Section: News
Topic: Aid effort for 9/11 victims near end
by Greg Moran

Local lawyers helped on claims

Listen closely. Just beneath the familiar strains of holiday revelry you can hear the slow ticking of a clock, counting down the seconds on an extraordinary chapter in the nation's legal history.

At midnight tomorrow, the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund closes. With it will end an unprecedented experiment to resolve death and injury claims from the 2001 terrorist attacks – without protracted litigation.

More than 5,000 claims, worth more than $1.5 billion, have been processed.

Although many of those who applied to the fund hired lawyers, more than 1,500 were provided free counsel through what has become the largest pro bono legal effort ever undertaken, created in part by San Diego civil lawyer David Casey Jr.

Known as Trial Lawyers Care, or TLC, the group drew on the expertise of hundreds of lawyers from around the country. Among them were 40 San Diego lawyers; only New York City, the epicenter of two of the four attacks, provided more volunteer lawyers.

"You're dealing with people from virtually every culture on earth," said Casey, the president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and a key figure in establishing the fund and the lawyers group.

"There were lots of complex legal problems. It was a significant challenge, but I can say every lawyer who did this got back from it a lot more than they gave."

The fund was created for those killed or injured when four commercial airliners were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in rural Pennsylvania. It was established 13 days after the attacks, largely born out of an attempt to shield the airline industry from an avalanche of lawsuits that could have brought the industry to its knees.

An unknown number of claimants have bypassed the fund and sued the airlines anyway, attorneys said. Yet many have quietly settled claims in hearings before Special Master Kenneth Feinberg, who is in charge of distributing awards.

Last week, Feinberg said he expects 90 percent of families of deceased victims will file claims. A total of 2,976 people died in the attacks; thousands more were injured.

The average compensation to families of people who died is $1.78 million, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice, which oversees the fund. Injury payouts have ranged from a low of $500 to $7.9 million.

Bias Claim

The fund has not been without critics, who have said the payment formula established for survivors discriminates between the wealthy dead and the poor dead. The fund pays $250,000 for non-economic loss for each deceased person, plus $100,000 for a surviving spouse and each child who is a minor.

The controversy centers on awards for economic loss. These are based on income, number of dependents and so on.

For example, someone who made $30,000 a year, had a wife and child and died at age 30 would have an estimated award of $1.2 million. Yet someone making $70,000 per year, in the same personal situation, would be entitled to an award of $2.2 million.

Critics have said the government, paying out taxpayer dollars, essentially values the life of the stockbroker more than that of, say, the dishwasher.

The rules of the fund allow Feinberg to consider individual circumstances outside the dry formulas, such as the cost that a victim – for example, an only child – would incur while taking care of aging parents.

This is where lawyers can marshal evidence and arguments to increase a potential award.

The initial thinking behind the lawyers group was that it would provide victims help with paperwork, Casey said. Soon, however, it became apparent that the scale of the enterprise – determining the economic impact of the loss of a wife, brother, son over future decades – would take a larger effort.

TLC set up an office in New York City and eventually employed 20 people. Four worked as "victim intake staff," spending hours talking to grieving and injured victims, said John Bailey, the executive director.

A group of staff lawyers worked with the pro bono lawyers, coordinating their efforts from around the country while serving as the repository of knowledge over how the claims process was working.

Behind each claim was a story – harrowing, riveting, often achingly sad, San Diego attorney Benjamin Bunn said.

Case cited

Bunn and his law partner Chris Hulbert represented a Staten Island, N.Y., woman named Roseanne Celic. Her 43-year-old husband, Tom, a vice president at an insurance company, died while attending a meeting at the World Trade Center.

After deciding to try the claim process, she received an application from the fund in the mail. It was a two-inch-thick document so intimidating it brought Celic to tears.

She asked for an attorney from TLC, and was assigned Bunn and Hulbert. Beginning in June 2002, they made several trips to the East Coast, meeting with Celic and her late husband's co-workers.

At first, Celic said in an interview, the lawyers simply wanted to learn about her husband and their life together. Only later did they delve into the couple's finances, marshaling information to make their best possible case to Feinberg.

Because TLC was the first group of its kind, there were few guidelines for the lawyers. "What it comes down to is, a lot of this was kind of a work in progress," Bunn said.

The hearing before Feinberg took place just before Christmas 2002, Celic said. For 40 minutes, the lawyers used a videotape depicting her husband's life, as well as reams of economic data, to quietly make their case.

Celic declined to discuss the amount of her final award, but she said working with the TLC lawyers "was the best thing I could have done."

Expansion comes

As time went on, the lawyers group expanded, encompassing experts from a variety of disciplines to advocate for larger awards for victims. A group of economists, organized in San Diego, went to work at no cost assessing economic impacts.

Gabriel said the group employed cultural anthropologists, to explain the importance of an eldest son or grandmother in the context of a given culture. Batteries of translators were recruited.

On behalf of those who died as well as injured victims, life-care planners were recruited to explain to the fund certain long-term economic impacts for surviving family members.

The group also recruited burn experts to tell Feinberg what those injured victims would have to deal with, said John C. Jeannopoulos, the director of attorney services for TLC.

In all, the group estimates that, by not charging fees, the attorneys saved claimants $200 million. The group also calculates that its lawyers were able to increase, by 50 percent, awards that were based on factors such as age, income and marital status. That accounted for more than $700 million going to victims.

Local ties

Thirteen San Diego-area families were related to victims of the attacks. Officials with the fund could not say how many from San Diego had applied.

But Debby Borza, whose 20-year-old daughter Deora Bodley, was on United Airline Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, applied to the fund "because I didn't want to go through litigation with the airlines for seven to 10 years."

Borza, who did not use a lawyer, said her experiences with Feinberg were "exemplary." She called the very idea of the fund "a kind and generous gesture."

The fund's offices will be open until midnight tomorrow. They will accept claims that are postmarked by tomorrow. Claims in the works will be processed. All are expected to be paid out by June.

When the last check is written, it likely will spell the end of this unique attempt at compensating so many aggrieved people. Casey, for one, thinks it will not be duplicated.

Whatever the final word on the fund's effectiveness, one thing is clear to some claimants: No system, regardless of how well intentioned, can fully account for their losses.

"Sometimes," Borza mused, "I wonder if people think if they get some money they might feel better. But that's not the case. Not the case at all."