Kenneth Feinberg
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Kenneth Feinberg is a Washington, D.C. attorney specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution who was appointed Special Master of the U.S. Government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
Originally from Brockton, Massachusetts, he worked for five years as an administrative assistant and chief of staff for U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, and as a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney General. Before founding his own firm, The Feinberg Group, in 1993, he was a founding partner at the Washington office of Kaye Scholer LLP.
Feinberg has served as Court-Appointed Special Settlement Master in cases including Agent Orange product liability litigation, Asbestos Personal Injury Litigations and DES Cases. Feinberg was also one of three arbitrators who determined the fair market value of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and was one of two arbitrators who determined the allocation of legal fees in the Holocaust slave labor litigation. He is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the Georgetown Law Center, and the University of Virginia School of Law, and taught a course called "Mass Torts" at the University of Virginia School of Law during the 2006 spring term.
[edit] September 11 Victim Compensation Fund
Appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be Special Master of the fund, Feinberg worked for 33 months entirely pro bono. He developed the regulations governing the administration of the fund and administered all aspects of the program, including evaluating applications, determining appropriate compensation and disseminating awards.
Early in the process he was described as aloof and arrogant. Feinberg was subjected to some very public criticism at meetings, in the media and on Web sites.[citation needed] "I underestimated the emotion of this at the beginning", Feinberg has said. "I didn't fully appreciate how soon this program had been established after 9/11, so there was a certain degree of unanticipated anger directed at me that I should have been more attuned to."
It was up to Feinberg to make the decisions on how much each family of a 9/11 victim would receive. Feinberg had to estimate how much each victim would have earned in a full lifetime. If a family accepted the offer, it was not possible to appeal. Families unhappy with the offer were able to appeal in a nonadversarial, informal hearing to present their case however they wanted. Feinberg personally presided over more than 900 of the 1,600 hearings. At the end of the process $7 billion was awarded to 97% of the families.
"It's a brutal, sort of cold, thing to do. Anybody who looks at this program and expects that by cutting a U.S. Treasury check, you are going to make 9/11 families happy, is vastly misunderstanding what's going on with this program," said Feinberg. "There is not one family member I've met who wouldn't gladly give back the check, or, in many cases, their own lives to have that loved one back. 'Happy' never enters into this equation."
Feinberg was able to change the mind of some of his harshest critics. Charles Wolf, whose wife died in the north tower, renamed his highly critical Web site called "Fix the Fund" to "The Fund is Fixed!". At first he called Feinberg "patronizing, manipulative and at times, even cruel." Later he said, "To have one of your sharpest critics follow through on a promise and not only join the program he was criticizing, but promote it to his peers, says a lot about you and the way you have adjusted both the program and your attitude." "Today, I have complete faith in you."
In 2005 his book, titled "What is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11," was published.
