Andrew Sacks, Esq. | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Lawyer |
Known for | Environmental litigation, $1.06B verdict against ExxonMobil |
Website | Sacks Law, LLC website |
Andrew Sacks is the managing partner of the Philadelphia law firm Sacks Law, LLC. Best known for litigating against companies that damage the environment or injure people, Sacks successfully helped secure a $1.06 billion verdict against ExxonMobil [1] in 2001. The company was found guilty of polluting land with radioactive material and the case is the largest private landowner contamination case in U.S. history.
Sacks was a participating attorney in the landmark verdict against ExxonMobil in 2001. A jury awarded his client $1.06 billion in damages for land polluted with radioactive material. The case is the largest private landowner contamination case in United States history. [2]
Sacks and legal partner John Weston were counsel in a case representing the Departments and Central Government of Colombia, which resulted in a $200 million settlement from Philip Morris. [3]
Sacks was counsel in a case in which Ashland Oil paid $14 million to settle more than 5,000 third-party claims as well as damages, [4] expenses, and cost of the settlement. The settlement included $11 million for cleanup, $5.25 million in legal and administrative fees to handle class-action suits, and $2.25 million in criminal fines paid for violations of the Federal Clean Water Act.
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a major environmental disaster that made worldwide headlines in the spring of 1989 and occurred in Alaska's Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. The spill occurred when Exxon Valdez, an oil supertanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company, bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef, 6 mi (9.7 km) west of Tatitlek, Alaska at 12:04 a.m. The tanker spilled more than 10 million US gallons (240,000 bbl) of crude oil over the next few days.
Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker that gained notoriety after running aground in Prince William Sound, spilling her cargo of crude oil into the sea. On 24 March 1989, while owned by the former Exxon Shipping Company, captained by Joseph Hazelwood and First Mate James Kunkel, and bound for Long Beach, California, the vessel ran aground on the Bligh Reef, resulting in the second largest oil spill in United States history. The size of the spill is estimated to have been 40,900 to 120,000 m3. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil spill was listed as the 54th-largest spill in history.
Phoenix is an unincorporated community located in Baltimore County in the State of Maryland, United States. It is located at latitude 39°30'59" North, longitude 76°36'59" West. The United States Postal Service has assigned Phoenix the ZIP code 21131.
Jere Locke Beasley is an American attorney and politician; he served as acting governor of Alabama from June 5 to July 7, 1972. His law firm has been noted nationally for winning major awards for its clients; among them was an $11.8 billion punitive damage award against ExxonMobil in 2003.
Anadarko Petroleum Corporation was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. It was organized in Delaware and headquartered in two skyscrapers in The Woodlands, Texas: the Allison Tower and the Hackett Tower, both named after former CEOs of the company. In 2019, the company was acquired by Occidental Petroleum.
Robert A. Clifford is a Chicago trial lawyer and principal partner at Clifford Law Offices. Clifford's firm specializes in "personal injury, medical malpractice, mass torts, consumer and health care fraud, product liability, and aviation and transportation disasters." He attended DePaul University for both his undergraduate work and Juris Doctor, finishing in 1976. The firm was founded in 1984 to represent plaintiffs in personal injury and wrongful death cases.
Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, PLLC is a US plaintiffs' law firm, established in 1965 and based in New York City. It has mounted many class action cases on behalf of investors.
ExxonMobil Australia is an Australian affiliate of ExxonMobil, the U.S.-based oil giant. It operates a number of oil and gas platforms in Bass Strait, south east of Melbourne, Australia, as well as a gas processing facility at Longford and Long Island Point (LIP) in Hastings.
William Mark Lanier is an American trial lawyer and founder and CEO of the Lanier Law Firm. He has led a number of high-profile product litigation suits resulting in billions of dollars in damages, including Johnson & Johnson baby powder and Merck & Co.'s Vioxx drug.
ExxonMobil Corporation is an American multinational oil and gas corporation and the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The company, which took its present name in 1999 per the merger of Exxon and Mobil, is vertically integrated across the entire oil and gas industry, and within it is also a chemicals division which produces plastic, synthetic rubber, and other chemical products. ExxonMobil is headquartered near the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, though officially incorporated in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The company is the largest oil and gas company based in the US, America's third largest by revenue among all industries, and the eighth largest in the world.
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408 (2003), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the due process clause usually limits punitive damage awards to less than ten times the size of the compensatory damages awarded and that punitive damage awards of four times the compensatory damage award is "close to the line of constitutional impropriety".
The MTBE controversy concerns methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), a gasoline additive that replaced tetraethyllead. MTBE is an oxygenate and raises gasoline's octane number. Its use declined in the United States in response to environmental and health concerns. It has polluted groundwater due to MTBE-containing gasoline being spilled or leaked at gas stations. MTBE spreads more easily underground than other gasoline components due to its higher solubility in water. Cost estimates for removing MTBE from groundwater and contaminated soil range from $1 billion to $30 billion, including removing the compound from aquifers and municipal water supplies, and replacing leaky underground oil tanks. Who will pay for remediation is controversial. In one case, the cost to oil companies to clean up the MTBE in wells belonging to the city of Santa Monica, California is estimated to exceed $200 million.
AVX Corporation is an American manufacturer of electronic components headquartered in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. It is the largest industrial employer in Horry County, South Carolina, with almost 1000 workers in Myrtle Beach and Conway. AVX has 9,900 employees and operates in the United States, Europe and Asia. AVX is a subsidiary of Kyocera Electronics Corporation.
Stuart H. Smith was a controversial practicing plaintiff attorney licensed in Louisiana. Smith practiced law for more than 25 years, litigating against oil companies and other energy-related corporations for damages associated with radioactive oilfield waste. Smith was one of the lead legal strategists in on-going national litigation regarding the nation's drug-industry manufactured opioid crisis, having led the nation-wide effort to have the crisis’ impact on opioid-dependent born children recognized as a special class deserving of dedicated, long-term response from those who caused the epidemic in the United States.
The Jacksonville, Maryland, ExxonMobil gas leak case is a series of lawsuits against ExxonMobil as a result of a February 2006 underground gasoline leak from an ExxonMobil service station in Jacksonville, Maryland.
Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP is a litigation boutique located in San Francisco, California, founded in 1978. The firm's areas of practice include intellectual property, professional liability, class actions, wrongful termination defense, general contract and commercial litigation, antitrust, white collar crime, and appellate.
As the world's largest majority investor-owned oil and gas corporation, ExxonMobil has received significant amounts of controversy and criticism, mostly due to its activities which increase the speed of climate change and its denial of global warming.
Levy Konigsberg is an American-based law firm that was established in 1985. The company is known for a number of high-profile cases in the United States. Its practice areas include asbestos litigation, qui tam, lead poisoning, sexual abuse, tobacco litigation, medical malpractice, and negligence. In 2015, Levy Konigsberg was recognized as one of the 50 Law Firms in the 2015 Elite Trial Lawyers list by The National Law Journal.
Baron & Budd, P.C. is an American plaintiffs' law firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Opponents of mass tort litigation have criticized the firm for the zealousness with which it represents its clients, and for the political activities of some of its attorneys.
The Exxon Mobil–New Jersey Environmental Pollution Settlement was a 2015 legal settlement between ExxonMobil and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, over contaminated sites at oil refinery plants and other facilities at Bayway Refinery in Linden and Bayonne Refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey dating back to the Standard Oil's use of the properties starting in the 1870s. The settlement was controversially settled by Governor Chris Christie's Administration for far less than the state originally sought when it began the lawsuit in 2004, and has been the subject of intense criticism from activists and environmentalists.