The airbag maker Takata settled a closely watched lawsuit involving the injury and eventual death of a woman whose car crashed in 2014.

The settlement was announced moments before a critical hearing in which a judge in Jacksonville, Fla., could have ordered the company’s chief executive, Shigehisa Takada, to testify in the case.

Even the lawyer representing the family of the victim, Patricia Mincey, said the sudden turn of events was unexpected.

“I had no expectations at all” of a settlement, said the lawyer, Theodore J. Leopold, of the plaintiffs’ law firm Cohen Milstein in Washington. “We were preparing to go to trial.”

Dow Chemical agreed to pay $835 million to settle a decade-long lawsuit on price fixing, saying it had less chance of winning its petition at the Supreme Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The chemicals company was found liable by a federal jury in Kansas in February 2013 in the class-action lawsuit, which alleged Dow had conspired to artificially inflate polyurethane prices.

BATON ROUGE – Prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (Angola) filed a lawsuit today alleging that they needlessly suffer from chronic pain, permanent injury, and preventable sickness and death as a result of prison officials’ failure to provide constitutionally adequate medical care.

The Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), the law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC (Cohen Milstein), the Advocacy Center (AC), and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Louisiana (ACLU-La) filed a complaint against the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) and Angola’s wardens alleging violations of the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment and federal disability statutes. The complaint, titled Lewis et al. v. Cain et al., was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. In challenging the inadequate medical care, the complaint alleges that the prison’s more than 6,000 prisoners are all at risk of serious harm, while scores of men have already experienced unnecessary injury, suffering and death.

The class action complaint details several problem areas at the prison: delays in evaluation, treatment, and access to specialty care; denial of medically necessary treatments including surgeries, medication, medical devices, and physical therapy; inappropriately managed medications; poor follow-up care; and a lack of qualified staff. The complaint also details the way these medical problems impose hardship on prisoners in other areas such as work duties and housing assignments.

Prisoners report horror story after horror story: a man denied access to a specialist for four years while his throat cancer advanced; a man denied medical attention four times during a stroke, which left him blind and paralyzed; a blind man denied even a cane for 16 years. In many cases, only the specter of legal action spurred the prison to provide long-delayed medical care.

The complaint contends that Angola’s medical care worsened when Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge, which used to serve prisoners with medical emergencies, was closed during the reorganization of the state’s Charity Hospital System. Even basic screenings and treatments are now being broadly denied.

“The grave systemic deficiencies in the delivery of medical care at Angola lead to appalling outcomes,” said Jeffrey Dubner, an attorney at Cohen Milstein. “Preventable illness, injury and death are not part of a prison sentence, yet Angola officials are pervasively subjecting the men in their custody to these risks.”

The complaint also alleges that disabled prisoners are especially hard-hit by the inadequate delivery of care. Miranda Tait, Managing Attorney for AC, said, “Because prisoners with disabilities generally require stabilizing care and management of chronic conditions, the failure of the prison to deliver adequate care heightens the chance that a prisoner with disabilities will be condemned to increased misery and exacerbated disabilities.”

The investigation into the delivery of medical care at Angola began more than two years ago as a result of multiple prisoners’ reports of grossly inadequate medical care. Attorneys interviewed more than 200 men in connection with this investigation and found scores whose problems echo those of the plaintiffs named in the complaint. The class action seeks an injunction that will bring the prison in line with constitutional standards in the delivery of medical care.

Complaint – May 20, 2015

The Promise of Justice Initiative is a private, non-profit organization that advocates for criminal justice reform and abolition of the death penalty on behalf of indigent defendants and prisoners who seek fair and equal treatment under the law.

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC has been a pioneer in class action lawsuits on behalf of individuals and small businesses for over 40 years. It has 80 attorneys and offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

The Advocacy Center of Louisiana is a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to assisting people with disabilities and seniors in Louisiana to achieve maximum potential and independence. The Advocacy Center of Louisiana employs 50 people statewide who assist people to achieve employment, education, housing, and health care goals.

The American Civil Liberties Foundation of Louisiana has been Louisiana’s guardian of liberty since 1956, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Berger & Montague PC and Susman Godfrey LLP were tapped Monday to represent propane tank purchasers in multidistrict litigation accusing leading tank manufacturers AmeriGas Partners LP and Ferrellgas LP of engaging in a de facto price-fixing scheme by reducing the amount of propane in tanks without changing the price.

The litigation alleges that beginning in 2008 the defendants conspired to reduce the amount of propane they would put in their tanks from 17 to 15 pounds, while keeping prices stable, effectively raising the prices charged by 13% per pound. Plaintiffs further allege that defendants continued to conspire through at least March 2014 and, as a result, Direct Purchasers paid more for propane than they otherwise would have.

In tapping the firms to represent direct purchasers, U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner cited both the fact that Cohen Milstein filed the first direct purchaser complaint in the present case as well as the firm’s ongoing investigation in the matter.

Read Cohen Milstein, Others to Helm Propane Tank Antitrust MDL.

On May 15 a federal district court judge trebled a $400 million verdict in a class action in which customers had alleged that The Dow Chemical Company fixed prices for the chemical urethane. The $1.2 billion award, by U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum in Kansas City, Kansas, was by far the largest this year as of press time; the runner-up may be a $524 million verdict in April against a Nevada insurance company accused of failing to supervise the doctor at the center of a hepatitis C outbreak.

The plaintiff class of direct purchasers, led by Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll; Fine, Kaplan and Black; Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward; and Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, also defeated Dow’s bid to decertify the class. Dow, looking to David Bernick at Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Hamilton Loeb at Paul Hastings, tried to make use of a March 27 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend. In that decision, the justices refused to certify a class of Comcast subscribers who alleged anticompetitive pricing by the company. The court ruled that the plaintiffs’ expert witness—the same expert witness used by the Dow plaintiffs—failed to show that damages could be proved on a classwide basis.

But Judge Lungstrum held in his 30-page decision that the Comcast decision didn’t apply. In the Dow case, trial testimony had been limited to a single theory of impact—overcharges due to price-fixing; and Lungstrum found that the plaintiffs’ expert had provided a proper causal link between the direct purchasers’ theory of liability and the classwide impact.

Dow contends that the verdict can’t stand because the claim was not upheld by the jury for the full five-year alleged conspiracy, and the same expert’s model upon which the claim is based has been rejected by a Kansas jury and the Supreme Court in Comcast.

For plaintiff Direct Purchaser Class:

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll: Richard Koffman, Kit Pierson, and associate Sharon Robertson. (Robertson is in New York; and the rest are in Washington, D.C.) The firm was co–lead counsel.

Fine, Kaplan and Black: Paul Costa, Gerard Dever, Matthew Duncan, Roberta Liebenberg, and Donald Perelman. (They are in Philadelphia.) The firm was co–lead counsel.

Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward: Joseph Goldberg. (He is in Albuquerque.) Goldberg was co–lead trial counsel.

Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel: Rebecca Beynon, Michael Guzman, and associates Alexander Edelson, Michael Nemelka, and Justin Presant. (They are in Washington, D.C.) Guzman was co–lead trial counsel.

For defendant The Dow Chemical Company (Midland, Michigan):

In-House: Managing counsel Lynn Looby.

Boies, Schiller & Flexner: David Bernick, Scott Grant, and associate Gary Studen. (Bernick and Studen are in New York; Grant is in Washington, D.C.) Bernick has represented Dow on a variety of matters and was retained for this matter shortly after joining Boies Schiller.

On December 12, 2011, Judge John W. Lungstrum of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas granted final approval to a $51 million settlement agreement with BASF in In re Urethane Antitrust Litigation.

The $51 million BASF settlement will increase the total value of cash settlements in this case to over $139 million.  In June 2011, Huntsman International LLC agreed to pay $33 million to settle claims from direct purchasers in this multidistrict urethane antitrust litigation, while bankrupt Lyondell Chemical Co. likewise reached a deal to exit the long-running case.  Final approval to the Huntsman and Lyondell settlements was granted on September 27, 2011.  In 2006, Bayer settled for $55.3 million.

The settlement with BASF leaves Dow Chemical Co. as the sole remaining defendant in the case.

Final Approval Order – December 12, 2011 [PDF]

Huntsman International LLC has agreed to pay $33 million to settle claims from direct purchasers in multidistrict urethane antitrust litigation, while bankrupt Lyondell Chemical Co. likewise reached a deal to exit the long-running case in Kansas, the plaintiffs said Thursday.

Seegott Holdings Inc., Quabaug Corp. and Industrial Polymers Inc. — the representatives for the direct purchaser class — asked the Kansas federal court to sign off on the two settlements, which would leave only Dow Chemical Co. and BASF Corp. as defendants in the case.

“Class counsel believe the Lyondell and Huntsman settlements represent a very good result for the class, and we look forward to litigating the case against the remaining defendants,” plaintiffs’ attorney Richard Koffman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC said Friday.

Poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation will pay $10 million to settle the class action lawsuit which accused it of failing to pay overtime to over 8,000 employees in 11 states.  Cohen Milstein attorneys, who represent the plaintiffs, say that the deal will allow class members to recover about 85 percent of the back pay that they sought.

Judge Harry F. Barnes of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas signed off on the settlement Friday, finding it “fair, reasonable and allowable” under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Cohen Milstein partner, Joseph Sellers, said the settlement was “very good for the workers.”

Mr. Sellers said part of the reason for settling was that the plaintiffs had discovered during the case that Pilgrim’s Pride had been reducing employees’ hours during the class period, making the number of employees and workweeks subject to overtime less than they believed.

Excerpted from “Pilgrim’s Pride Strikes $10M Deal in FLSA Suit” (Law360; April 7, 2010)