodes very well for most of our dockets. No guarantee that all of them will get settled this year. But it's very good news for a lot of these big cases to take many years to see a number of them all coming to closure in 2024. So, with that, you can go to the individual topics on the case that you're personally involved in. Click there if you have interest or know people that may have one of these other types of claims, you can pass that information along, we’d be more than happy to talk someone else that you know, that that may have some other type of claim that we'd be happy to look at for them.
Again, thank you for allowing us to represent you.
We hope you find this information very informative.
These big litigations take many years to come to fruition. There's a lot of paperwork and documents and discovery that takes place, many times hundreds, if not thousands of depositions, millions of pages of documents are exchanged. And so, it just takes a long time for all this, get to a finish line through a resolution or trials.
The good news is a lot of our dockets that we've been involved in for some years now are all starting to get to finish lines almost simultaneously. So, I want to talk very briefly about those as part of a recap of our first quarter newsletter.
We have our ITC litigation, that was the international terminal in Houston, which caught fire three
or four years ago and caused a lot of people to have particular respiratory problems in areas that lived around it because the fire lasted for two or three weeks and impacted neighborhoods with shelter in place, etc. We have a settlement with them now. We've entered into the master settlement agreement. We've selected the third-party administrators to handle the funding of the litigation with the court approval, and we're expecting that process to go through the rest of this year with the majority of the funding to occur on individual clients late this year. Again, more information at the link that you can go to, but that's a recap of what's going on there. All good news.
On our Boeing case - our Spanair plane crash, which occurred in Madrid over a decade ago, has finally gone to trial. Last month we were able to finally settle it at trial. So, again, good news there for our clients who had to wait very patiently for a number of years regarding international transfers of the litigation and the number of appeals in the Spanish courts before we were finally able to get it back for trial. But our legal team there and our experts did a great job of showing where the exposure was to Boeing in the case. And we were able to get that settled on very favorable legal terms under the circumstances last month. Funding on that one will occur again in the very near future as well.
Another one is our Boy Scout litigation. A lot of you heard the horror stories associated with what happened to a number of kids that were in these scouting programs over the years. I was in scouting and loved it and hated to hear that there were these kinds of problems systemically with predators in some of these organizations. But the good news is, through all the bankruptcy proceedings that there were some stays of the funding of the litigation, and we've won the appeals on that, and those stays have been lifted. So we're cautiously optimistic that the bankruptcy trustees will be able to start assigning numbers to those claims now. And hopefully we'll see funding later in 2024 on those cases as well.
Another one coming to a head soon is our Astroworld/Travis Scott litigation. That was the horrific incident which occurred in Houston as part of the annual Travis Scott - Astroworld festival. And we had over a dozen people that were killed when there was a crowd surge to the front of the crowd, to the front stage and lots of injuries, hundreds of injuries. And for our 200 clients that we're representing on that, we’ve completed most of the discovery. I hired the foremost expert in the world on crowd control out of Manchester, England, and I'll be tendering him for deposition next week in anticipation of the trials that start in May. So, we're cautiously optimistic again that once the court makes decisions on the final disposition and setting the table, so to speak, for the trials, that we'll hopefully be able to engage in serious negotiations with the defendants in that litigation through that trial and through other trials that we get set later in the year. And again, cautiously optimistic that that litigation may settle late this year as well.
Another good one is our 3M litigation. This was the one where 3M sold to the government defective hearing protection devices or our military personnel, and that was not uncovered until a whistleblower ratted them out a few years ago. We have over a thousand military veterans who have hearing problems of tinnitus and other hearing damage associated to the use of these defective products. And we've been in litigation for several years with them with that federal consolidated case pending in Pensacola. And the good news again with that one is that we were able to resolve that litigation completely at the end of last year. We entered into a master settlement agreement, the courts approved it, and 3M has started the funding. It's a several year funding program with 200,000 plaintiffs in that litigation. And the funding is going to take a period
of time on a FIFO or First In, First Out queue. But we've already gotten our first couple of hundred clients paid, and we're cautiously optimistic that most of our clients will be in line for payment at some point later this year.
Last and not least, one that is moving forward very positively and very quickly now is our TPC plant explosion case, which occurred in Port Neches, Texas, over two years ago. It's been tied up in bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware. And we've had our bankruptcy counsel involved in the planning and execution of the bankruptcy stage there. And the good news is that we were able to get some money out of TPC even though they were bankrupt, which will fund late this year. And better news than that also is that a product manufacturer that was involved in this case, that made the blend that clogged up and caused explosion, has agreed to meet with us in Boston in May to discuss resolution of our cases there. Again, we have two thousand clients there, many of whom had devastating property damages. We had a fatality involved in that and several other people that had serious injuries as well. And we're cautiously optimistic, again, that this mediation that the defendant actually requested will result in some positive discussions and possible settlement of the claims against them this summer. And if that occurs, there may be funding of the rest of this claim by the end of the year.
So, again, 2024 bodes very well for most of our dockets. No guarantee that all of them will get settled this year. But it's very good news for a lot of these big cases to take many years to see a number of them all coming to closure in 2024. So, with that, you can go to the individual topics on the case that you're personally involved in. Click there if you have interest or know people that may have one of these other types of claims, you can pass that information along, we’d be more than happy to talk someone else that you know, that that may have some other type of claim that we'd be happy to look at for them.
Again, thank you for allowing us to represent you.
We hope you find this information very informative.