Los Angeles Times

Law: 2 years after heiress' death, millions in legal fees have been rung up. Conduct of case prompts questions.

By PAUL LIEBERMAN and JOHN J. GOLDMAN
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

NEW YORK-in expressing her wish to be buried at sea. Doris Duke bluntly told a friend she wanted to be "eaten by sharks."

 What the eccentric heiress did not count on was that the sharks would feed on her $1.2-billion estate as well.

  But two years after Duke's death, at 80, in her gated home above Beverly Hills, the legal fight over her riches has evolved into the Super Bowl of probate battles, eclipsing such courtroom free-for-alls as the recent ones here over artist Andy Warhol's estate and the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune.

  By one estimate, $50 million in fees could easily be rung up by attorneys challenging and defending the tobacco heiress' will while not a penny has gone into the foundation Duke intended to be one of the nation's largest charities.

  When an official of the New York attorney general's office recently spoke before 225 lawyers crammed into a banquest room near Wall Street, he joked that it looked like "a meeting of all the attorneys involved in the Duke estate."

 Don Howarth and Suzelle Smith had resumes: He had three Harvard degrees, she one from Oxford. They were active in the Christian Legal Society too – though no one mistook them for turn-the-other cheek types. For they saw themselves as "blood and guts" litigators who "go for the viscera."

  They specialized in "big cases," defending asbestos firms sued by lung disease victims, or representing leukemia victims suing a nuclear plant. In each, they used Demopoulos as their expert witness. He rebutted accusations against asbestos firms and linked the power plant to leukemia.

  In turn, when Demopoulos grew close to Doris Duke in 1991, they became the heiress' lawyers, helping prepare the codicil that named the doctor her executor for fees up to $25 million. But soon "it was [our] time to fall out of favor," Smith noted, and Duke moved on to new lawyers and new wills.

  After her death, they teamed up with Demopoulos again. They insist that the doctor was concerned about which charities Duke's wealth would go to, but they also are candid about the realpolitik.

  "The estate fight is about how an awful lot of money will be distributed" Smith said. "Whoever that person is, they're going to have a lot of financial power."

  Howarth and Smith hope to be paid down the line, arguing that they are doing a service to the estate by "exposing" Lafferty and U.S. Trust.

  "Everyone's gathering." said Howarth, "now that the wounds have been opened and the blood's on the water."

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