The cost was outrageous, but a drop in the bucket compared to willie's (another slick willie) average settlement.
Here is the way our legal/justice (for some) system is headed:
Willie GaryHis lawsuits are typical of what is wrong with many of today's "lawyers" and the un-informed juries they select. His settlements are in the "BILLIONS" not millions.........many with a common theme..
http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0%2C1199%2CNAV47_STO55937%2C00.html http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/newsatlanta/coke/0712.html http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news/ap/20010314/ap-maris-suit.html May 11 -- "Ad deal links Coke, lawyer in suit". Both the Coca-Cola Co. and plaintiff's attorney Willie Gary are denying a linkage between Gary's role as a lawyer in the current high-profile race bias litigation against Coke and the company's just-announced agreement -- financial terms not disclosed -- to become a major advertiser on a cable channel of which Gary is part owner. Last month amid fanfare the Florida lawyer arrived in Atlanta on his private jet ("Wings of Justice") to assume representation of several of the original plaintiffs in the much-publicized employee litigation against the beverage company. "I want a settlement that's fair and just," he said then. "I don't come cheap. I think big, real big." On Tuesday Coke announced a major five-year deal to buy ads on the fledgling Major Broadcasting Cable Network, which Gary helped launch and of which he is chairman and chief executive. Gary says his clients are aware of the deal and says, "There's absolutely no conflict. We're not friends. We're business people. Coke is not giving me anything. ... It's goods in exchange for service. ... No way this is a conflict.'"
A sometime fund-raiser for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH coalition, Gary is best known in legal circles for the ruinous $500 million verdict he obtained in a Jackson, Mississippi courtroom against the Loewen Group, a Canadian-owned funeral home chain, in what had previously seemed a routine commercial dispute (see our editor's account). Last week he announced that he was demanding nearly $2 billion from the Burger King Corporation on behalf of Detroit restaurateur La-Van Hawkins, whose UrbanCityFoods business has not fared as well as expected in its operation of franchised hamburger units. Gary's entry last month into the Coke case came at a time of unpleasant back-and-forth charges between some of the employees who were first to sue and class-action lawyers who had worked to assemble their and others' complaints into a suit on behalf of the company's entire black workforce, led by Washington, D.C.'s Cyrus Mehri, of Texaco fame (our account of that one), with the Mehri camp saying the individuals were holding out for too much money for themselves personally as distinct from the class, and a PUSH coalition activist, Joseph Beasley, countering that under the settlement anticipated from the class action the "lawyers get all the money" while "the black community is left high and dry".
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Now he's sueing the oil company's for BILLIONS about something, it goes on & on..
All these lawsuits do, is drive up the cost for us, the "little" people, while lining the pockets of the lawyers & their firms..
Eagler