From slip-and-fall accidents to billion-dollar toxic torts, courts wrestle with two big questions: Who is a legitimate victim, and what will it take to make that person whole? The damages resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might outstrip anything that came before. And from the moment BP CEO Tony Hayward pledged to pay “all legitimate claims” tied to the leak, the legal community—and the world—have wondered: What, exactly, is a legitimate claim? And how will those claims be satisfied? The short answer: No one really knows. But a lot of lawyers are about to spend a large portion of their lives finding out. “We’re in uncharted waters,” says attorney Burton LeBlanc, a shareholder in the Baton Rouge office of Baron & Budd. “There’s nothing in the history of the legal system that can compare to this.” The most famous compensation in American history derived from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Exxon paid about $1 billion in punitive damages and compensation after two decades of litigation, and experts agree the Deepwater Horizon spill is a far bigger deal in terms of the number of people affected. Even guessing at the total cost of the disaster is futile. But ...
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