Maher's Firm Was Among the Eleven Counsel Firms in Florida's $11.3 Billion Tobacco Settlement

For decades, Florida's Medicaid program absorbed the costs of treating hundreds of thousands of patients with lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other conditions linked to cigarette smoking. The state paid those bills while the tobacco industry, which had never lost a civil case after more than 800 tries nationwide, disclaimed any link between its products and illness. In February 1995, Governor Lawton Chiles and Attorney General Robert Butterworth moved to change that, filing suit against the major cigarette manufacturers to recoup what Florida taxpayers had spent.

To build the litigation team, Chiles and Butterworth assembled eleven private law firms under a contingency-fee contract and gave the group the name Peoples' Trial Advocates. Among them was Maher, Gibson and Guiley, P.A. of Orlando, the firm of Michael C. Maher, which is named as counsel of record in the Florida Supreme Court's decision on the settlement. The eleven firms worked as a coalition of dozens of lawyers pointed at a common target.

The firms compiled internal tobacco company documents, deposition testimony from scientists, and statistical evidence on Medicaid expenditures to build the state's damages case. Florida had also passed a 1994 statute allowing the state to sue cigarette companies on an aggregate basis without identifying individual sick Medicaid recipients, removing one of the industry's strongest procedural shields. Trial was set for August 1997 in West Palm Beach.

With jury selection underway and pretrial rulings going against them, the tobacco defendants agreed to settle on August 25, 1997, the morning the trial was to begin in earnest. The five major manufacturers, including Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, agreed to pay Florida $11.3 billion over twenty-five years. The settlement required the industry to end billboard advertising in Florida, remove cigarette vending machines from locations accessible to minors, and retire iconic advertising figures including Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man from all Florida placements. Governor Chiles described the outcome as 'the straw that broke Joe Camel's back.'

At $11.3 billion, Florida's settlement exceeded Mississippi's $3.6 billion agreement reached in July 1997 and stood as the largest state tobacco recovery before the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement brought all remaining states into a national resolution. A subsequent Florida Supreme Court ruling in State v. American Tobacco Co., 723 So.2d 263 (Fla. 1998), confirmed that the settlement funds belonged to the State of Florida and addressed disbursement disputes involving the private counsel's contingency-fee liens. The firms' combined fee under the contract was set at $2.8 billion, itself the subject of a separate legislative and legal process.