Lawyers chasing compensation for MH370 families despite no trace of plane

The Malaysian Insider

With the help of a Boeing 777 model, Monica R. Kelly patiently explains to the grieving families in a hotel suite in Beijing how Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have malfunctioned.

Although investigators have yet to find any concrete proof of what happened to flight MH370, it has not stopped the lawyer and her colleagues from the American law firm, Ribbeck Law Chartered, from making their pitch to the families.

They tell the families that a court in the United States could potentially award millions of dollars per passenger in a lawsuit against the Boeing Company, which built the missing jet, a Boeing 777-200, The New York Times reported today.

“It’s not an issue of whether families will be compensated,” Kelly told the daily recently while munching on French fries with her 12-year-old son at a restaurant across the street from the Lido Hotel where the families in Beijing have been holed up since the plane's disappearance on March 8.

“It’s a question of how much and when.”

Kelly, however, admitted that flight MH370 was a uniquely difficult case.

“We’ve done more than 43 plane crashes,” she said, “and there’s never been a situation like this one, ever.”

Complicating Kelly's potential case against Malaysia Airlines, Boeing or other parties is the fact that no debris has been found to confirm that the aircraft had indeed crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

However, several families have approached the Chicago-based law firm, whose lawyers are aviation law experts, to help them file a lawsuit against aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co and Malaysia Airlines, as they believe the plane had crashed due to mechanical failure.

Ribbeck Law has made two filings in a court in Chicago, where it is based, to try to force Boeing to divulge more information, but both were dismissed.

The judge had threatened to impose sanctions against the firm for making inappropriate filings.

Still, the rush is on to secure compensation for families of the flight’s 227 passengers, about two-thirds of whom are Chinese, said the NYT report.

Ribbeck Law has sent six employees to Beijing and six to Kuala Lumpur, where families of passengers have been put up in hotels. Rival firms have also been contacting the families.

“The next step is getting insurance payments, not lawsuits,” said James Healy-Pratt, a partner and head of the aviation department at Stewarts Law, based in London.

Some Chinese families are reluctant to immediately pursue lawsuits or take the payment that airlines generally award in the event of a plane crash, as mandated by international law in the Montreal Convention.

This is because they refuse to accept the fact that the passengers are dead and insist that the Malaysian government is orchestrating an elaborate cover-up.

Wang Le, whose mother was on flight MH370, said that he was starting to cope with her death, but that “it’s not the time for compensation yet”, reported the NYT.

“Talking about lawsuits or whatever — we still don’t know where the plane is,” he said.

Some of the flight MH370 families are accepting insurance payments as a first step.

The China Life Insurance Company, the biggest such company in China, said on its website that it had 32 clients on the flight and that it had paid out US$670,400 (about RM2.2 million) to cover seven of them as of March 25.

It said the total payment for all the clients would be nearly US$1.5 million. At least five other Chinese insurance companies have also made payments.

Since Malaysia is bound by the Montreal Convention, the families are also entitled to a minimum compensation from Malaysia Airlines, of up to US$174,000 per passenger.

The amounts awarded in lawsuits related to flight MH370 could vary by the jurisdiction of filing, the NYT report said.

American courts offer plaintiffs a better chance of winning multimillion-dollar settlements, several aviation lawyers were quoted as saying.

Those courts assign greater economic value to individual lives than do courts in other countries, and they regularly impose punitive damages on companies.

The most a Chinese court has awarded plaintiffs in a fatal plane crash case is about US$140,000 per passenger, for an accident involving Henan Airlines in 2010.

Zhang Qihuan, a lawyer who has been talking to relatives of those on MH370, told the NYT that a court probably would not award more than that in any accident, to avoid setting a precedent. But he said families could settle for a much higher amount out of court if they agreed to keep quiet.

Some lawyers, meanwhile, said it was too early to talk about lawsuits as there is insufficient evidence to establish why the plane disappeared.

Robert A. Clifford, an aviation accident lawyer based in Chicago, told NYT that he had been contacted by a lawyer in Texas claiming to speak for a flight MH370 family.

But he said no one should rush into litigation. “You don’t have to knee-jerk it, go out, file something,” he told NYT. “This is a process, not an event, and this race is not always won by the swift.”

Malaysian authorities seemed to be preparing themselves for the legal and financial fallout from the plane’s disappearance.

Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein had said that the Cabinet had decided that the Attorney-General's Chambers will examine the legal implications in all decisions regarding flight MH370.

The chief executive officer of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, told reporters last week that the company had already begun discussing compensation with the family members and with “various legal parties”.

Malaysia Airlines has already offered US$5,000 to each family to help deal with immediate financial strains, including travel costs. The airline had said it had adequate insurance coverage to meet “all the reasonable costs” that might arise from the plane’s loss. – April 2, 2014.