The class-action lawsuit against the city of New York concerning the ground zero response and cleanup effort suffered another setback last week. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein handed down a decision stating the lawsuit’s roughly $600 million settlement, filed on behalf of about more than 10,000 ailing first responders and workers who searched for survivors and cleared the wreckage after the Sept. 11 attacks, would be inadequate. He went further to delineate the settlement’s convoluted compensation allotment system and grossly excessive attorney fees as reasons for his recommendation to restructure the settlement. Hellerstein maintained the compensation paled in comparison to the effort displayed, hazardous conditions endured and compensation truly deserved by the plaintiffs, whom he made a point to refer to as heroes.
Now, I’m not for throwing the h-word around willy-nilly, and indeed, use of the word “hero” has been exercised to such an extent as to render it virtually useless, having gone so far as to become a verbal Band-Aid applied to anyone who gets the raw end of an unpalatable scenario (see: any victim featured on “Nancy Grace” or HLN in general). Does this mean our heroes are fewer and farther between than we typically recognize or that some of them are undeserving or, more pertinently, that the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are being aggrandized?
Concerning the latter, it’s always difficult to assess the actions of those exclusively involved in emergencies as being purveyors of herodom or simply doing their jobs. In this instance, it seems Hellerstein drank a little too much of his own Kool-Aid, because as far as I’m concerned, volunteers notwithstanding, you aren’t a hero just for adhering to your job description and happening to get poisoned. You are, however, entitled to suitable sums of money. Interestingly enough, it seems Hellerstein failed to recognize and acknowledge, and in fact skipped right over, the ones who might be considered the real heroes in this situation: the lawyers.
Too long have these heroes’ deeds sat idle and unsung; too often are they forced to retreat to the isolation of the penthouse suites that cap their ivory office towers to be relegated to local slot advertising or over-encroaching highway billboards, to hide behind the veils of non-lawyer spokespeople, to stand before volume-redundant libraries and to wear ridiculous cowboy hats, though it’s painfully obvious they’ve never even fed a horse, much less ridden one. Well, this nonsense stops with me; it’s time I shine a light on their heroics.
Faced with perhaps the most muddled, tangled wreckage of a case seen in recent years, these litigators rummaged through the piles, nay, the heaping rubble of paperwork necessary to rescue and salvage sums of compensation for their clients — often braving the confines of poorly ventilated, if lavishly adorned, conference rooms and having to work through the pain of tendinitis or the discomfort of an occasionally malfunctioning Aeron chair — only to be compensated themselves with a mere 40 percent of said settlement. That’s less than $250 million, folks. How are they going to compete with financial executives for top shyster miscreants of New York City with chump change like that?
As if working for peanuts wasn’t bad enough, here comes Hellerstein (and, in all likelihood, everyone aware of the settlement’s structure) not pulling any punches in saying their compensation is ridiculous or unwarranted. Is there anything ridiculous about being confronted with the chaos of such a case and, out of the ruins, being able to erect a monumental edifice of billable hours shining like a beacon of hope for generations (of lawyers) to come? That doesn’t sound ridiculous to me; it sounds downright American.
