Greene Broillet Helped Recover $3.3 Billion for Los Angeles County in the Tobacco Settlement

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Los Angeles County bore enormous public-health costs tied directly to smoking-related illness. County hospitals and clinics treated patients for lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other conditions that internal tobacco-industry documents had long acknowledged were caused by cigarette use. As evidence of industry concealment mounted nationally, California's largest county joined a wave of government plaintiffs filing their own lawsuits against the four major tobacco manufacturers, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Lorillard.

The county retained outside trial counsel to pursue its claims, selecting two Southern California firms: the Newport Beach firm of Robinson, Calcagnie and Robinson, and the Santa Monica-based firm of Greene, Broillet, Taylor, Wheeler and Panish. Browne Greene, a founding partner, led the engagement for the Greene Broillet team. A third firm, Esner, Higa and Chang of Los Angeles, also assisted in the litigation.

Negotiations involving state attorneys general and local government plaintiffs from across the country concluded on November 23, 1998, with the execution of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The four companies agreed to pay at least $206 billion to states over 25 years, restrict tobacco marketing to minors, eliminate billboard and public-transit cigarette advertising, and disband industry trade groups used to coordinate public-relations and lobbying campaigns against the health evidence.

Los Angeles County's share of the settlement came to approximately $3.3 billion, paid out over the term of the agreement. The California Legislative Analyst's Office, in a January 1999 fiscal analysis, placed the total nominal value of LA County's payments at roughly $3.35 billion. The initial contingency-fee structure for outside counsel would have allocated 25 percent of the recovery to the four representing firms, but because the fees drew scrutiny, the tobacco companies instead funded a national attorney-compensation pool of $500 million per year to be divided among all plaintiffs' lawyers nationwide. The two larger Southern California firms each anticipated receiving up to $112 million from that pool.

The settlement did not arise from a jury trial; it was the product of multiparty mediated negotiation. No court subsequently reduced or remitted the county's recovery. Annual payments to Los Angeles County began flowing in 1998 and continued in subsequent years under the agreement's schedule.