Legal Status:
We have finally gotten a definitive answer from our
lawyers. They are not willing to break the next legal phase into two parts.
They propose to prepare and file a suit, defend it from attempts of dismissal
and go through discovery to prepare to take the suit to court. They require us
to commit to funding the work at a cost of $150,000. Trial costs will be in
addition to that. We believe that, as a part of discovery, we will be able to
get contact information for all affected retirees and recruit lots of new
members to help finance the trial if necessary. There is always the possibility
that some currently unknown information will emerge in the process that will
make our suit untenable. If that happens, we will cease legal activity and
return the unused funds to our donors on a prorated basis.
Fund Drive:
Our initial fund drive raised $90,000 and we spent $15,000
for an initial opinion on the viability of our suit. That left us with $75,000
of the $150,000 required. Our second fund drive has raised $23,000 to date so
we need an additional $52,000. We donÕt believe we will meet our goal with the
current fund drive unless we locate more retirees to solicit from or find new
ways to obtain more funds.
Pursuing legal action is the only course left to us and a
lack of funds to do so will make all efforts to date useless. If you intend to
donate, please do so as soon as possible.
Expanding our Membership:
We believe we have reached most of the retirees that
communicate regularly by email. We have not tried to recruit retirees that
rarely or never use email. We have a list of people and phone numbers,
scavenged from our petitions, that we have no email addresses for and that we
can try to reach. We also have a list of people that signed the petitions but
didnÕt give their phone numbers. We have posted a link to that list under the
ÒLast UpdatedÓ heading on our web site llnlretiree.com.
If you have contact information for any of the people on the list, please pass
it on to us. Some of you may also have names that should be added to our
contact list. If you have names and phone numbers or email addresses for
retirees that you think should be on our list, please send them to us. We will check
the names we receive and, for those not already on our email list, we will add
them to our list of people to contact.
A number of you have offered to help in the past, but we
didnÕt have assignments to pass out. Now we need help to make telephone contact
with potential new candidates. We also need people willing to act as
information sources, keeping retirees without computer skills and/or email
access informed of our activities. Finally, we would like someone to organize
and co-ordinate telephone contact activities.