Elizabeth J. Cabraser

Litigation

San Francisco

Elizabeth J. Cabraser has been taking on leadership roles representing plaintiffs in mass tort litigation and class actions for four decades. From those posts, she has helped bring in some headline-making settlements, including the $26 billion settlement from opioid makers for state and local governments, $75 million from 20 generic drug makers for price-fixing, about $2 billion in settlements from GM over faulty ignition switches and up to $4 billion in the VW "clean diesel" litigation.

Early this year, Cabraser and co-lead counsel announced a settlement in litigation against the large management consultancy, McKinsey & Company, over marketing advice it provided opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The $78 million deal on behalf of third-party payors follows several larger settlements for other plaintiff classes. But Cabraser is still litigating against McKinsey on behalf of babies who were born addicted to opioids. National Prescription Opiate Consultant Litigation, 3:21-md-02996 (N.D. Cal., filed June 8, 2021).

Settlements she and other plaintiffs' attorneys reach in these big cases are just the tip of the litigation iceberg, Cabraser said. What's below the waterline is collecting all the data about individual plaintiffs and their claims.

"It's where all the proof lies," she said. "It isn't just that there's large numbers of people involved. It's that the large numbers of incidents or tragedies or damages that make up those cases make them incredibly complicated."

Collecting the data "makes the difference between a settlement that works and is fair and one that doesn't."

Initially, in the national opioids litigation, the attorneys only had anecdotal information about where and when the drugs were sold. Then in 2018, they won access to the DEA's Automated Reports and Consolidated Ordering System data. National Prescription Opiate Litigation, 1:17-md-02804 (N.D. Ohio, trans. Dec. 12. 2017).

"It totally changed the litigation because there was no other way with accuracy to determine market shares, to determine who was most active in a particular geographical area," she said. "But this way we could tell, to the pill, at the county level across the country where everything went."

Cabraser serves on the plaintiffs' executive, settlement and tribal committees in the opioids MDL.

The data is much more challenging to assemble in her newest giant case. She is one of the co-lead attorneys representing former Marines sickened from exposure to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune from 1953 through 1987. Camp Lejeune Water Litigation v. United States, 7:23-cv-00897 (E.D. N.C., April 25, 2023).

"We have to rely on military records and epidemiological data that was compiled by government agencies," she said. But those records are old. "They're on various media from handwritten to floppy disks to all sorts of different media. ... It's proven to be a tremendous chore and also an area of dispute in terms of what evidence is available."

So far, there are about 300,000 claims in the administrative process plus about 2,000 cases actually on file.

"I'm very, very proud to be able to represent these Marines and their families," Cabraser said. "I'm glad that Congress finally decided to do something about it."

-- Don DeBenedictis