FEDERAL: Report critical of diet drug lawyers class action behavior
Law professors' report criticizing the diet drug lawyers' conduct in class action unsealed as reported by this Herald Leader story:
Three attorneys facing federal criminal charges in a 2001 fen-phen settlement apparently violated "numerous" procedural and ethical rules in their handling of the class-action case, according to written reports from two legal experts filed by prosecutors in U.S. District Court at Covington.
"A Kentucky lawyer whom I greatly admire once referred to the misconduct of a lawyer in a legal malpractice action as 'this dog's breakfast of facts,'" wrote one of the experts, Edward Brewer III, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University. "If ever there were wrongdoing by lawyers that fit that description, then this case lies at the top of the bowl."
Richard Bales, another professor at NKU's Chase School of Law, wrote in less colorful prose, but concluded that defendants William Gallion, Shirley Cunningham Jr. and Melbourne Mills Jr. "violated several of the basic rules governing class actions" in the fen-phen case.
The reports by Bales and Brewer, filed by federal prosecutors in March, were under seal until this week. Brewer and Bales presumably will be expert prosecution witnesses in the criminal trial of Mills, Cunningham and Gallion scheduled May 12 in Covington.
In another development, a member of Gallion's defense team filed notice with the court that he had been suspended on Tuesday from practicing law in the federal Eastern District of Tennessee. A U.S. district judge found that attorney Herbert Moncier had engaged in unethical conduct during a November 2006 hearing.
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