The sole survivor of a highly publicized 2018 helicopter crash has sued her former lawyer – a noted Dallas specialist in aviation accidents – claiming he doesn’t deserve a contingency fee from her multimillion-dollar settlement because of his “grossly inadequate representation and often misguided legal advice.”
Andra Cobb filed suit Jan. 21 against Ladd Sanger, managing partner of the Dallas office of Slack Davis Sanger. The suit, in state district court in Dallas, also names Sanger’s firm as a defendant.
Before she fired Sanger, the suit said, he devoted little attention to her case, gave her bad advice based on a “plainly erroneous” reading of the law and tried to pressure her and her family into seeking a settlement that was less than the $10 million in applicable insurance coverage on the helicopter, which was owned by her longtime companion, Charles Burnett III, a multimillionaire from the Houston area.
Jeff Tillotson, the Dallas attorney representing Austin-based Slack Davis Sanger and Ladd Sanger in the suit, said Sanger “regrets that it has come to this. He believes this suit is without merit, but he doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to comment publicly at this time.”
Brian Hail, lead counsel for Cobb and a Dallas-based partner at Kane, Russell, Coleman & Logan, said: “My client and I feel like the petition speaks for itself and indicates that Ms. Cobb should clearly prevail on her claims against Mr. Sanger and his firm.”
Burnett and four others, including Cobb’s father Paul, died when Burnett’s Bell Huey helicopter crashed on a remote mesa in northern New Mexico Jan. 17, 2018. Those aboard were en route to a birthday party Burnett was hosting at his ranch in Folsom, New Mexico, just south of the Colorado border.
Also killed in the crash were J.C. Dodd, the helicopter pilot; Roy Bennett, a pro-democracy opponent of Zimbabwe’s authoritarian leader Robert Mugabe; and Bennett’s wife Heather. The Bennetts were friends of Burnett, a colorful, British-born businessman and philanthropist who once held the world speed record (139.8 mph) for a steam-powered car.
According to her suit, Andra Cobb retained Sanger three months after the crash, under a contingency-fee contract that was to grant Sanger’s firm 30% of any monetary recovery she got. Separately, Sanger was hired by Cobb’s mother Marty, individually and on behalf of the estate of Paul Cobb, a former police chief in Pasadena, Texas.
Mother and daughter both fired Sanger Aug. 30, 2018, “after five months of inadequate representation and legal counsel,” Andra Cobb’s suit said. They later filed a wrongful-death action in New Mexico with a different law firm and settled for a confidential amount greater than the $9.74 million that, according to the Cobbs, Sanger had pressured them to accept.
The suit contends that because Sanger was fired “for good cause,” his firm is not entitled to the 30% of the settlement it was to receive under its contingency agreement with Andra Cobb.
The contested amount is being held in trust pending resolution of the dispute.
“Once Mr. Sanger was hired by Ms. Cobb, he was immediately aware that he had a very fragile client who, just weeks before, was the sole survivor of the horrific tragedy of the helicopter crash that claimed the lives of five others, including her own father and the love of her life, Charles Burnett,” the lawsuit said.
“Ms. Cobb was clearly suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], having survived the horrendous crash and witnessed the deaths of her loved ones. She was haunted by the memories, which she relived daily, of shivering in the cold pitch black night on a barren mesa, miles from civilization, with a broken arm, chemical burns from jet fuel, desperately trying to maintain a cellular signal with 911 while she tried to save the pilot and another passenger from encroaching flames without catching fire herself.
“As such, Mr. Sanger had a heightened duty to Ms. Cobb to provide compassionate and competent legal advice. Unfortunately, he did not do so.”
Sanger, the lawsuit said, advised Cobb that a personal-injury claim could be barred under workers’ compensation law, since the passengers on Burnett’s helicopter had been listed as crew members. This listing was a ruse by Burnett, the suit said, because the Huey was “a restricted category aircraft,” meaning that under Federal Aviation Administration regulations it could only carry crew members, flight-crew trainees or others performing specific, essential functions – not people headed to a rich guy’s birthday party.
Sanger’s firm reached the conclusion that workers’ comp could invalidate a personal-injury claim “without performing a shred of relevant legal research,” the suit said.
Only after the Cobbs asked about the basis for that conclusion did the firm conduct any, according to the suit, and that “consisted of ONE hour of research completed by a first-year law student intern. It turns out that even this extremely limited research was flawed.”
After drafting a “bare-bones, two-page” demand letter to the insurer of the craft for just under the $10 million in coverage, the suit said, “Mr. Sanger told Andra and Marty that unless he heard from them within one hour … he would go ahead and send the demand. Luckily, the Cobbs quickly instructed Mr. Sanger to stand down and not engage in unauthorized conduct that would be a clear breach of his fiduciary duty.”
On its website, Slack Davis Sanger holds itself out as a go-to firm for lawsuits stemming from air crashes.
“For over 25 years,” it says, “victims of aviation accidents and their family members have chosen the aviation accident lawyers at Slack Davis Sanger to navigate the complex litigation rules associated with air travel to obtain just compensation for their losses.”
Ladd Sanger, the site says, “focuses his practice on aviation law, including products liability, business litigation, and representing clients who have been injured as a result of air disasters. As a pilot with experience flying both fixed-wing planes and helicopters, Ladd understands the technical aspects of aviation crashes and applies that knowledge to all of his cases.”