The court officials overseeing the NFL's $1 billion settlement fund for concussion-related injuries have barred five law firms from handling any more claims from former players, after finding that they fraudulently steered clients toward doctors willing to give them a Parkinson's disease diagnosis whether they exhibited symptoms or not.
The five firms represented or performed work involving 98 former players who in recent years sought six- to seven-figure payouts from the settlement for Parkinson's disease claims, the special masters appointed to help oversee the settlement wrote in a report filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.
Of those, 37 remained pending and will now be denied, with a chance for the players to restart the claims process. But 57 were approved -- totaling more than $95 million -- before tips about suspicious activity prompted an audit. The attorneys' share of that came out to about $20 million, the report said, and additional firms may have been involved in similar actions.
The report called it "an organized scheme ... in which these law firms -- and potentially others -- circumvented the Settlement's anti-fraud safeguards and laundered questionable Parkinson's Disease diagnoses into payable claims."
