THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 5, 1994 TAG: 9408050593
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
A trust established to pay injured users of the Dalkon Shield birth-control device has been bombarded with records from claimants who waited until the last minute to document their medical problems.
Monday was the deadline for women who sought compensation to submit materials backing up their claims to the Dalkon Shield trust fund, said Michael Sheppard, the trust's executive director.
``Response was very heavy,'' Sheppard said Thursday. ``We had a lot of Federal Express deliveries, and a number of claimants faxed material to people in Richmond and had it hand-delivered.''
The deluge of medical records came from many of the 6,000 women who met an April 1986 deadline for filing claims but had not provided documentation.
``We won't know for a couple of days how many people responded,'' Sheppard said. ``We're still counting. But it appears we received more than 2,500 sets of medical records in the last two days before the deadline.''
The records were delivered to the trust's Claims Resolution Facility, which has about 300 workers who answer claimants' questions, sort through the mounds of paperwork and evaluate claims.
The $2.5 billion trust was established after Dalkon Shield manufacturer A.H. Robins, facing injury claims from 325,000 users of the intrauterine device, filed for bankruptcy protection in 1985. Robins later merged with American Home Products Co., which set up the trust.
The Dalkon Shield, pulled from the U.S. market in 1974, was blamed for thousands of hysterectomies, spontaneous abortions, painful infections, birth defects and at least 18 deaths.
Sheppard said the trust has paid about 163,000 claims totaling $1.2billion. The trust, which has earned $775 million in interest, still has about $1.5 billion to settle 80,000 remaining claims.
The trust is paying out about $1million a day, Sheppard said. Individual payments have ranged from $125 to just over $2 million, and Sheppard said more than 90 percent of the trust's offers have been accepted.
The acceptance rate could drop, however.
``The more serious claims are the last to be paid, and the more serious claims are the ones most likely to be litigated,'' Sheppard said.
Denver attorney Patricia Jo Stone, who has represented 60 Dalkon Shield claimants and still has about 10 cases pending, said many of her clients ``felt more than strongly that the sums they ultimately decided to accept were not fair and just compensation.''
She said the offers have averaged $60,000 to $70,000.
``By the time they received the offers, it was almost 20 years since they suffered the injuries and they were ready to get on with other things in their lives,'' Stone said.
``Also, from a plaintiff's perspective, it is virtually impossible to prove your case 20 years after the fact,'' she said.
But attorney Guerry R. Thornton Jr. of Atlanta, who represented about 1,250 claimants, said the ``vast majority of settlement offers have been very fair and consistent with the historic averages in private litigation.
``I think it's been the most successful resolution of any mass torts case in the country,'' he said.
The trust should finish making offers by the end of the year, Sheppard said, and claimants can either take the money, submit the matter to arbitration at Duke University's Private Adjudication Center or go to court. The trust does not negotiate settlements.
``We still have years of litigation to look forward to,'' Sheppard said.
That means the trust will continue to maintain a staff, he said, although it will be sharply reduced. The trust imposed a hiring a freeze a year ago and has since trimmed 75 positions. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lamar Land files some of the more than 400,000 claims in the Dalkon
Shield trust office in Richmond on Thursday.
KEYWORDS: LAWSUIT DALKON SHIELD BIRTH CONTROL
DEVICES by CNB