Mediator Cathy Yanni of JAMS in San Francisco..01-29-08.Photo by Christine Jegan (freelance)

A federal judge in Cleveland has appointed three special masters to help craft a settlement in the massive opioid litigation. One of them, Cathy Yanni, who works at JAMS in San Francisco, spoke to law.com about the complex case, which involves hundreds of cities, counties, states, Native American tribes and others that have sued manufacturers and distributors of the prescription painkillers. “This litigation is a multilevel chess game,” she said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Law.com: U.S. District Judge Dan Polster appointed you, Cleveland's David Cohen and Francis McGovern of Duke Law as special masters. Why do you think you were chosen for the opioid litigation?

Cathy Yanni: In my case, I was Judge Polster's special master in the gadolinium case, which was an MDL he was involved in two or three years ago. We settled 1,000 cases together in Cleveland. So we've worked together a lot. He asked plaintiffs and defendants to propose names of who they thought would be good special masters for this case, and our three names—my name, Francis' name and David Cohen's name—were the only names that appeared on both lists.

Have you worked with Francis McGovern or David Cohen before?

I've worked with both of them. They're both fabulous, very collaborative, and all three of us have been president of the Academy of Court Appointed Masters, which is an organization put together by special masters for special masters. Francis and I have worked together on other cases—silicone gel breast implants and Skechers. And David and I collaborated when we were working with the Academy of Court Appointed Masters.

What role do you see each of you playing as special masters?

The best way to look at it is we're going to assist Judge Polster in any way that we can. And each of us is going to work together to help him with the resolution of the opioid situation. Apparently, there are other cases where there have been multiple special masters. I know Francis mentioned in the BP case and apparently in Actos. It's not that unusual. Oftentimes, there's a person who does the special master for case management and discovery issues, and then a settlement special master, and I specialize in the settlement aspect. In this case, we're all focused on settlement, so it's a little different.

What else is unique about the opioid case?

First of all, it's a national crisis. Second of all, there are many more plaintiffs groups, many more defendant groups. It's a more complicated landscape than many normal pharmaceutical litigations where you have the plaintiffs and claimants versus a single manufacturer, or maybe two or three manufacturers. This litigation is a multilevel chess game.

The other unusual part of this case is just the number of agencies and political different federal agencies and state agencies. The number of people who are part of the governmental interests is significantly larger than in any case I've been involved in.

How could that impact your job?

It increases the amount of time we have to spend getting people involved in the process. So it's a lot of people I suspect we'll work with who are not part of the legal system every day, like in most MDLS, or in most cases I mediate. These are people who are working in a small city or county. They're working for their constituents. To me, it's more hands-on work with the parties.

What do you think needs to happen for a settlement in this case to occur?

We need to get everyone together who's a stakeholder and start discussions with what is their view of how we abate the opioid crisis and how do we implement a solution. So it's almost starting at the end and working backward. Everyone involved in this case agrees we need a global solution and, as Judge Polster has said, people are dying every day. We need to do something now.

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