About 400 people should receive nearly $20 million held in a controversial fund controlled by three Lexington, Ky., lawyers in a lawsuit over the diet drug fen-phen, a judge has ruled.
Special Judge William Wehr last week ordered that funds from the Kentucky Fund for Healthy Living, which was set up using money from a $200 million settlement in Boone Circuit Court, be placed in a trust for the lawsuits' plaintiffs, all of whom said they suffered medical problems because they took the diet drug. Lawyers and consultants involved in the lawsuit received $106 million collectively of a $200 million settlement and also set aside $20 million of the settlement to create the nonprofit fund. The lawyers received roughly $20 million each.
Several clients raised questions about the settlement, and the clients sued the lawyers in 2004, demanding an accounting. . . .
[E]arlier this year, Wehr ruled that attorneys William Gallion, Melbourne Mills and Shirley Cunningham Jr. violated their fiduciary duty to their clients by taking more than half the proceeds from the settlement. The lawyers and others involved in the case received about $105 million. The clients received $74 million.
In August, the state Supreme Court temporarily suspended the law licenses of Mills, Cunningham and Gallion until the Kentucky Bar Association could complete an investigation into possible misconduct in the case.