Asbestos Trust Withdraws Motion to Redact Law Firm Names in Upcoming Trial Over Alleged Claims Mismanagement

In a case scrutinizing the management of an asbestos trust, the trust’s advisory committee has withdrawn a motion to redact the names of the law firms involved in alleged wrongdoing.

The NARCO Trust Advisory Committee withdrew a motion to keep secret all “identifying information regarding law firms that represent individual claimants” in a bankruptcy proceeding over alleged mismanagement of the claims process. The new filing said that by withdrawing the request to remove the identities of the law firms in question, the parties can “focus on the specific matters at issue in these proceedings.” The committee has not, however, withdrawn the request to keep the claimants’ names private.

The revised motion came ahead of the upcoming trial where Honeywell is suing the trust for alleged mismanagement. The NARCO trust is maintained to pay asbestos claims against the now-bankrupt Honeywell affiliate.

The previous motion, filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, claimed plaintiff Honeywell has made allegations that “assail the character” of the law firms.

Two organizations responsible for overseeing the trust, North American Refractory Co. Trust Advisory Committee (TAC) and the Future Claimants’ Representative (FCR), filed a motion April 22 which argued that sharing the identities of law firms that have submitted trust claims in the upcoming trial would be harmful and “are not relevant to the issues before the court.” The motion claimed Honeywell “has failed to provide a basis for the relevance” of identifying individual law firms and calls that failure “a strategy designed to impugn the integrity of non-parties in this trial.”

Although NARCO has relented in its pursuit of redacting the law firm names, it argued that the identities of individual asbestos claimants should remain private. According to the motion filed May 5, keeping the identifying information private “is consistent with applicable law” and “appropriate to protect individual claimants’ privacy concerns.”

A group of insurers filed a brief opposing the motion, which claimed that TAC and FCR have not shown “a proper reason to redact the identities of the persons submitting claims to the Trust, have not shown harm would occur absent such a redaction, and have not proposed a sufficiently narrowly tailored request for relief.”

In a separate filing, the Coalition for Litigation Justice submitted an amicus brief asserting that “asbestos defendants and their insurers, and indeed the public, have a right to know if cases or trust claims are being filed and resolved in a manner consistent with court rules , trust distribution procedures, and ethics, only public scrutiny will cure potential fraud and abuse.”

Counsel for FCR, Edwin J. Harron of Young, Conaway, Stargatt & Taylor, could not be immediately reached for comment. George T. Snyder of Stonecipher Law Firm was also not immediately available for comment.

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