Herman Gerel, LLP is involved in several different types of cases, yet they all share one common thread.

In each instance, a person or group of individuals was harmed by a huge corporation. Without Herman Gerel, LLP , these individuals would have been outmatched by the multi-million dollar defense budgets of corporate wrongdoers and outflanked by their hundreds of lawyers.

That is why Herman Gerel, LLP provides the expertise, manpower and resources to help individuals confront corporate wrongdoers and obtain the justice they so rightly deserve.

Mass tort

Simply stated, a Tort is a wrong. It involves any damage, injury, or wrongful act done willfully, negligently, or in circumstances involving strict liability (but not involving breach of contract) for which a court of law will grant monetary damages or an equitable remedy to compensate you for your injury.

Torts can be violations of civil law, like personal injury, negligence, misrepresentation, libel or slander, trespassing, invasion of privacy, etc. Or torts may involve criminal acts, like assault, battery, kidnapping, arson, burglary, manslaughter, murder, rape, or robbery.

So while a tort may also be a crime, the primary purpose of tort law is to compensate the injured party, not to punish the wrongdoer as in criminal law, except where the  if the perpetrator's conduct was willful, malicious, or outrageous.

Mass Torts occur when a large number of people have been similarly injured. Examples of mass torts include major multi-party lawsuits involving faulty products like defective hip implants, silicone breast implants, tobacco, or the many pharmaceutical cases that Herman Gerel, LLP is known for.

CLASS ACTION

Class Action Suits are a form of multi-party litigation allowed in virtually every state. A class action is a procedural device that allows multiple claims for known and unknown claimants in multiple jurisdictions to be litigated efficiently and resolved with finality.

For instance, Herman Gerel, LLP has filed class action lawsuits in both our World War II Slave Labor and Propulsid litigations. Moreover, since procedural devices like class actions and individual lawsuits are not mutually exclusive, we sometimes pursue our clients' claims with multiple procedural devices. For example, in the WWII Slave Labor case we filed individual lawsuits on behalf of our clients, but we also filed one class action lawsuit in which the class members included our clients.

A class action suit also makes sense when each victim's claim is too small to justify an individual lawsuit. Electric utility customers, for example, overcharged a few pennies each month may individually be due only $15 in damages. But when those claims are added together, the amount can be staggering. And it's unfair to allow a corporate wrongdoer to get away with a wrong simply because it has harmed a million people, each for a small amount of money.

So a class action suit allows a class representative to aggregate all those claims and ask for the cumulative amount of money in damages, which will be shared by all class members.

INDIVIDUAL LAWSUITS

A plaintiff may file an individual lawsuit in state or federal court. He or she may be the only claimant in the case, or may be one of many.

Since there is no limit to the number of participants in an individual lawsuit, you could be part of a single lawsuit with a thousand other claimants. The important thing to remember is, it is still an "individual" lawsuit.

This means that when a judgment is entered or a settlement is reached, the only people who benefit directly are the specific individuals who are named parties to that suit. So if an uncle or cousin -- who took the same faulty medication that you did -- decides not to join your lawsuit, he or she will not gain from any settlement or verdict reached in your case.

As a result, if the court awards you $1 in punitive damages and $2 in compensatory damages, your cousin gets none of that. Or, because the outcomes may vary from jury to jury -- or from case to case -- the opposite might occur: your cousin might win big, and you could get nothing.

However, there is a procedural device called Multi-District Litigation (MDL) that Herman Gerel, LLP has successfully used to give individual lawsuits many of the same strengths and advantages available in class action suits.

MULTI-DISTRICT LITIGATION

All individual lawsuits from across the country that are pending in Federal court and that involve a similar type of claim (like the Herman Gerel, LLP cases for injuries caused by Rezulin, Propulsid, PPA, or the Sultzer orthopedic hip implants) can be consolidated and transferred to a single judge for pre-trial purposes only.

As in a class action suit, in Multi-District Litigation (MDL) you benefit through judicial economy and efficiencies of scale. For example, if the defendant you are suing is also being sued by 100,000 other plaintiffs across the country, just taking depositions in all the various jurisdictions could delay the trial date by years. But when all those individual suits are MDL'd, it happens in one place. One time. This also helps to save money for the clients.

The next advantage is a more level playing field. With 100,000 individual suits against the same defendant (s) scattered from coast-to-coast, various judges might issue conflicting orders. Or set differing standards of evidence. But in MDL those 100,000 cases go to just one judge, for more uniform, more consistent pre-trial work.

Our clients also have the advantage of Herman Gerel, LLP's nationwide experience in the MDL litigation process.

MDL LITIGATION

Herman Gerel, LLP attorneys are now playing leadership roles in prominent Multi-District Litigation now being performed across America:

Russ Herman, our partner in New Orleans, was recently appointed Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Propulsid MDL. He also holds a seat on the Plaintiff's Steering Committee of the current HMO MDL.

Herman Gerel, LLP partner, Maury Herman, is chairman of the Plaintiff's Steering Committee of the Eastern District of Missouri Case 4:05-md-01672-SNL, In Re Express Scripts, PBM Litigation.

Herman Gerel, LLP partner,  New Orleans office, Stephen J. Herman, serves on the Plaintiff's Steering Committee of the Eastern District of Missouri Case 4:05-md-01672-SNL, In Re Express Scripts, PBM Litigation.

A partner in the Herman Gerel, LLP Washington, D.C. office, Michelle Parfitt, is a member of the PPA MDL Plaintiff's Steering Committee.

In the handful of key MDL'd cases now in progress across the country, one finds Herman Gerel, LLP partners in the top tier of case strategy, experience and leadership.

The next step is to put Herman Gerel, LLP MDL experience to work for you.