By Reynolds Hutchins
reynolds.hutchins@insidebiz.com
The U.S. Supreme Court last week rejected oil giant BP's challenge to a compensation deal over the now four-year-old oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The word from the high court came down last Monday. The news means BP will have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in claims to businesses affected in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion - claims the oil company argued could not necessarily be linked to the spill.
It was a victory for the claimants, for environmentalists who jumped on the cause and for one Virginia Beach attorney.
"Today is a very good day," said Jeffrey Breit, partner at the Beach-based firm of Breit, Drescher & Imprevento PC, after the decision.
For the past three years, Breit has been trying the case against BP in the aftermath of the explosion that claimed 11 lives and became the largest U.S. offshore oil spill in history.
Breit was one of 15 attorneys tapped to try the liability portion of the case, which will dole out a percentage of responsibility to the three defendants - BP, Halliburton and Transocean.
Claims against Halliburton resulted in a $1.1 billion settlement back in September. The drilling rig's owner, Transocean, agreed last year to pay $1.4 billion in federal civil and criminal charges.
BP set aside $43 billion to resolve all claims, but has only paid out $2.3 billion thus far in so-called business economic loss claims.
BP agreed to a compensation deal in 2012 - which Breit estimated in the $7.8 billion range. But the company later pulled an about-face and argued that amount and the number of claimants listed may have been exaggerated.
Breit called it a sort of "buyer's remorse."
In a brief to the court, the company contended that the claims administrator paid several claimants "whose purported losses were not fairly traceable to the spill... such as lawyers who lost their law licenses and warehouses that burned down before the spill occurred."
"You have a couple thousand people in the Gulf waiting to get their money who have been held up by BP trying to rewrite history," Breit countered.
The court's latest decision will accelerate that process, Breit said.
"It's a very significant end of a problem," he said.
But no one is out of the woods yet.
"I'd like to say that it's over, but unfortunately there are number of outstanding issues we have to resolve," Breit said.
The Virginia Beach lawyer will return to the Gulf on a more regular basis next year, when he'll be one of several lawyers trying the state of Alabama's case against the international oil giant.
In the meantime, Breit said he expects somewhere around 100,000 claimants to get paid between January and June.
"I'm very proud of the work we did," Breit said. "All of us."
Breit highlighted the work of attorneys Steve Herman and Jim Roy, who led the plaintiffs' team.
"This was a team effort and all the lawyers who tried this case with me were excellent and I was lucky to be a part of it," he said.