For the past three weeks, Al Ellis has traveled to three different states on a heartbreaking journey, meeting individually with 40 plaintiffs who either survived or lost family members in a 2008 airplane crash in Guatemala that killed 11 people.
As a court-appointed “facilitator,” Ellis has been assigned the unusual task of recommending to a state district judge what each of those claimants should receive from a limited pool of insurance money, tendered as part of a defendant’s proposed settlement in a mass tort suit.
