Attorney General reverses course, supports holding back percentage of BP settlements | NOLA.com

Louisiana A.G. Buddy Caldwell

Attorney General reverses course, supports holding back percentage of BP settlements | NOLA.com: "Reversing his position without explanation, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell said Tuesday he would support holding back 4 percent of state financial recoveries from the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster to fund the work of the committee of plaintiff attorneys at the helm of the litigation.

File photoAttorney General Buddy CaldwellCaldwell will also assume a new higher-profile role in the consolidated litigation over the oil spill, and will join Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange as co-coordinating counsel for state interests.The news came in a court filing Tuesday afternoon that also withdraws an earlier objection Caldwell had filed with the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over the 4 percent withholding issue."

Meanwhile the Southeast Texas Record reports that Alabama A.G. Luther Strange who supported the hold back has shifted his position in light of the objection filed by the United States Department of Justice.  Strange reportedly now calls for Judge Barbier to reconsider.


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Holdback order in BP oil spill case challenged

Holdback order in BP oil spill case challenged: "NEW YORK, Jan 13 (Reuters) - In a flurry of court filings this week, lawyers for claimants before the $20 billion BP oil spill fund asked a federal judge to reconsider his December order requiring that six percent of future settlements be placed in a reserve account.

U.S. District Court judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans established the account on Dec. 28 to potentially reward lawyers leading the BP multi-district litigation spawned by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in 2010. Barbier said he had not decided to award the fees, but he wanted to have the option if he decided they were deserved. On Jan. 4, Barbier amended his order to clarify the order would only affect claimants who hadn't received a determination letter from the BP fund as of Dec. 31."

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Kenneth Feinberg freezes payments from BP oil spill fund | NOLA.com

Fallout continues from MDL Judge Carl Barbier's order to deduct 6% of all settlements between BP and claimants  in the Gulf oil spill of 2010.  BP challenges the judge's jurisdiction to order a hold-back of funds paid to people who have not filed suit and have not benefited from the plaintiffs Steering Committee's work and investments in the cases.  As I discuss in a forthcoming piece in the Roger Williams Law Review there is a regulatory vacuum regarding administration of BP's mandatory compensation scheme under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.  Judge Barbier citing the existence of a "putative class" of claimants has stepped boldly into that gap.  - GWC
Kenneth Feinberg freezes payments from BP oil spill fund | NOLA.com:

"The Gulf Coast Claims Facility has halted all payments for oil spill damage in the wake of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier last week that 6 percent of all settlements reached after Nov. 7 be set aside to finance the work of plaintiff attorneys in the oil spill litigation in New Orleans. The move means that thousands of people and businesses waiting to be compensated outside of court for harm they endured when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in April 2010 will have to wait longer for their money.

Payments to about 9,000 people and businesses who have received final determination letters from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, but have yet to sign the award, are now in play. Another 40,000 people and businesses have claims under review at the GCCF and could also be affected.
"While we seek clarification from the court, we will freeze all GCCF payments going forward," claims facility administrator Kenneth Feinberg said Tuesday. "Hopefully, this freeze will be of a very short duration.""

Goodwin Procter, attorneys for Feinberg and the GCCF have asked for clarification of how to comply with the ruling which is effective November 7.  At least some of those funds are no longer within the GCCF or BP's control.


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Fund will be created to reimburse plaintiff attorneys working on BP litigation | NOLA.com

Fund will be created to reimburse plaintiff attorneys working on BP litigation | NOLA.com:

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has granted a hotly contested motion to create a fund that could eventually reimburse plaintiff attorneys for their work in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill litigation over the objections of several parties to the case.

Barbier's order does not actually award "common benefit fees," or the amount of money that the committee of plaintiff attorneys pressing the case for the benefit of all claimants would get to compensate them for their time and expenses.
Rather, it sets up a fund that would ultimately pay such fees, should they be awarded, and requires defendants and states in the case to begin holding back a percentage of any settlements as contributions to the fund.

A percentage of settlements reached through the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, the $20 billion fund administered by Washington mediator Kenneth Feinberg, will also be required to be contributed to the fund.

The order is HERE
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BP Shortcuts Led to Gulf Oil Spill, Report Says - NYTimes.com

BP Shortcuts Led to Gulf Oil Spill, Report Says - NYTimes.com: "WASHINGTON — BP, running weeks behind schedule and tens of millions of dollars over budget trying to complete its troubled Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, took numerous shortcuts that contributed to the disastrous blowout and oil spill last year, federal investigators concluded in a report released on Wednesday."

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An Oyster on the Seder Plate? - NYTimes.com

by Paul Greenberg

LAST night I put an oyster on my Seder plate.

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Jason Logan

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• Times Topic: BP Plc.

While I didn’t particularly want to put something traif atop that most kosher of dishes, this Passover falls on the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. And since BP, the leaseholder of the failed well, seems intent with its new television ads on making us forget about the spill, I felt that something drastic was in order to help us remember. Combining the memorial powers of the Seder plate with the canary-in-the-coal-mine nature of the oyster seemed a good way to keep the disaster — and BP’s promises to clean up its mess — in mind.

This past March I spent a week in Louisiana’s bays and bayous. All over the region I encountered oyster dredges full of dead, empty shells and broken oystermen with equally empty pockets. Many of the oystermen I interviewed reported that 80 percent of their beds had been killed.

Ecologically speaking, this is huge: a single oyster can filter 40 gallons of water a day, and the millions of oysters in Louisiana’s waters are one of the things that make the gulf work as an ecosystem.

An Oyster on the Seder Plate? - NYTimes.com

Gulf’s Complexities Come Into Focus as Spill’s Damage Is Tallied - NYTimes.com

Leslie Kaufman reports for the Times:

"There is no doubt that gulf water, wildlife and wetlands sustained injury when, beginning on April 20 last year, some 4.9 million barrels of oil and 1.84 million gallons of dispersants poured into the waters off Louisiana. But the ecosystem was not passive in the face of this assault. The gulf, which experiences a natural seepage of millions of gallons of oil a year, had the innate capacity to digest some of crude and the methane gas mixed with it. Almost as soon as the well was capped, the deep became cleaner to the eye. By the same token, dozens of miles of marsh still remain blackened by heavy oil, government crews are still grooming away tar balls that wash up ceaselessly on beaches and traces of the dispersants are still found floating in the currents....."

Gulf’s Complexities Come Into Focus as Spill’s Damage Is Tallied - NYTimes.com

Report cites design flaw in BP well blowout preventer

the last line of defense - the blowout preventer

The Times reports that an engineering firm has identified flaws in the blowout preventer at the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well.

NY Times Editorial - Phase 2 for the BP Oil Spill Fund

Gulf Oil Spill Damages, Phase Two

Published: March 13, 2011

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There must be days when Kenneth Feinberg, who administered the 9/11 victims fund nearly a decade ago, asks himself why he ever volunteered to run the $20 billion compensation fund for victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. He has heard little but criticism — some justified and helpful, some unfair and unhelpful — from the start....

HERE is the full Times editorial, as posted on the Gulf Oil Spill Facility's website

BP Says payment terms are too generous

The Times has just reported that BP is about to lodge a complaint with the Kenneth Feinberg-administered Gulf Coast Claims Facility.  His projected losses are too high, in BP's opinion.  The document is not yet available.
Update

Calculation of future damages

GCCF - proposed methodology

emailed comments on proposed methodology

Public comment by BP

Background

The Gulf Coast Claims Facility

Legal Ethics Forum: Claims Facilities and Nullification of Ethical Duties

Monroe Freedman asks: Is there something rotten in Denmark?

Legal Ethics Forum: Claims Facilities and Nullification of Ethical Duties

The reference is to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility run by Kenneth Feinberg, to the agreement his firm entered with BP, and the ethics opinion Feinberg obtained from ethics maven Stephen Gillers here (for which expense he will be reimbursed by BP).

Master of Disasters: Is Ken Feinberg Changing the Course of Mass Tort Resolution? - Magazine - ABA Journal

Master of Disasters: Is Ken Feinberg Changing the Course of Mass Tort Resolution? - Magazine - ABA Journal

The short answer is - Yes.

Is that a good thing? Maybe.

Final Report - National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling

 "a culture of complacency"
from the Final Report to the President:



"Drilling in deepwater brings new risks, not yet completely addressed by the reviews of where it is safe to drill, what could go wrong, and how to respond if something does  go awry. The drilling rigs themselves bristle with potentially dangerous machinery. The deepwater environment is cold, dark, distant, and under high pressures—and the oil and gas reservoirs, when found, exist at even higher pressures (thousands of pounds per square inch), compounding the risks if a well gets out of control. The Deepwater Horizon and Macondo well vividly illustrated all of those very real risks. When a failure happens at such depths, regaining control is a formidable engineering challenge—and the costs of failure, we now know, can be catastrophically high.  


In the years before the Macondo blowout, neither industry nor government adequately  addressed these risks. Investments in safety, containment, and response equipment and  practices failed to keep pace with the rapid move into deepwater drilling. Absent major  crises, and given the remarkable financial returns available from deepwater reserves, the  business culture succumbed to a false sense of security. The Deepwater Horizon disaster  exhibits the costs of a culture of complacency."

Final Report (Released 01/11/2011) | National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling

Gulf Claims Czar Makes Mixed Progress on Transparency Pledges - ProPublica

Kenneth Feinberg - master of disasters

Sasha Chavkin of ProPublica reports:

On Dec. 13, Gulf spill paymaster Kenneth Feinberg promised to increase his operation’s transparency and improve its communication with claimants. Feinberg said he wouldaddress claimants’ struggles to get information about their claims by hiring field staff in the Gulf to answer their questions, publicly releasing his methodology for deciding payments and offering pro bono legal assistance to applicants.

A month later, Feinberg has made mixed progress in carrying out these promises. His reforms so far follow a familiar pattern: He has accepted criticism and responded with substantive changes, but he has also overpromised in setting his timeline for improvements and lagged in their implementation........

Gulf Claims Czar Makes Mixed Progress on Transparency Pledges - ProPublica

BP oil spill: Deepwater, deep trouble | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

The National Oil Spill Commission, set up by order of President Obama, has concluded, in a newly released chapter that "most of the mistakes can be traced back to a failure of management". The managers are BP, Halliburton, and Transocean.  the full report is due shortly.

BP oil spill: Deepwater, deep trouble | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

U.S. sues BP over Gulf Oil Spill

The U.S. Department of Justice has initiated a civil action against BP for the oil spill. Civil penalties range from $5.4 billion to $21 billion.  Criminal prosecution may follow.
Link to CBS News report HERE
Link to complaint for civil penalties HERE
h/t Mass Tort Blog, Main Justice

In BP Oil Spill, Final Settlement Phase Begins - NYTimes.com

In BP Oil Spill, Final Settlement Phase Begins - NYTimes.com