Filing lawsuits doesn’t immunize Gori vs asbestos fraud claims: New filing

By Jonathan Bilyk | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

Saying “human tragedy is no license for fraud,” a plastic pipes maker is urging a federal judge to reject the bid to end their racketeering lawsuit accusing the Gori Law Firm, America’s most prolific filer of asbestos personal injury lawsuits, of allegedly running an illegal “bounty” system that pushed false asbestos injury claims and allegedly coached plaintiffs and witnesses to lie.

“The fact that a plaintiff has contracted mesothelioma does not mean the Gori Firm is allowed to invent a fact pattern and teach a witness to lie in order to extract settlements from chosen target companies,” the pipes manufacturer, J-M Manufacturing, said in their filing.

“Teaching another person to lie, extracting a payment from a third party based on the telling of that lie, and splitting the proceeds recovered — that is criminal. A license to practice law should never allow anyone to commit criminal acts.”

The May 21 filing came as the latest step in a court fight over the fate of the action lodged by Los Angeles-based J-M accusing Gori of filing hundreds of allegedly bogus claims against the company and violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

J-M filed the motion in response to Gori’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

In the response brief, J-M asserts Gori is essentially asserting their work of filing lawsuits should insulate them from the fraud and racketeering claims.

J-M claims Gori has advanced a “staggering claim … that a years-long campaign of criminal fraud is not cognizable merely because it occurred in the context of litigation.”

“Contrary to Defendants’ suggestion, fraud does not magically transform into non-fraud when a lawyer employs it in a money-making litigation scheme,” J-M wrote in its new brief. “This Court cannot allow Defendants to invent a ‘litigation immunity’ to pardon their criminal enterprise.

“Lawyers are not above the law. Fraud committed by lawyers is still fraud.”

J-M had filed suit against Gori in Southern Illinois federal district court in late January.

J-M and Gori have faced off in court, with Gori on the plaintiffs’ side of the docket, hundreds of times. 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 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.

That case remains pending, as the Simmons firm seeks to also dismiss that action.

In Gori’s motion to toss the lawsuit against them, the firm follows a similar path laid out by their Simmons counterparts. Gori asserted the court must end J-M’s action, because it fails the so-called Noerr-Pennington test. That legal doctrine, established under a U.S. Supreme Court decision, 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.

And Gori asserts J-M can’t present any evidence to back its “bounty” claims, asserting the lawsuit was motivated by sour grapes and a desire to strike back somehow 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.

“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 in its motion to dismiss, filed in late April.

But in its response, J-M said its claims are strong, and asserted Gori is improperly attempting to use the Noerr-Pennington doctrine as a shield to neutralize attempts to hold them accountable under the law for alleged fraud.

“Defendants’ Motion asks this Court to hold that lawyers, by virtue of their membership in the bar, have RICO immunity for professional fraud,” J-M wrote. “Nothing in Defendants’ motion merits such a drastic ruling. Defendants cannot claim immunity as a matter of law.”

Gori has not yet responded to J-M’s response in court.

U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn has not yet ruled on the motion to dismiss.

Gori has been 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 Ashwin J. Ram and Andrew Erskine, of the firm of Buchalter LLP, of Los Angeles and Chicago, and J-M General Counsel Frank Fletcher, of Los Angeles.