Thousands of smokers and their families sought out Florida tort king Norwood “Woody” Wilner after he won a big case in 1996 against the tobacco industry. But in the decade that followed, Wilner held the potential plaintiffs’ claims in check as a massive Florida tobacco class action named after Howard Engle moved forward, culminating in a short-lived $145 billion verdict. “Wilner figured that most of these clients were Engle class members,” as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit put it in a ruling issued on Wednesday, “so he just collected names and waited for the class action to run its course.”
In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court decertified the Engle class but gave plaintiffs an opportunity to bring new individual lawsuits, thousands of which remain pending in the state. With limited time to contact his roster of hopeful clients from long ago, Wilner filed a flood of placeholder lawsuits in their names in 2008, including 521 personal injury cases on behalf of individuals who—it turns out—had died years earlier.
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