Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox on Tuesday approved paying $29.1 million from a $45 million lawsuit settlement fund to 21,132 Marlboro Lights smokers and their lawyers.
The fund was set up to end a 13-year-old class-action lawsuit accusing Philip Morris USA and parent company Altria Group of misleading Arkansas consumers about the safety of Lights and companion brand Marlboro Ultra-Lights.
The cigarette-maker denied wrongdoing and has successfully fended off more than a dozen similar suits around the country. Arkansas was the only state where the company paid a settlement.
The lawsuit had the largest plaintiff class ever in the state, Fox told the attorneys at the final hearing on the litigation. He commended them on their hard work and "highest level" professionalism.
"Everything in this case was time-consuming and, in some aspects, novel," he said, noting that he's presided over about 10,000 other cases during the nearly 14 years it's taken this "very complex litigation" to be resolved.
About $18.1 million will go to 13,281 applicants, an average of $1,363 per application.
By comparison, the only successful litigation against the tobacco company on this issue won $25 plus interest, about $77 total, for each of that Massachusetts case's nearly 200,000 plaintiffs.
Anyone who bought the Lights brands in Arkansas over a 38-year period was entitled to a share of the money regardless of whether they ever lived in the state. The period covered the time the cigarette brands were introduced in November 1971 until regulators barred cigarettes from being advertised as light in June 2010.
Applicants were eligible to receive 10 cents or 25 cents per pack purchased, depending on when they bought the cigarettes.
They did not need to provide receipts to stake a claim. Applicants were required to submit a sworn statement estimating their annual purchasing habits, naming three locations where they had bought cigarettes and identifying someone who could vouch for them.
About 37 percent of the applications were deemed incomplete or questionable; those 7,851 claimants will be paid only $100 each.
Fox said 5,869 of those applicants reported buying some cigarettes while underage and another 1,909 reported purchasing more than five packs a day for a "sustained length of time." The tobacco industry reports that smoking three packs a day is rare, he said.
Some applicants claimed that they had been buying 100 packs a day. If those claims had been fully allowed, they would be worth about $91.8 million, according to the figures the judge released Tuesday.
Fox also approved a $10 million payment to lead attorney Tom Thrash and the other lawyers who have shepherded the case since it was filed in April 2003. That has included two federal appeals, one of them to the U.S. Supreme Court, and an appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court.
The lawyers had asked for at least $12.2 million to cover their expenses and work hours. Fox said they will be paid more.
But before he can make a final determination on what they're due, Fox said, he needs more documentation about what they've spent and what they've done before he can approve further payments.
"I need more detail, more of a line item," Fox said. "Show your work."
He said he is scrutinizing their expenses down to the level of where they ate, warning them that he would not approve their expenses for meals they had at Arthur's Prime Steakhouse in west Little Rock.
He emphasized that he considered the restaurant a "superlative eating establishment" and one of the finest in the state. But he said it is also one of the most expensive and he could not endorse the plaintiffs having to pick up the check for the lawyers to eat there.
The judge also authorized paying $73,520 to the claims administrators: attorney Allison Allred will receive $23,648 and accountant Angie Hopkins, $49,871. They have been compiling and analyzing the applications for the court since September and calculated the figures the judge presented to the sides on Tuesday. He described their work as "top-notch" and efficient.
The two lead plaintiffs, Wayne Miner of Franklin County and James Easley of Miller County, will each get $10,000 on top of any claim they made on the fund, the judge said.
There were 26,297 applications submitted, about half of them being received during the final two weeks of eligibility, Fox said.
But the judge disqualified about 20 percent -- 5,165 applications that claimed about $2.3 million.
A few claims were ruled ineligible because they were duplicate claims or submitted past the Dec. 1 deadline, but most of them, 4,848 applications, came from one of five addresses in either Ohio or Atlanta.
It's unlikely that each of those locations, four residential homes and a senior-citizen apartment complex, are home to about 1,000 applicants each, the judge said.
Further, a random check of a sampling of those applications by the lawyers could not find any application with a valid phone number, he said.
The judge said he would not categorize any application as fraudulent because the terms of the settlement gave him the authority to reject those applications that were "improperly submitted" and "materially incomplete."
The applications were collected over a three-month span that began in September and included a regional advertising campaign that reached Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Louisiana. The settlement was also advertised nationally in People magazine.
Fox hasn't yet ruled on disbursement of the remainder of the settlement fund, but some of it will cover administrative expenses as well as additional attorney fees. The plaintiffs' lawyers have also suggested giving some of the settlement funds to health and anti-smoking groups such as the American Lung Association, Arkansas Children's Hospital and the University of Arkansas for Medical Science.
The sides reached the settlement agreement in July through court-ordered mediation shortly before the case was scheduled for trial.
The lawsuit was filed in April 2003 on behalf of consumers who had bought Lights or Ultra-Lights in Arkansas.
The suit accused the cigarette company of running a misleading advertising campaign that deliberately duped consumers into believing the Lights brand was safer and subjected them to lower levels of tar and nicotine than regular cigarettes.
Plaintiffs sought a full refund for each pack purchased in the state.
Philip Morris denied any deliberate deception and wrongdoing, arguing that Lights did what they were advertised to do -- deliver less tar and nicotine -- if they were smoked correctly.
The Lights filters were specially ventilated to reduce tar and nicotine, but smokers could get more by inhaling more deeply or more often, the company stated. Smokers who used the cigarettes as they were designed got the promised benefit of reduced tar and nicotine, it said.
The cigarettes were re-branded as Marlboro Silver and Marlboro Gold in June 2010 after federal regulators barred makers from advertising cigarettes as light or mild.
Fifteen attorneys from seven law firms in four states -- Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi and Texas -- worked on the case, court filings show. Three other Little Rock lawyers from two law firms, Thrash Law Firm and Carney, Williams, Bates, Pulliam & Bowman, participated: Hank Bates, Marcus Bozeman and Randy Pulliam.
A Section on 01/18/2017