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"                      <p class=\"imgtitle\">Chesley</p>           NEW ORLEANS (Legal Newsline) - Cincinnati attorney Stanley Chesley told lawyers gathered at a Louisiana State Bar Association mass tort symposium that taking RICO cases to MDLS can lead to \"tremendous revenue.\"<br /><br />\"You gotta learn not to be frightened of it or try to predict what a judge will or will not do,\" he said.<br /><br />He said that 39 states have eliminated punitive damage claims.<br /><br />Chesley, and attorneys William Markovits of Cincinnati and John Climaco of Cleveland, made up the panel on \"RICO and It's Role in Modern MDL\" at the 10th Annual Class Action/Mass Tort Symposium held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans on Friday.<br /><br />Chesley discussed how introducing RICO into MDLs seems daunting, but the main hurdle is to \"survive a [Federal Rule] 12(b)6\" and then proving specifically how the defendants have violated 18 U.S.C. \u00A7\u00A7 1962.<br /><br />\"When it's laid out there it's something that made defendants' bowels go to water,\" Chesley said.<br /><br />Climaco, who tried the first criminal RICO case in Cleveland in 1976 and the first major civil RICO case in 1982, said that civil judges used to scrutinize using a criminal statute in a civil case, but now it has become \"extremely effective.\"<br /><br />Using a recent example, Climaco pointed to a case against the makers of Dannon yogurt, in which the French company claimed health benefits associated with its Activia yogurt sold in the United States.<br /><br />\"That was a pure case of fraud,\" Climaco said. Dannon ended up settling that class action suit for $35 million.<br /> "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://legalnewsline.com/stories/510523936-lawyers-discuss-tremendous-revenue-potential-in-pursuing-ricos-in-mdls>