In Friday court filings, insurers affiliated with Chubb Ltd. and Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. point to messaging such as an email sent in November by the law firm Junell & Associates PLLC, telling clients that “time is quickly running out” to meet a court-designated deadline and that lawyers “can complete a claim form on your behalf,” based on information from an initial phone consultation.
Some attorneys, including a managing partner from Junell, signed hundreds of claims in a single day, the insurers said, and others appear to have signed forms attesting to their truthfulness before they were even filled out.
The Boy Scouts sought chapter 11 last year over their past failures to safeguard children from sexual predators, starting a court-supervised process in which the organization is trying to compensate survivors while protecting the bulk of its wealth. Negotiations are continuing between victims’ lawyers and the Boy Scouts, which has said it needs a settlement approved by early summer to survive.
Mass-tort cases, which involve dangerous products or, in the Boy Scouts’ case, allegations of sexual abuse, have become a big business. Behind every case are marketers, brokers, funders and other third parties that help accumulate claims and pass them off to lawyers. Individual victims or plaintiffs become a commodity that can be bought and sold before finding their way into court or receiving a settlement.
The Boy Scouts bankruptcy case marked the first nationwide mass-tort case fueled by sex-abuse claims. It touched off a marketing campaign aimed at abuse survivors, encouraging them to step forward through television commercials, text-message blasts and social media advertising.
By a November deadline, more than 95,000 claims had been filed. Victims are looking for much of their compensation to come from insurance companies that wrote policies for the Boy Scouts decades ago, when most of the abuse occurred.
The insurers said thousands of claims are suspect, particularly those signed only by lawyers “with no evidence to show that counsel has knowledge of facts to support the claim.” Friday’s motion seeks approval from a bankruptcy judge to probe 15 victims’ lawyers who filed large numbers of claims. In another filing, the insurers asked to look into a sample of claimants, saying further examination would help cull legitimate claims from potentially fraudulent ones.
Some lawyers the insurers want to question held themselves out as part of the Coalition of Abused Scouts for Justice, which ended up filing 60% of the claims.
David Molton, a lawyer for the coalition, said the insurers’ filings were the latest in a string of attempts to misdirect attention from the sexual abuse inflicted on boys and to attack survivors and their advocates.
“The predators who were allowed to infect the Boy Scouts for many decades created a population of tens of thousands of sexual abuse victims and survivors, resulting in tens of billions of dollars of harm, pain and liability” for which the coalition believes the Boy Scouts and their insurers are responsible, he said.
There are powerful incentives for victims’ lawyers to file as many claims as possible. The more claims a law firm brings in, the more influence it can have over deal talks. The Boy Scouts have proposed creating a compensation trust to administer payments to abuse survivors, though it isn’t clear how much victims could recover under such an arrangement, which they would vote on before it is considered in bankruptcy court.
The Boy Scouts said in a statement the organization was deeply sorry for abuse suffered in scouting and reiterated a pledge to provide victims with equitable compensation through the bankruptcy process.
“We expect that any concerns regarding claim irregularities will be addressed and that the proposed trust will be used appropriately to equitably compensate abuse survivors,” the Boy Scouts said.
Tim Kosnoff, a lawyer formerly with the coalition, signed more than 750 claims, according to the insurers. He said his firm looked into every claim and “didn’t file anything that looked facially like it could be fraudulent,” but signed some forms on behalf of clients who hadn’t returned signed copies by the cutoff.
“Do we let all these claims not be filed and they lose their rights forever?” Mr. Kosnoff said. “These are fraud? Prove it.”
Many claimants don’t recall the names of their abusers but are asked to provide other corroborating details such as the location of regular troop meetings or outings where abuse occurred.
Advertisements on television and social media sites direct potential claimants to call centers that bundle up the claims. “Act now before it’s too late,” one TV advertisement sponsored by a lawyer group called Abused in Scouting told viewers, directing them to a phone number. “The Boy Scouts of America may think they can get away with it. Don’t let them.” At least 11,000 television advertisements had aired by August, lawyers for the Boy Scouts told the bankruptcy court last summer.
Some law firms bought claims from aggregators and filed them “without the signing lawyer—or any lawyer—ever having seen them,” according to the insurers’ filing.
One lawyer the insurers want to question, Deborah Levy with Junell & Associates, appeared to attach her signature to claims forms before they were even filled out, according to the Friday filing. Five of her signatures were created in a 20-second span, the insurers claim, citing a forensic analysis they conducted.
Junell didn’t respond to a request for comment.
At an October hearing, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein in Delaware expressed concern about lawyers signing claims on behalf of victims and questioned why, if enough communication and diligence had been done, the client couldn’t sign it themselves.
She allowed the practice, but warned that lawyers shouldn’t be signing claims without doing the necessary due diligence.
“And if we get a thousand signatures by an attorney on proofs of claim forms filed at the last minute, I think that raises questions,” the judge said at the hearing, later adding that any lawyer doing that “ought to be concerned about what impact that could have on…his clients.”