Gori seeks quick end to asbestos fraud, lawsuit ‘bounties’ case

By Jonathan Bilyk | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

The Gori Law Firm, considered America’s most prolific filer of asbestos personal injury lawsuits, has pushed back on claims it engaged in a long-running scheme of lawsuit fraud and racketeering, saying the lawsuit brought by a plastic pipes manufacturer is an improper attempt to use federal racketeering law to punish the firm for succeeding in court.

On April 21, the Edwardsville-based Gori firm filed its motion to dismiss the lawsuit lodged by Los Angeles-based J-M Manufacturing, which accused Gori of violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

In the motion, Gori describes J-M’s lawsuit as “ill-conceived and retaliatory,” and essentially assert the lawsuit was motivated by sour grapes, and a desire to strike back at the Gori firm for allegedly repeatedly resting big money settlements and judgments from J-M on behalf of people who claimed they were harmed by asbestos allegedly contained in pipes made by J-M.

“Allowing the case to proceed would come at the serious cost of further harming Defendants’ reputations and chilling victims and law firms from bringing legitimate claims against J-M,” Gori wrote in its April 21 brief.

Gori’s filing comes nearly three months since J-M first filed its lawsuit in Illinois Southern District federal court.

J-M and Gori are no strangers to each other in court. According to court documents, Gori has named J-M as a defendant in its asbestos lawsuits at least 400 times.

All told, J-M has been targeted more than 6,000 times in asbestos-related lawsuits, with most of those lawsuits lodged in Madison and St. Clair county courts, the top two destinations for such lawsuits in the U.S.

However, according to J-M’s complaint, about 96% of the cases brought by the Gori firm were ultimately dismissed.

And the reason, J-M asserts, is because at least hundreds of those lawsuit claims against J-M were based on a long-running fraud scheme.

In its lawsuit, J-M asserts it was identified as a defendant in those cases solely to drive up the number of defendants to improve the chances of securing settlements from companies that are either unwitting, confused or otherwise unwilling to fight the claims.

In its filings, J-M notes that accusations of fraud are nothing new in asbestos litigation, as evidenced by other cases in which plaintiffs’ firms have been caught double-dipping ­— using litigation delay tactics to improperly collect from both asbestos lawsuits and later claims filed against bankrupt companies — or filing fraudulent claims altogether. These included famous cases that generated headlines in asbestos litigation involving CSX and Garlock Sealing Techs.

In the new complaint, J-M claims a lawyer who formerly worked at the Gori firm has provided evidence that Gori allegedly engaged in similar patterns of fraud, but allegedly took the alleged scheme to new levels.

In its complaint, J-M accuses the Gori firm of establishing a so-called “bounty” system under which it incentivized the lawyers it used to conduct depositions of clients – so-called “depo attorneys” – to coax and coach clients into agreeing to level false asbestos exposure claims against J-M and other companies, even when the client had never been exposed to products made by those companies.

According to the complaint, the Gori firm had used that bounty system since at least 2018.

Under the alleged system, attorneys “who successfully coached their clients to provide deposition testimony that they were exposed to products belonging to (J-M and certain other companies)” could secure “up to 2% of total settlement proceeds.”

This could allegedly allow an attorney earning as little as $65,000 a year the chance to bring in “up to $800,000 or $900,000” more in earnings per year, the complaint alleges.

According to the complaint, the alleged “bounty list” included J-M and at least 19 other companies, allegedly including 3M, Caterpillar and Honeywell, among others.

According to the complaint, companies allegedly landed on Gori’s “bounty list” because they were seen as “easy targets who were willing to pay substantial settlements” or were companies that had “‘pissed off’ Gori attorneys” in prior proceedings.

According to the complaint, this alleged strategy of tacking on dozens of potential additional defendants — allegedly whether or not they were based on factual claims — allowed Gori to maximize its returns using a so-called “batch settlement” scheme.

The lawsuit against Gori marks the second time J-M has lodged such fraud and racketeering claims against a top asbestos lawsuit firm.

In 2024, J-M also sued Alton-based Simmons Hanly Conroy, accusing America’s second largest filer of asbestos-related lawsuits of falsifying or suppressing evidence in asbestos cases and coaching witnesses to allegedly lie under oath about exposure to asbestos from cement pipes J-M produced.

In its motion to dismiss the new lawsuit, Gori notes J-M’s complaint against Simmons, but says J-M’s new lawsuit “targeted (at) its litigation adversaries” is “even weaker than the first.”

Following the path laid out by the Simmons firm, the Gori firm asserts the court must cut J-M’s lawsuit short because it fails the so-called Noerr-Pennington test, a legal doctrine established under a U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially affirms Americans have a constitutional right to file lawsuits and defend themselves in court.

In its motion, Gori says J-M’s lawsuit can’t survive under the so-called “sham litigation” exception to that doctrine, which doesn’t extend such constitutional protections to obviously fake legal claims.

In its action against the Simmons firm, J-M has already responded to a similar Noerr-Pennington defense, asserting the lawsuits filed by Simmons were “baseless or fraudulent.” J-M has leveled similar accusations against the Gori firm, though it has not yet responded directly to Gori’s motion to dismiss.

In that motion to dismiss, Gori further asserts J-M has not yet provided any evidence to back its claims concerning the “bounty system,” nor shown that any of the hundreds of lawsuits Gori has filed on behalf of clients that identify J-M as a defendant were not truthful claims against a potential defendant.

“J-M’s Complaint is littered with conclusory allegations of fraud and hyperbolic allegations about a ‘bounty system’ and ‘fraud playbook,’ but J-M never identifies any specific misrepresentations in furtherance of a scheme to defraud, as it must,” Gori wrote. “J-M purports to describe a conspiracy to have ‘depo attorneys’ instruct clients to make false product identifications, but J-M never identifies a single instance in which this occurred or a single case that was impacted or settled as a result.

“… In fact, J-M premises its arguments on truthful information contained in Gori Law’s pleadings and discovery responses, such as accurate statements about a plaintiff’s work history, which is hardly the stuff of wire and mail fraud.”

The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Stephen P. McGlynn.

McGlynn has not ruled on the dismissal request.

Gori is represented in the case by attorneys Ryan J. Mahoney, of The Mahoney Law Firm, of Glen Carbon, and Neal K. Katyal, of Milbank LLP, of Washington, D.C.

J-M is represented by attorneys Garreth DeVoe, Ashwin J. Ram and David H. Chao, of the firm of Buchalter LLP, of Los Angeles and Chicago.