Louisiana Lawyers Defeat Class Status Bid in Suit Over BP Claims

摘要

Plaintiffs suing the lawyers they hired to prosecute their Deepwater Horizon oil spill subsistence claims for malpractice were denied class certification by a federal court, because theirclaims would require individualized proof of proximate cause.Each of the would-be class members would need to prove that their lawyers’ “decision to put their own interests before the interests of their clients,” and to continue to accept new clientsuntil just before the deadline for filing their subsistence claims, was the but for cause of their loss of a subsistence award, the court said.The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana rejected the argument that the plaintiffs could establish causation by showing that the lawyers’ decisions affected theirmethodology and process in a way that affected all class members the same. They would still need to submit individualized proof to show how the lawyers’ decisions impacted the filing ofeach claim.