BP: Many settlement opt-out requests aren’t valid

About half the businesses and individuals who asked to be excluded from a proposed settlement over BP’s 2010 oil spill submitted valid requests, the company and a team of plaintiffs’ attorneys say in a court filing. A maximum of 13,123 potential claimants submitted valid opt-out requests by a Nov. 1 deadline, the filing says. A total of 25,866 asked to be excluded, but the architects of the deal say many failed to comply with the court’s requirements for submitting requests. More than 9,000 were deemed invalid because an attorney, not the actual claimant, signed the request. “And most of these ‘signatures’ were not even done by counsel personally; instead, they were applied using what appears to be a rubber stamp of the lawyer’s signature, which begs the question of whether even counsel—let alone the clients—executed these submissions with due consideration to each submission and each client’s facts, circumstances, and interests,” BP and plaintiffs’ attorneys write. Nearly 8,000 opt-out requests were submitted by Brent Coon’s Texas-based law firm without any client signatures on them, they add. The Associated Press supplies more details in the full story here. Meanwhile, BP faces arraignment today before a federal magistrate judge on manslaughter and other criminal charges stemming from the 2010 rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Read more about the legal proceedings here.