A lawsuit alleges that Charleston attorney Jim Humphreys caused more than 500 of his former clients to miss a deadline to collect damages from their exposure to asbestos, and instead told them the settlement was never agreed to.
Humphreys allegedly missed the deadline, which would have allowed his clients to recover claims after bankruptcy court approved a settlement with Celotex in the late 1990s, according to a lawsuit filed this week in Kanawha Circuit Court.
Charleston attorney P. Rodney Jackson filed the lawsuit on behalf of Humphreys' former client, Beverly McCormick. The firm James F. Humphreys & Associates L.C. is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed Tuesday, and Jackson has asked a judge to give the lawsuit class-action status so others can join.
Humphreys and his firm represented thousands of plaintiffs in an asbestos-related mass tort claim against Celotex. Under a settlement negotiated in bankruptcy court, people could claim settlements based on their level of exposure, risk and injury. The Celotex Asbestos Settlement Trust was founded Feb. 1, 1998, according to its website.
The company directed people to sign an agreement approving their respective settlement allocations, the lawsuit states. Celotex received all the documentation from Humphreys' clients before the court-imposed deadline, according to the lawsuit, but hundreds of clients names were never submitted by that deadline.
Despite the error, the lawsuit states, Humphreys believed Celotex would honor the time-barred claims. Upon realizing it wouldn't, Humphreys began a "cover up," the lawsuit alleges, "with the result that clients who would have recovered settlement monies have recovered nothing to date."
Humphreys is accused of directing his employees not to disclose the alleged "filing blunder" to any client whose claims were time-barred. Instead, Humphreys and his firm allegedly told clients that their claims against Celotex were lost because of the bankruptcy, lack of medical evidence, inadequate provision of information by claimants and diagnosis from the wrong doctor, among other reasons.
Jackson writes in the complaint that the exact number of potential class members isn't known, but could be determined through the discovery process using records maintained by Humphreys and his firm. Jackson believes the class would include more than 500 of Humphreys' former clients. He describes them as, "All persons who reside in West Virginia who were clients of the law firm James F. Humphreys, L.C., who had asbestos-related claims against Celotex entitling them to specific recoveries from the negotiated and approved settlement fund, and whose claims were not timely submitted for processing."
Humphreys, a former Democratic state senator from Kanawha County, ran for Congress in 1999. He lost to a fellow Kanawha County legislator, Republican Shelley Moore Capito, who is now a U.S. senator after serving 14 years in the U.S. House.
Last year, Jackson filed a lawsuit against Humphreys and his firm on behalf of a Virginia couple, who claimed he lied for more than eight years and made them believe he filed a lawsuit on their behalf.
That Kanawha Circuit Court case alleges Humphreys and his employees told Ira Calvary and Mavis Horne they were pursuing claims from the time the couple hired Humphreys in 2002 until August 2014.
The couple intended to claim in the lawsuit they hired Humphreys to file that the damage to their property was exacerbated because of construction at the Tazewell County airport in Virginia, which they live near. That lawsuit was never filed, they allege.
In 2006, Humphreys allegedly attempted to attach a group of Virginia plaintiffs, including the Hornes, to the mass flood litigation pending in West Virginia. But a judge ruled the statute of limitations had expired in 2004 and that their claims "had nothing to do with the West Virginia plaintiffs," their lawsuit states. It is still pending.
Reach Kate White at
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