Last month, checks began arriving in the mail for more than 100 victims of the 2011 Reno Air Races disaster — an incident in which a World War II plane crashed into an audience of spectators, killing 10 people and leaving many more injured. While the settlement was handled out of court, which was unusual enough, it also had a “settlement administrator” who helped the lawyers determine how much compensation each of the victims received from a limited pool of insurance funds.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Mike Slack, a partner in Austin’s Slack & Davis who was the lead negotiating plaintiff lawyer involved with the Reno crash, used a similar process to help settle claims related to a 2008 airplane crash case that killed 10 people in Guatemala.
