It was a case that multiple lawyers turned down, but the litigators who took up the decade-long wrongful-death litigation were awarded nearly $3 million in attorney fees by a state court in Miami—and in doing so, one of the attorneys broke what he called the $1,000 per-hour tobacco plaintiff billing rate ceiling.

Their client was Morris Eisen, the surviving spouse of an Engle Progeny victim, who once ran one of the largest personal injury law firms in the country. But that was until a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced him to 57 months in prison for fabricating evidence and bribing witnesses to win multiple multimillion-dollar verdicts.