In early June, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee flew to New Orleans to join two counterparts, US District Judge Eldon Fallon and California Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney, for a meeting with Merck’s legal team. The judges, who together oversee the 27,000 Vioxx lawsuits, requested that Merck’s general counsel, Ken Frazier, who was considered the driving force behind the drugmaker’s defense strategy, join them.

The night before the meeting, the judges had dinner together, Higbee tells The Star-Ledger of New Jersey. Dinners in New Orleans had become both a way of strategizing and strengthening a working relationship that depended heavily on e-mails and telephone conversations. Over that meal, they prepared for a meeting the next morning with attorneys from both sides. It was time, the judges had decided, for the lawyers to discuss a resolution.

The next day, in one of Fallon’s conference rooms in the federal courthouse in downtown New Orleans, they met with Merck’s lawyers to gauge how serious the drugmaker was about settling. The judges urged the lawyers to begin talking. They asked for monthly meetings and regular progress reports. They emphasized, among other things, the need to move the cases along.

“We were simply not going to be able to continue this slow progress,” Higbee says. “It would go on forever…”We wanted to be reassured that the negotiations were being held in good faith. Not just because we wanted them to, but because they wanted to make progress…Trying the cases one at a time was no longer going to be an option. We never thought we would try all the cases, but there was a chance we would try another 500 cases.”

So the judges told Merck’s lawyers they would have to start spreading the cases out among more judges, which would diminish the chance of getting a settlement. “The chance of a fair resolution was much more likely,” Higbee says, “while there was a control of the litigation by the three judges…Both sides had a similar goal - to settle as much of the litigation as possible and to pay people with the strongest cases, the most serious injuries, the most money.”

And Higbee believes the settlement will ultimately succeed. “I’m anticipating,” she says, “they will get more than 85 percent of the cases” Merck negotiated for the deal to go through.