N.O. may be hub of major battle

Four years ago, some of the nation's top trial lawyers converged on New Orleans for dinner at Antoine's. The main course was cooperation; they wanted tobacco companies for dessert. Veterans of lawsuits over asbestos exposure, hotel fires, plane crashes and refinery explosions, they joined forces and launched a unique legal assault on cigarette makers.

They're back.

Many of the same lawyers will be in town this week to coordinate a new wave of litigation. This time, they have the gun industry in their sights.

"We are taking on an industry that is virtually unregulated because of their power, much like tobacco," said John Coale, a Washington, D.C., lawyer.

New Orleans was the first city to sue gun makers, hoping to hold them responsible for the cost of violent crimes. Chicago followed in November with its own theory: that firearms companies created a public nuisance by flooding nearby suburbs with weapons to dodge the city's restrictive gun laws. Other cities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco and Boston, are considering lawsuits of their own.

How much of a role the lawyers will play in such lawsuits is unclear. A well-heeled lot who will reap millions from tobacco settlements, they are hoping to make New Orleans a hub for the gun litigation, as it was in the tobacco wars.

Even now, a suite of downtown offices that is home to a database of tobacco documents used by lawyers across the country is making room for handgun information. Law firms that local mastermind Wendell Gauthier organized four years ago are pitching in $100,000 apiece to finance the battle with gun manufacturers, as they first did to finance the tobacco lawsuits. The payoff they hope for would be contingency fees of up to a third of whatever the gunmakers are forced to cough up.

"The plan at the moment is to have it organized locally and to have a major impact on the gun industry," said Joseph Bruno, a New Orleans lawyer.

-.And the gunmakers plan to be ready.

The resolve is there to actively and aggressively defend ourselves," said Rob Ricker, governmental affairs director of the American Shooting Sports Council, an industry group based in Washington, D.C.

The industry got a big boost last week when the National Rifle Association, which had been staying out of the dispute, announced it was targeting at least six states for intensive lobbying designed to stop the lawsuits. The NRA wants legislation in place that would restrict the ability of cities to enter into contingency fee agreements with trial lawyers. Instead, cities would have to put up attorneys fees in advance, greatly restricting the potential size of the take. Louisiana is one of the target states.

Dwarfed by Big Tobacco

As with tobacco litigation, trial lawyers talk about bombarding gun companies with lawsuits all across the country at the same time. They say that handguns, like cigarettes, are lethal and that the manufacturers failed to take steps to make them safer.

But the brewing face-off between the "masters of disaster," as some of the leading trial lawyers are known, and the gun industry has important differences.

The most obvious is size.

With more than $3 billion in nual sales, the handgun market is a blip compared with the masssive cigarette market, with estimated domestic sales of $50 billion a year. The tobacco industry can afford to pay more than $200 billion over the next 25 years, as it agreed to in November.

"In the long run, tobacco was a win-win for both sides. Our industry does not have the financial wherewithal," Ricker said, adding that gunmakers would be better off filing for bankruptcy protection than agreeing to settle the cases.

"I do think the plaintiffs' lawyers involved have more money than the industry does," said Jim Irwin, a New Orleans attorney who represents the gunmaker Colt's Manufacturing Co.

Big Tobacco consists of huge, publicly held companies that must answer to shareholders; almost all the major gun manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson Corp. and Colt's, are private companies. Some of the major players, such as Glock, Inc., are foreign firms.

Nor are handgun manufacturers as well organized as tobacco companies. "In sophistication, organization and money, tobacco is everything these guys aren't," Coale said. "Apparently they fight amongst themselves a lot. They've already been divided. We just have to conquer them."

Ricker acknowledged the gun industry has been highly competitive but said it will mount a coordinated defense and is in the process of hiring national firms to help.

"There isn't that organization or structure that existed with tobacco, but there will be, whether there are the two lawsuits we have now or the 100 that have been threatened," he said.

Court battle has begun

The early battles in the wave of tobacco litigation that brought the industry to the table were over which courts would hear the lawsuits. The Castano group, named for a New Orleans lawyer who died of lung cancer, first tried to sue all cigarette makers on behalf of all addicted smokers in the country. But federal appeals courts rejected the nationwide class-action approach, sending the lawyers into courts in each state, where they slammed the industry with dozens of lawsuits at once.

Gunmakers are bracing for a similar battle and are fighting to get the lawsuits into federal courts. Chicago and New Orleans filed their lawsuits in state courts, which are considered more hostile to big business and more likely to award huge damages.

The firearms companies are all from outside Louisiana, so a lawsuit filed by New Orleans against them typically would land in federal court. But the city also sued local pawn shops and sporting goods, stores that sell guns, a move that lawyers for gun makers say is nothing but an attempt to dodge federal court.

They want the case moved to federal court in New Orleans, and the city is fighting it. U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan has set a hearing on the issue for March.

The gun industry also says that once jurisdiction is settled, the liability law is on its side.

"This case has nothing to do with fault. It is just merely an attempt to get money from a segment of the economy that these people think is unpopular," Irwin said. "I think most people are struck by this and say this is not fair."