Katrina cases blow into Beaumont

Beaumont-based Provost Umphrey has gained about 200 clients who are suing State Farm related to the insurer's handling of their Hurricane Katrina-related claims, according to a May 10 article in the Sun Herald newspaper of Gulfport, Miss. The hiring of Provost Umphrey came after  the December 2007 indictment of Mississippi plaintiffs attorney Richard F. "Dickie" Scruggs and his subsequent guilty plea, the article states; Scruggs had to give up the Katrina cases after federal authorities charged him with conspiring to bribe a judge. State Farm then successfully petitioned to have attorneys who had worked with Scruggs dismissed from the case. The article states that Don Barrett, one of those dismissed attorneys, wrote to his ex-clients to suggest that they hire Provost Umphrey. Barrett, of the Lexington, Miss.-based Barrett Law Office, told the Sun Herald that he knows the firm's managing partner Walter Umphrey from the 1990s, when they worked on Mississippi's tobacco litigation together.
-- Jonathan Fox