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The court system worries how to handle all those individual cases

With 3,500 cases in Northeast Florida alone, smokers have until Friday to seek damages for tobacco-related illnesses under a deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court.

The next step will be figuring out how to docket all those cases without shutting down the court system.

"This is uncharted territory. This has never done before," said Jacksonville lawyer Eddie Farah, who has teamed with pioneering tobacco attorney Woody Wilner to represent most of the local plaintiffs.

The glut of new tobacco cases was set in motion by a 2006 state Supreme Court ruling in a class-action lawsuit that had resulted in a $145 billion award against the tobacco companies, the largest such verdict in U.S. history. Although the Supreme Court found the amount excessive and dismantled the class, it upheld some of the jury's findings and gave smokers who got sick from 1990 to 1996 or their families until Friday to file individual lawsuits for damages.

Estimates on the number of cases statewide range from 5,000 to 10,000, said Scott Schlesinger, a plaintiff's attorney in Fort Lauderdale.

Lawyers for the tobacco companies didn't return phone calls Wednesday but have denied in court documents that their cigarettes caused the alleged injuries and argued the lawsuits are legally improper. Companies named in the lawsuits are R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, The American Tobacco Co., Philip Morris and Lorillard. They have put up a $700 million appeal bond that attorneys said would be available to the claimants in the upcoming cases.

In Jacksonville, about 660 cases are filed in federal court; the rest are in state court. Wilner said many of the plaintiffs are people he represented after he received national acclaim in 1996 for winning $750,000 in damages for an Orange Park smoker - the first time a tobacco company had ever been required to pay damages for smoking-related illnesses.

Chief Circuit Judge Donald Moran said he plans to meet with lawyers for both sides to decide how to handle the onslaught of cases.

"We will need some kind of system," Moran said. "If we were to have to try every one of these cases individually, that's an impossibility."

In the early 1990s, when asbestos cases flooded the courthouse, one judge was assigned to handle all the pretrial issues, Moran said. He said he opposes creating a special tobacco docket because he doesn't have enough judges to free up for it.

Schlesinger said some South Florida courts are considering creation of a tobacco division; others are discussing consolidation of the cases before an administrative judge, much like Duval County handled the asbestos cases.

The Supreme Court opinion says findings in the class-action case regarding issues like whether the tobacco companies were negligent and knew cigarettes were dangerous and addictive won't have to be re-proven in the individual trials.

But plenty of issues remain, such as how much responsibility individual smokers have for their illnesses or whether specific diseases were caused by cigarettes, lawyers said. Because the lawsuit is no longer a class-action case, those issues will be decided case by case.

"These aren't just one- or two-day trials," Farah said. "This is not a rear-end collision where a guy ran a red light and everybody knows who's at fault."

paul.pinkham@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4107