Meet the lawyer who crushed the brokerage industry

Attorney Michael Ketchmark just won a landmark $1.8 billion class-action jury award from the National Association of Realtors in a case likely to redefine residential brokerage.

Ketchmark had been relatively unknown to the real estate world, but the NAR case wasn’t his first win of significance.

The personal injury attorney is famous in Missouri’s circles of power and influence. He’s a star lawyer who won a $2.2 billion verdict in the early 2000s and is a high-profile political donor in the state.

Ketchmark and his legal team wasted little time after their big win Tuesday, immediately filing a similar suit against other major brokerages.

“We view it as a tremendous day of accountability for these companies,” Ketchmark told CNN.

The complaint names NAR, Compass, Douglas Elliman, eXp, Redfin, Weichert Realtors, United Real Estate and Howard Hanna Real Estate Services as defendants. It alleges the brokerages conspired to force sellers to pay buyers’ brokers, and inflated those commissions.

Personal injury attorneys typically work on a contingency basis, collecting 33 percent to 40 percent of awards and settlements. In the case of a $1.8 billion award, the fee for Ketchmark and his team would be about $600 million.

However, large awards are often reduced substantially, either by judges or settlements, and judges can cap the amount plaintiffs’ attorneys receive in class actions. In 2021, an Ohio judge capped the fee at 15 percent of the $26 billion opioid settlement. 

Ketchmark, based in Leawood, Kansas, isn’t just known for his wins in the courtroom. He’s a major donor to both Republicans and Democrats in Missouri, giving their campaigns more than $1 million over the past decade, the Missouri Independent reported in 2021.

Before the brokerage litigation, Ketchmark’s best known case was in 2002, when he represented the plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit against Eli Lilly and other drugmakers related the criminal case against Robert Courtney, a Kansas City-area pharmacist who diluted 98,000 chemotherapy prescriptions for more than 4,200 cancer patients in the Kansas City area.

The legal battle drew national headlines. On behalf of Courtney’s victims, Ketchmark won a $2.2 billion civil judgment against the drug makers in a suit that claimed the companies were negligent in failing to uncover Courtney’s scheme. The drug makers, however, eventually settled for only $72.1 million.

He also represented a Kansas City-area doctor who was awarded $26 million in 2021. The physician alleged an ER staffing company fired him after he raised concerns that a single doctor was covering both regular and pediatric emergency departments at the hospital where he worked.

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