STATUS (February 3, 2022): Excellent News! Yesterday, the United States authorized approval of the settlement agreement and the parties signed the agreement.  In the parties’ Joint Status Report filed with the Court yesterday, the parties notified the Court that the agreement had been fully executed and explained that:

The United States will disburse funds in accordance with the agreement.  Distribution is expected to take some time and will be made in batches until the funds for each of the 5,722 plaintiffs has been disbursed to plaintiffs’ counsel, following any administrative offsets for debts owed to the United States.  Once disbursements are complete, the parties will stipulate to the dismissal of this action with prejudice. (Joint Status Report, Dkt. 87). 

The next status report is due on May 2, 2022.  We are hopeful that all payments will be made prior to that date and that we will be able to dismiss the case. 

Once we receive our first batch of payments, we will distribute those checks and continue to distribute each batch as they come in until all 5,722 plaintiffs have been paid.  Please note, that it can take the Judgment Fund 30 – 60 days to process the first batch of payments once it receives notice of the settlement from the United States.  We will post a distribution log on our website so you can check whether your check has been mailed. In Abad, the Government took approximately three months to make all payments.

To ensure that you receive your damages monies, it is extremely important if you have moved since you signed up for the case that you let us know (if you have not already done so).

Your settlement award will be reduced by our contingency attorney fee to which you agreed when you signed up for the case of 25% of your gross settlement amount. However, we were able to negotiate with the Government to recover $109,412.15 in hourly attorneys’ fees, and this reduces the contingent fee paid by each plaintiff to a slightly lesser percentage of 24.79%.