By MARK SARDELLA
WAKEFIELD — The town of Wakefield will join hundreds of municipalities nationwide in filing lawsuits against manufacturers and distributors of powerful opioid painkillers that are said to be fueling the nation’s drug abuse crisis. Targets of the lawsuits include drugmakers such as Allergan, Johnson & Johnson, and Purdue Pharma, and the three large drug distribution companies, Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson.
Town Counsel Thomas Mullen told the Board of Selectmen this week that many communities are signing up to sue the opioid companies. He said that he has advised the town of Lynnfield, where he also serves as Town Counsel, to join the suits and the Lynnfield selectmen have agreed.
Mullen said that he was initially reluctant to advise Wakefield and Lynnfield to get involved because he was not familiar with the out-of-state law firms that control the litigation and because lawyers who specialize in class action lawsuits are “generally an unsavory crew.”
However, one law firm stood out in a good way, he said, because they are partnered locally with the firm Anderson & Kreiger, which Wakefield has hired successfully on several occasions. Lynnfield has also used the firm in the past.
“I regard Anderson & Kreiger as the best law firm in Boston that specializes in municipal work,” Mullen said. He said Anderson & Krieger has partnered with Scott & Scott in the opioid litigation.
Scott & Scott is a firm with more than 70 lawyers headquartered in Connecticut with offices in three states, Mullen said.
Two of Scott & Scott’s partners gave a thorough overview of the lawsuit during a recent meeting with Mullen, Wakefield Town Administrator Stephen P. Maio and Lynnfield Town Administrator Robert Dolan.
“Mullen told the selectmen that Scott & Scott specialize in class action lawsuits and have done things such as security fraud cases, antitrust pharmaceutical cases and they had a big piece of the Bernie Madoff case.
“They represent cities in five states in the pending opioid cases,” Mullen added. “In Massachusetts, they represent Worcester, Springfield and Haverhill.”
Mullen said Scott & Scott’s theory of the case is that manufacturers and distributors, knowing the dangers of addiction, encouraged doctors to prescribe opioids as pain relievers, rather that for their intended use in end-of-life care.
Mullen said that he found Scott & Scott’s approach very interesting from a tactical standpoint.
“They want to avoid federal court,” Mullen said, “where hundreds of cases have been consolidated before a single judge in Ohio, who is urging quick settlement and is resisting efforts to move the cases along. (Scott & Scott’s) approach is to file in state court, so they can control the litigation.”
He said that signing up with Scott & Scott appears to be risk free.
“They offer a pure contingent fee arrangement, taking 22.5 percent of any recovery as a fee,” said Mullen. “They front all expenses, which are likely to be substantial because a lot of expert testimony has to be obtained. If there is a recovery, they will recover their expenses from it. If there is no recovery, they would forgive those expenses. I do not see how any defendant could assert a counter claim against the town.”
Mullen said that he liked the active and aggressive approach of Scott & Scott.
“I would not recommend that we merely hire a firm that wants to park our case in Ohio and take a cut of whatever is negotiated there without working on it,” he said. “I recommend that the board retain Scott & Scott for the purposes of pursuing opioid litigation, which is the same recommendation I made to the Lynnfield Board of Selectmen.”
The Wakefield selectmen authorized Maio to sign a letter with Scott & Scott agreeing to be a party in the suit.
Any settlement deal could include billions of dollars in payments that could be shared by municipalites for treatment programs, abuse prevention and to cover some of the costs of dealing with the crisis.
The Trump administration has said it is focusing intensely on fighting drug addiction, but critics say its efforts fall short of what is needed. Trump signed off this month on a bipartisan budget deal to provide a record $6 billion over the next two years to fight opioids, but it’s not yet decided how that will be allocated.
The latest effort by the U.S. Justice Department targets powerful, but legal, prescription painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin, which have been widely blamed for ushering in the drug crisis. But prescribing of those drugs has been falling since 2011 due to policies by government, medical and law enforcement officials designed to reverse years of overprescribing.
The majority of opioid deaths now involve illegal drugs, especially the ultra-potent opioid fentanyl. Deaths tied to those fentanyl and related drugs doubled in 2016, to more than 19,000, dragging down Americans’ life expectancy for the second year in a row.
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