Court sides with Bevin in lawsuit over $4.2 million paid from Purdue Pharma case
Siding with Gov. Matt Bevin, the Kentucky Court of Appeals on Friday ordered a trial judge to reconsider whether a Louisville law firm was wrongfully paid $4.2 million by Attorney General Andy Beshear for its work helping the state to settle a lawsuit against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma.
Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate erred by not allowing the case to proceed through discovery so that more evidence could be gathered, a three-judge panel wrote.
Granting summary judgment in the case, Wingate ruled nearly a year ago that the state of Kentucky could not retroactively block payment to the firm. But Wingate should allow the case to resume from the early stages where he cut it off, Judge Christopher Shea Nickell wrote for the appellate panel.
“Review of a case that at one point was valued by experienced attorneys to be in excess of $1 billion was resolved in little more than three months,” Nickell wrote.
The lawsuit in question represents one of several courthouse battles between the Republican incumbent Bevin and Beshear, a Democrat who is running for governor this year.
Bevin’s Finance and Administration Cabinet sued the law firm of Dolt, Thompson, Shepherd and Conway in Franklin Circuit Court in 2017. The Bevin administration says the firm should not have been allowed to collect $4.2 million from the Purdue Pharma settlement on Jan. 21, 2016, because its contingency fee contract with the attorney general’s office expired seven months earlier, on June 30, 2015.
Arguing for the firm’s right to collect the money, Beshear said “that, through miscommunication, the original contract with Dolt, Thompson had expired and no renewal contract had been executed.” Attempts were made to correct this oversight with a new contract, Beshear said.
Former Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway — who oversaw the $24 million Purdue Pharma settlement, a far cry from the $1 billion that state lawyers once said the case was worth — joined Dolt, Thompson as a partner after he left office in 2015. Conway has said he received no money from the settlement upon joining the firm.
“The Bevin administration is pleased with the Court of Appeals’ unanimous ruling today that there must be discovery about why Attorneys General Andy Beshear and Jack Conway settled a case against one of the largest opioid companies in the country for pennies on the dollar,” Bevin’s general counsel, Steve Pitt, said Friday in a prepared statement.
In its own statement, Beshear’s office noted that he was not attorney general when the case was settled in 2015. Instead, Beshear inherited the proceedings from Conway after the November 2015 election, and he since has provided $8 million in settlement funds to addiction treatment facilities across the state, a spokesman said.
“Our office has administered this settlement in a transparent manner and at the instruction of the courts, lawmakers and even Gov. Bevin’s Finance and Administration Cabinet.,” Beshear spokesman Terry Sebastian said.
This story was originally published January 25, 2019 at 3:13 PM.
