Defense Lawyer’s ‘Punch Me’ Claim: Colleagues Drove Up Legal Costs
An antitrust lawyer who worked at Drinker, Biddle & Reath until he was asked to leave last year is claiming that defense lawyers’ legal strategy drove up the costs of a lawsuit over nurses’ wages in the Chicago area.
Lawyer John Cusack told the Chicago Tribune that lawyers representing the hospital defendants spent millions of dollars fighting class action certification when they should have tried to get the case dismissed as frivolous.
The suit had contended that an exchange of wage information fostered by the Chicago Healthcare Council, Cusack’s client at Drinker Biddle, had depressed wages for registered nurses. The case settled last month, with two nurse plaintiffs receiving $25,000 each. Potential liability had been as high as $1 billion, if the case had proceeded as a class action, the Tribune story says.
“This case is a graphic illustration of why legal costs and fees are so high,” Cusack told the Tribune. “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
According to the Tribune, “it’s not every day that lawyers publicly second-guess fellow professionals on the same team about how a case was handled.” When Drinker Biddle learned that Cusack was criticizing the litigation strategy, it fired off a letter demanding he “cease and desist and refrain from any further conversations.”
Tom Campbell, one of Cusack’s former antitrust partners, told the Tribune that Cusack “has stuck his nose out and said, ‘Punch me.’”
Cusack took an “unorthodox approach” in the litigation by fighting a subpoena for wage information from the council with the claim that the case had no merit, the story says. At the same time, he urged lawyers for the hospital defendants to seek dismissal of the suit—something he couldn’t do because his client wasn’t named as a defendant, the story says. Cusack was later taken off the case.
Drinker Biddle partner Gordon Nash says Cusack’s criticism is wrong. “You can’t just go into court and say this case is nonsense and expect the judge to dismiss it,” he told the Tribune.
Lawyers for other law firms representing the hospital defendants did not comment for the record when contacted by the Tribune. The firms are Miller Shakman & Beem, McDermott Will & Emery, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Katten Muchin Rosenman, Seyfarth Shaw, and Mayer Brown.
