Fee fights among plaintiffs lawyers aren’t unusual. But the fight that has followed Bayer CropScience’s $750 million settlement of litigation over rice crop contamination has entered rarefied air. In a battle over $72 million in fees, a St. Louis federal judge on Tuesday certified a class of plaintiffs firms to pursue unjust enrichment claims against another set of plaintiffs firms.
The dispute traces back to 2006, when Bayer revealed that traces of its genetically modified rice strain had contaminated other long-grain rice crops in the southern United States. Some 8,000 rice farmers filed suits against Bayer, and most of them were consolidated into multidistrict litigation. Bayer settled the MDL in 2011 for $750 million. Other suits, including some in state courts, produced separate settlements. (We named Don Downing of Gray, Ritter & Graham and Adam Levitt of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz our Litigators of the Week for the MDL settlement. Levitt is now with Grant & Eisenhofer.)
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