· January 25, 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case highlights an underlying problem in the nation’s system of justice, attorney Jan Schlichtmann said during a visit to the law school on Jan. 25. In the ruling, the court struck down provisions of campaign finance reforms, barring the government from limiting political spending by …
· Michael Keating, an attorney at Foley Hoag, part of the legal team that represented W. R. Grace, says Schlichtmann’s fatal flaw is his inability to separate a …
· Best known for his work on a lawsuit which served as the basis for a best-selling non-fiction book, attorney Jan Schlichtmann is a currently operating attorney best known for his work on the case Anderson v. Cryovac. Though he lost the case, the publicity attendant to the work resulted in more stringent Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The case was …
· In the Shadow of Woburn. Twenty-five years after taking on the case of his life, and a decade after A Civil Action made him famous, Jan Schlichtmann is …
Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W. R.
Schlichtmann turns down a pretrial settlement offer of about $4 million from Beatrice. Later the jury absolved Beatrice of liability. The jury did find Grace liable, but another round of testimony would have been required before damages could be awarded.
After a lengthy trial, the case is dismissed in favor of Beatrice, after Jan turned down an offer of $20 million from Beatrice attorney Jerry Facher during jury deliberations.
When the case was over, Schlichtmann lost his partners, his career and "got the hell out of town" by moving to Hawaii. He returned to Boston in 1993 to start over, which has meant marriage and two young sons. Since the movie, he is especially in demand on the lecture circuit.
Schlichtmann fell behind on his mortgage and started living in the office. But none of the partners regretted the case.
The EPA files charges against the tannery's owners, and a much higher settlement is eventually offered and accepted, which included an apology and cleanup. At the end, it's revealed that it took Jan several years to pay off all of his debts, and he has since taken another polluted water case.
A Civil Action is the true story of Schlichtmann's David and Goliath legal fight against powerful corporations accused of environmental contamination that were alleged to have resulted in high rates of leukemia in children in Woburn, Mass.
Rule 11 states that a lawyer should not file papers in court that are not “well-grounded in fact.” Cheeseman's “Rule 11” motion argued in essence that the plaintiff's lawsuit lacked factual support and that an adequate pre-suit investigation would have revealed that.
Cases involving personal injury, battery, negligence, defamation, medical malpractice, fraud, and many others, are all examples. Breach of contract claims.
2. When Mr. Schlichtmann went to the tannery, what did he see that caused him to accept the case? He saw the company discarding waste, and he also saw wealthy companies that he could sue.
In complicated lawsuits, it is not uncommon for the legal process to span several years from submission of the original complaint to completion of the trial. The lawsuit filed by the eight families in Woburn extended from 1979, past the trial held in 1986, through appeals that lasted into 1990.
He devised a maneuver to keep the victims' families from testifying by focusing the first phase of the trial on a scientific question: whether any of the poisons had actually migrated from the tannery to city wells. He underscored the fact that the 15-acre tannery site was separated from the city wells by a river.
In complicated lawsuits, it is not uncommon for the legal process to span several years from submission of the original complaint to completion of the trial. The lawsuit filed by the eight families in Woburn extended from 1979, past the trial held in 1986, through appeals that lasted into 1990.
He practices environmental law.
Leukemia Cluster in Woburn, US, Linked to Chemical Leakage and Tainted Water. In Woburn, Massachusetts, it was discovered in May 1979 that barrels with industrial fluid containing trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) had been leaking into the Aberjona River.
Jerome Facher, a Boston lawyer who successfully defended a tannery accused of water pollution that plaintiffs linked to a cluster of childhood leukemia deaths — a case that became the basis of a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie — died on Sept. 19 at his home in Arlington, Mass. He was 93.
He’d flown to Illinois to court a cancer expert from the University of Chicago. Schlichtmann still remembers the academic asking him, once he’d reached the university’s lab, “Do you have any idea what you’re trying to do here?”
As author Jonathan Harr eventually chronicled so well in A Civil Action, Schlichtmann was a brash young lawyer after Cornell Law, brash enough to have turned down a $75,000 settlement offer in his first trial—a wrongful-death case, one that even the judge thought should be settled.
Back then, Schlichtmann’s motto for the firm was “Rich, famous, and doing good.”. The Woburn case would make them rich and famous, and it would do a great deal of good: create a landmark precedent, but also change corporate behavior and, by extension, the culture of America.
In the end, huge swaths of original scientific research in geology, epidemiology, and even cardiology were funded not by the federal government, not by wealthy nonprofits, but by Schlichtmann ’s tiny law firm on Milk Street—independent scientific inquiry whose results could have helped either side in the Woburn case. A great deal of it just happened to support Schlichtmann’s. Which was a very lucky thing. The firm spent $2.6 million preparing for trial.
It was a bold claim, made all the bolder because environmental law was in its infancy then, the link between chemicals and the cancers they caused legally irrelevant if not nonexistent. When Schlichtmann’s firm took up Woburn in 1982, for example, none of the Big Tobacco lawsuits had been settled yet. One day, deep into the discovery phase of the Woburn case, Schlichtmann learned how delusional his cause really was.
In December 1985, a few months before the Anderson trial began, Schlichtmann’s grandmother died. Her funeral fell on a Sunday, but Schlichtmann spared only an hour to attend. That was how much the case consumed him.
At Schlichtmann’s table, you can see the back of his neck redden. When it’s Schlichtmann’s turn, he stands to address the judge. He is 58 now, tall, with a prominent nose and mustache, his face gaunt enough to look haunted, his frame as thin as when the evening-news cameras first captured it a generation ago.
Schlichtmann had to first convince his legal team and his clients of his plan. Mark Cuker, his co-counsel, knew the case would be tough. Woburn was now a precedent—notorious both for its failings and its pioneering spirit—and it had dealt with contaminants in parts per billion. Toms River was parts per trillion.
One of the first cases to test Schlichtmann’s theory was Toms River, which was Woburn writ large: a cancer cluster in a bucolic New Jersey town where, between 1979 and 1995, 90 children developed various forms of the disease, a rate that was 74 percent higher than in other towns its size. Many of the children died.
While all this was going on, Schlichtmann enlisted a friend, Lori Ehrlich, to serve as a “punitive class member”—in essence, a person who would act as an assumed lead plaintiff if Schlichtmann filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of consumers. Ehrlich’s role would be to serve as a bludgeon, threatening Nestlé with a class-action claim on behalf of everyone who drinks Poland Spring. So Schlichtmann had one suit on behalf of Poland Spring’s competitors, and the potential for another on behalf of Poland Spring’s consumers.
Schlichtmann enlisted Tom Sobol, a Cambridge-based lawyer of the national law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which had won big cigarette cases, and Garve Ivey, a renowned class-action lawyer in Alabama. Both attorneys were friends of Schlichtmann’s. Sobol threw a bash for Schlichtmann’s 50th birthday.
Around 2002, Schlichtmann heard that Poland Spring bottlers in Maine were not, in fact, gathering their water from springs. So he investigated. The water appeared to be coming primarily from ponds. So how to punish Poland Spring and its parent company, Nestlé? Sue them on behalf of Poland Spring’s competitors. Schlichtmann enlisted Tom Sobol, a Cambridge-based lawyer of the national law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which had won big cigarette cases, and Garve Ivey, a renowned class-action lawyer in Alabama. Both attorneys were friends of Schlichtmann’s. Sobol threw a bash for Schlichtmann’s 50th birthday.
Schlichtmann was a pioneer once more. “Jan and I thought we might be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Cuker says, with a laugh. This is Schlichtmann’s way now, settling outside the purview of the legal system. In fact, he’s been to trial only once since Woburn.
Or the local water company, which had mishandled the contaminated water. Linda Gillick, whose son had cancer, organized the aching families. She’d read A Civil Action, and picked Schlichtmann and a firm from Philadelphia to represent the families.
138. Schlichtmann contends that the Respondents pressured him to pay the discharged debt by attempting in 1998 to instigate an inquiry by the U.S. Trustee into whether he had committed fraud in his bankruptcy case. These allegations are the subject matter of paragraphs 52 to 61 above. For the reasons stated there, I find that Schlichtmann has not proven by clear and convincing evidence that the actions in question were an attempt to collect the discharged in personam liability.
In the Motion for Sanctions, Schlichtmann contends that the Respondents pressured him to pay the discharged debt by making malicious threats to expose to governmental authorities that he had engaged in bankruptcy fraud. Specifically, he contends that in 1992 and 1993, Cecil, both directly and though Schlichtmann's former partner, William Crowley, told Schlichtmann that he "wasn't out of this" and threatened to reveal that Schlichtmann had committed fraud in his bankruptcy filing by failing to inform the bankruptcy court that Schlichtmann had taken over the Groton matter and would be receiving a legal fee. In the proposed findings of fact that he filed after trial, Schlichtmann makes no mention of any direct communication from Cecil in this period; instead, he proposes findings only as to indirect communications made by Cecil to Crowley and related by Crowley to Schlichtmann. With respect to the indirect communications allegedly made through Crowley, I have found above (at paragraph 32) that the evidence of the alleged communications is hearsay and unreliable, and therefore that Schlichtmann has not carried his burden as to these. As for the direct communications, Schlichtmann appears not to rely on it any longer. However, as I have found above at paragraph 34, Schlichtmann has not sustained his burden of proof as to this alleged communication either. Moreover, there is no evidence from which the court could infer that alleged threats of fraud would have served to compel payment of the discharged in personam liability. In Cecil's communications with Schlichtmann during this period, all initiated by Schlichtmann, Cecil made clear to Schlichtmann that his concern was with the Groton receivable, that it belonged to TCC and that Schlichtmann was obligated to turn it over to TCC. Schlichtmann did not testify that Cecil ever demanded from Schlichtmann any payment other than turnover of the Groton fee. Therefore, threats of the type alleged here might reasonably have been understood as efforts to compel Schlichtmann to honor TCC's security interest, but not as efforts to compel payment of the discharged in personam liability. For these reasons, Schlichtmann has failed to carry his burden of proof as to the alleged threats in 1992 and 1993.