Posted on Sun, May. 11, 2008

Not the first fen-phen trial to create controversy

The Kentucky case is not the first fen-phen class-action to generate controversy.

Since the late 1990s, there have been allegations in other states that doctors, working with lawfirms, certified claims of fen-phen injuries without actually examining the patients. In other instances, it was alleged that lawyers paid doctors extra money for performing medical diagnoses that produced fen-phen claims. It also was alleged that law firm representatives in some cases instructed staffers in doctors' offices in how to conduct fen-phen examinations in ways that would generate more claims.

Some class-action lawyers also have gotten into trouble recently in cases involving fen-phen.

Famed Mississippi lawyer Dickie Scruggs, who arranged the $206 billion national tobacco settlement in the 1990s, pleaded guilty in March to a charge of conspiring to bribe a judge in a dispute over attorney fees growing out of lawsuits from Hurricane Katrina. And last month, prominent New York litigator Melvyn Weiss, a specialist in securities class-action law, pleaded guilty to charges that he helped conceal millions in kickbacks his firm made to plaintiffs over 25 years. His one-time law partner, William Lerach, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the same case.