Don’t miss this Matt Tolson/Houston Chronicle investigative piece on the cooperation between several Houston plaintiff’s attorneys — including prominently John O’Quinn — regarding the prosecution of dubious silicosis and asbestos claims, sometimes based on the same plaintiff (see related earlier post here). This part of the article is particularly interesting:

From the moment in late 2004 that silicosis litigation began to unravel under [U.S. District Judge Janis] Jack’s scrutiny, [former O’Quinn partner Richard] Laminack has denied any wrongdoing. The O’Quinn firm did not do asbestos work, he said, so it should not be lumped in with other firms who recycled their old clients, a practice that Jack saw as presumptive evidence of fraud.
“We never, never represented an asbestos claimant and then turned around and retreaded it as a silicosis claimant,” Laminack told the judge, an assertion he repeated to the congressional committee. “We never, ever did that.”

In a hearing in Jack’s Corpus Christi courtroom last August, Laminack ó who did not return calls from the Houston Chronicle ó insisted that neither he nor his firm should bear much of the blame for that sort of overreaching because they had no asbestos history. Unlike the Waco firm of Campbell Cherry, which had mined thousands of its previous asbestos clients as a source for new silicosis claims, he said, the O’Quinn firm was getting its clients mostly by referral from other firms.
Defense lawyers at that hearing pointed out that a significant percentage of Laminack’s silicosis clients in fact did have asbestos claims ó notwithstanding which lawyer represented them ó which prompted Jack to warn that the presence of those old lawsuits “stretches credibility” for their silicosis claims.
“I don’t like it, either,” Laminack replied. “I don’t want to represent people that don’t have legitimate cases.”
On its face, Laminack’s indignation appeared credible. Defense attorneys who had combed records of the Manville Trust, the nation’s largest asbestos trust fund set up in 1988 to settle personal injury claims to victims of asbestos exposure, turned up no claimants who had been represented by the O’Quinn firm.
What they did find, however, was an arrangement that Laminack did not mention. Hundreds of silicosis claimants had been represented in their asbestos lawsuits by Foster. Though nominally head of his own firm, Foster was tightly connected to the O’Quinn operation, according to documents produced by the congressional committee.
O’Quinn’s firm had bankrolled Foster’s in 2001 and set it up in offices just down the hall from its own. Two of the three Foster firm managers were O’Quinn partners, according to annual filings with the Secretary of State’s Office. Laminack told the committee that this was to keep Foster from borrowing money without O’Quinn’s approval. The two firms shared conference rooms and receptionists, as well as screening companies and diagnosing physicians.
Foster did not return a phone call from the Chronicle seeking comment.
“There was the facade of two separate firms, one to handle asbestos, one to handle silicosis,” said an investigator for the committee, speaking on condition he not be identified. “It’s pretty obvious they were a wholly owned subsidiary.”