Property Casualty 360 reports that plaintiffs’ attorneys alleging that State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. bought off an Illinois Supreme Court justice to evade a $1.05 billion award have cleared a major hurdle in their long-running litigation against the insurer.

U.S. District Judge David Herndon of the Southern District of Illinois granted a motion certifying a class of roughly 4.7 million auto insurance policyholders who were allegedly deprived of their 1999 trial court victory against State Farm.

Herndon found that the alleged fixing of the state Supreme Court decision affected all the proposed class members uniformly, and that the named plaintiffs and their attorneys otherwise satisfied court rules around class actions.

A State Farm spokesman, said the company plans to appeal the ruling. “Plaintiffs have unsuccessfully asserted and reasserted these allegations for many years and should not be permitted to do so any longer.”

The suit stems from a 2005 decision by the Illinois Supreme Court that upended the billion-dollar judgement against State Farm. A jury had found the company defrauded policy holders by requiring the use of cheaper, non-manufacturer parts when repairs were made to covered vehicles after a crash, handing plaintiffs $1.18 billion in damages. An appeals court affirmed but reduced the amount of the award.

According to the complaint, filed in 2012, the state high court’s decision reversing the judgment was unfairly influenced by Justice Lloyd Karmeier, who State Farm and its agents worked to elect during a campaign in 2003 and 2004. Karmeier’s campaign received at least $4 million from the insurer and individuals connected to it, plaintiffs allege.

Illinois’ Supreme Court has seven justices, and the decision at issue was not authored by Karmeier. It won the support of four justices, with two issuing a dissent that still concurred on key holdings, and another abstaining. The court reversed the award against State Farm on the grounds that certification of a nationwide class of policyholders was improper, among other things.

RICO litigation has become a popular tool against insurance companies by disgruntled claimants, even within the workers’s compensation arena.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. Federal RICO allows a successful plaintiff to recover treble damages, plus attorney fees.

The plaintiffs bar has sought to apply RICO laws as a penalty in workers’ compensation claims for at least a decade with mixed results. Conceptually they allege that an employer, carrier or third party administrator concocts a fraudulent scheme that is used over and over to prevent workers from obtaining just benefits.

Workers’ compensation claimants recently lost a RICO case filed in California.

In the California case John Black, and a group of police officers and fire fighters asserted a RICO claim in their fourth amended complaint involving the City of Rialto and the City of Stockton, CorVel Enterprises, York Risk Services Group and others. These plaintiffs allege “York, CorVel, and Rialto engaged in a pattern of fraudulently denying and delaying legitimate claims in order to lower the liability of the city, while at the same time maximizing the TPA’s revenues (and allowing the TPA to maintain and obtain contracts with other public entities based on their ‘outstanding’ financial performance at the expense of public servants)”