In May, Cowboys executive V.P. Stephen Jones expressed hope that the litigation arising from the Super Bowl XLV seating fiasco would be resolved this summer. Summer is nearly over, it hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t be happening any time soon.
Appearing on Wednesday’s PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio, lawyer Michael Avenatti explained that more than 150 cases are pending on appeal regarding the question of whether those claims should proceed as a class action. After the appeal is resolved, the 150 claims will still have to be processed through trial and any ensuing appeals.
"[W]e’ve been battling the NFL for years on end with connection to that case,” Avenatti said. “They spent over $20 million in attorney fees. They could have settled the case for far less than that but Roger Bonaparte has decided that he wants to spend more money on attorneys than fans.”
A two-week trial for seven of the individuals resulted in a $76,000 verdict in 2015. That specific case is pending on appeal over an allegation of fraud made against the NFL.
Following Wednesday show, Avenatti clarified that the plaintiffs and the NFL currently are awaiting a ruling on all pending legal issues from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The Super Bowl XLV litigation arose from the failure to install temporary seating prior to the game, resulting in fans showing up with tickets to seats that didn’t exist.
“The NFL has always accepted responsibility for the problems that were experienced by some of its fans at Super Bowl XLV and has attempted from the beginning to compensate them for their genuinely received losses and inconvenience,” attorney Thad Berens said after last year’s verdict.
In contrast, the NFL has offered all of the fans who showed up for the Hall of Game Non-Game only a refund on their tickets, and nothing more. For now.
“I think of the 22,000 folks, almost every one of them is going to be able to point to some additional damage,” Avenatti said on PFT Live, “whether it’s a lodging expense or a meal expense or something else of that nature that they should be compensated for. Quite honestly, we shouldn’t have to file a lawsuit over this. If this was any other $13 billion corporation in America they would just do the right thing. They’d get out in front of this, they’d say, ‘You know what? We take the foul, we screwed up, we’re gonna compensate people appropriately,’ and that would be it. Instead you have the NFL, every time something goes down that’s bad, they come out and they claim that they’re being accountable and responsible but their actions are a completely different story. It’s just that simple.”
There will be nothing simple about the litigation that is coming, because there has been nothing simple about the litigation over the Super Bowl XLV debacle that happened in early 2011.