Kenneth Feinberg

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Kenneth Feinberg : biography

October 23, 1945 –

Kenneth Feinberg (born October 23, 1945) is an American attorney, specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. Feinberg was appointed Special Master of the U.S. government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and served as the Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation, popularly called the "pay czar." Additionally, Feinberg recently served as the government-appointed administrator of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund. Most recently, Feinberg was appointed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to administer the One Fund—the victim assistance fund established in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Kenneth Feinberg is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, New York University School of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Publications

  • Who Gets What: Fair Compensation after Tragedy and Financial Upheaval, Published June 2012 by PublicAffairs, ISBN 9781586489779

Life and career

Feinberg was born in Brockton, Massachusetts. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1967 and a law degree from the New York University School of Law in 1970. 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 (now Feinberg Rozen, LLP) 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 Litigation 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 former Lecturer-in-Law at a number of U.S. law schools.

Feinberg is the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Feinberg and his wife, Diane ("Dede") Shiff, have three children and two grandchildren.

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. "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 percent 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."