Lawyers flock to seminar on Gulf of Mexico oil spill issues

Attorneys working on the litigation dealing with the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil plume can expect to deal with novel questions of punitive damages, economic injuries, and the interaction of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 on the existing body of state, federal and maritime law, participants in the Gulf Coast Oil Symposium said Tuesday.

The symposium, organized by the New Orleans Bar Association at the Sheraton New Orleans hotel, is a measure of just how engrossing the legal issues facing plaintiff and defense attorneys alike are expected to be. “We’ve never done a seminar in response to a specific event,” said Loretta Larsen, executive director of the bar association.

Attorneys who represented plaintiffs in the litigation over the Exxon Valdez tanker grounding in 1989 offered their words of wisdom.

Minneapolis attorney Karen Hanson Riebel said that time is the enemy. By the time the litigation settled, 20 percent of her 32,000 class members had died. After nearly two decades of litigation, class members received an average of $15,000 each for their losses.