By KEVIN CHIRI

Editor and Publisher

RESERVE – When the national pharmaceutical company Merck announced last week that they have agreed to pay $4.85 billion to 27,000 plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit over the pain medication Vioxx, the phones began to ring more than normal in the law office of St. John Parish attorney Daniel Becnel, Jr.

That’s because Becnel is well known for his involvement in most major class action lawsuits nationally, and naturally had a big portion of the plaintiffs in this suit.

It was “par for the course,” Becnel told L’Observateur, about the way things go when news comes out about such a settlement.

“Everyone wants to criticize the lawyers for being involved in this kind of thing. But as soon as there is a payout ready to happen, all kinds of people want to make sure they get what is coming to them,” he said.

Becnel said that he invested approximately $5 million over the past four years in the Vioxx case, all with the usual possibility of not getting anything in return.

“Most people never think about that,” he said. “If this case went down and we lost, I would get nothing back. But people are so quick to criticize myself and others for filing these suits. They think we are just in it to make millions. But you need to come into my office and read all the thank you letters we get from people when we settle these cases, and they get money for the problems they have. No one thinks about that.”

Becnel said that he has just over 1,000 clients out of the 27,000 involved nationally in the Vioxx case. Each one will have to fill out a form that will grade the severity of their damages, and get reimbursed proportionately.

“No telling what each person will get. They could get nothing, or they could get millions, depending on what happened to them. We had an FDA guy say there were 400,000 people who have had injuries or died from Vioxx, so you can see only a small portion of them will

even see any money from this,” Becnel said. “But at least for those who did, they will be reimbursed for what happened to them.”

The multi-billion dollar settlement marks the fourth time Becnel has been involved in a lawsuit that has brought in over $1 billion.

He was earlier involved in the first tobacco class action settlement, which came in California, and was for a whopping $278 billion, then he was heavily involved in the Phen Phen case for $22 billion, then the breast implant lawsuit which was settled for $7.5 billion.

But even with those lofty numbers thrown about, Becnel said he still asserts that it is the people who have been affected in these cases that he is most concerned about.

“Just like the FEMA trailer thing, there are still 50,000 people in those trailers and now they are having all this formaldehyde trouble. Two of the people I was representing have died now, so are critics of the lawyers saying we should just not do anything for those people?” he asked.

“If there was an explosion at one of the industry sites around here tomorrow, people would be running to call us to represent them. But it takes someone to invest a lot of money just to do it since these are such long and drawn out cases. If I don’t do it, or some other lawyer doesn’t put up the money, none of these people could ever take on the big industries on their own,” he added.

In the Vioxx case, there had been nearly 20 civil trials over the past two years, and even after Merck lost a $253 million verdict in their first case, they have won most of the others. However they are reportedly spending $600 million annually just defending the entire national class action case, leading them to want to settle.

The agreement could collapse if at least 85 percent of the plaintiffs don’t agree to the settlement, but lawyers in the case said that is unlikely and they believe the deal will hold.

Most plaintiffs are expected to get an average of $100,000 each, but that is before lawyers fees which usually range between 30 and 50 percent.