Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Florida suit had made history even before it hit the damages phase. It was the first time a class action against Big Tobacco had ever gone to trial. The cigarette companies have already lost some suits by individual smokers--a $26.5 million award in California from a February 1999 verdict, $33 million in Oregon a month later--but those can be seen as just the cost of doing business...
Class actions pose a far greater threat because they give plaintiffs the ability to mount ever larger legal offensives. Armies of lawyers could represent thousands of plaintiffs, and the potential losses would be correspondingly larger. And the cost of defending the cases would escalate. Tobacco companies have succeeded in blocking 24 lawsuits around the country from proceeding as class actions, and they expected to do that in Florida too. But plaintiffs' lawyer Stanley Rosenblatt persuaded the Florida courts--over heated objections from the other side--to let him represent a stateful of smokers...
...Rosenblatt backed up the pathos--after all, a nurse like Farnan knows the risks of smoking--with strong evidence of malfeasance by the tobacco companies. Taking advantage of mounds of industry documents turned over in other smoker lawsuits, he argued that the cigarette makers had intentionally kept the public in the dark about the dangers of smoking. Even in the face of that evidence, the tobacco companies tried to avoid conceding that cigarettes are addictive or cause cancer. They made a big mistake, says Rosenblatt. "To continue to carry on with this moronic debate...It made the jury as angry...
...defendants is how much money they will have to put up during the appeals process. Typically, the loser must post the full amount of the award while the case is under appeal. The Florida legislature passed a law this year capping the size of the appeal bond that each tobacco company must post at $100 million--a law the plaintiffs are challenging. If the cap is removed, the tobacco companies could conceivably be forced to file for bankruptcy, which would disrupt this case as well as the $209 billion settlement with the states, part of which goes to Florida...
Wall Street dismissed the $145 billion setback as if it were a parking ticket. Tobacco stocks were off marginally, indicating that investors had already priced the decision into the shares. And industry analysts remain bullish. "The scale of the verdict speaks to the unconstitutionality and the absurdity of the whole process," says David Adelman of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter...