Jump to full article: BBC Online, 2002-09-27
Intro: The lawyers who fought the state of California's case during the 1990s "tobacco wars" are looking at a sharply reduced payday.
A team of 60 law firms which represented California in the 46-state suit against the cigarette companies - settled for $206bn settlement in 1998 - had been awarded total fees of $1.25bn by an arbitration panel.
But a New York judge has ruled that the bill for the services of the Castano Group, as the team . ..
The massive court case started in 1994 when Mississippi became the first US state to sue in an attempt to recover the immense costs of treating smoking-related diseases.
Almost every state had joined in by 1996.
At length the tobacco majors were forced to back down on their long-standing insistence that they had never known nicotine to be addictive, in the face of documents proving they were well aware of the drug's dangers decades ago.
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