Photo Credit: Steve Heap/Shutterstock.com.

A group of more than 20 lawyers who would be on many observers' list of the “best and the brightest” of the mass torts bar filed a motion on Wednesday to be appointed lead counsel in the national opioid multidistrict litigation.

Plaintiffs lawyers decided on a leadership team following a unanimous voice vote at a meeting on Monday at the Hilton Cleveland Downtown Hotel. According to Wednesday's motion, the team would be led by New York attorney Paul Hanly of Simmons Hanly Conroy, Joe Rice of Motley Rice and Paul Farrell of West Virginia's Greene, Ketchum, Farrell, Bailey & Tweel, who is lead counsel in more than 100 of the 180 cases in the MDL before U.S. District Judge Dan Polster of the Northern District of Ohio. Polster had ordered plaintiffs lawyers to file motions for lead counsel by Dec. 20. No other motions were filed by the end of Wednesday, and responses are due on Thursday.

“All of the lawyers on the proposed slate are very experienced in either complex litigation or drug litigation or MDL proceedings,” Hanly said. Rice led the negotiations over the $246 billion tobacco settlement, as well as deals worth billions of dollars involving the BP oil spill in 2010 and the Volkswagen diesel emissions settlement. Farrell is founding co-chairman of the American Association for Justice's opioids section litigation group along with Baron & Budd's Burton LeBlanc, who is one of 15 lawyers on a proposed executive committee submitted in the motion.

Other members of the proposed executive committee include:

• Elizabeth Cabraser, whose firm, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, announced on Wednesday that the city of Nashville had retained the San Francisco firm to pursue an opioid lawsuit.

• Chris Seeger, founding partner of New York's Seeger Weiss.

• W. Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm in Houston.

• Ellen Relkin of New York's Weitz & Luxenberg.

• Paul Geller of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd in Boca Raton, Florida.

• Linda Singer, a Washington, D.C., partner at Motley Rice who has represented the city of Chicago and Santa Clara County, California, in some of the first opioid cases.

• Lynn Sarko of Keller Rohrback in Seattle.

• Russell Budd and Roland Tellis of Dallas-based Baron & Budd.

There also would be three co-liaison attorneys: Troy Rafferty of Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Rafferty & Proctor in Pensacola, Florida; Steven Skikos of San Francisco's Skikos, Crawford, Skikos & Joseph; and Peter Weinberger, managing partner of Cleveland's Spangenberg Shibley & Liber.

The proposed names appear designed to bridge a divide in the plaintiffs bar over whether to pursue opioid cases in state courts or in an MDL, which many consider to be slower procedurally. Just this week, Harris County, Texas, announced that a group of Houston attorneys would pursue its opioid case in Texas state court.

“We're certainly hopeful that there will be cooperation,” said Hanly. “The endgame for all these entities is to recover some or all of the billions of dollars that collectively they're hemorrhaging.”

Several lawyers, including Hanly and Conroy, also have held leadership roles in an MDL over which Polster presided that involved gadolinium-based dyes used to treat diseased kidneys.

Hanly said about 175 lawyers showed up at Monday's meeting, which lasted two hours. In Wednesday's motion, lawyers asked Polster to extend until Jan. 9 a deadline to submit a proposed plaintiffs steering committee, which Hanly expected to comprise more than 20 additional attorneys. Hanly anticipated there could be some changes to the team going forward but didn't expect any additional motions for lead counsel to be filed.

“Everybody knows Joe Rice, everybody knows me and Jayne [Conroy] and Russell Budd. We all have great mutual respect for each other,” he said. “The reason there was not a single 'nay' vote is the slate we put together is the best and the brightest.”