Case Study: Delivering Notice to a Remote Class

Cobell, et al. v. Salazar, et al., No. 11-5205 (D.C. Cir. 2012)

Cobell v. Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior, et. al. was brought on behalf of over 500,000 individual Indian trust beneficiaries to enforce the trust duties owed by the United States and to require the United States to provide a historical accounting of Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts to class members.

The Cobell class required a unique combination of traditional and modern notice methodologies. Class members, including potential heirs, were widely dispersed across urban and remote rural locations, presenting Kroll with starkly different considerations for effectively delivering notice. While some groups could be reached through modern methods such as banner ads and social media, one group was so remote that the only way to deliver notice was via a mule train—a pack animal sent with printed notices across a significant distance which took days to traverse.

In addition to the geographic distribution of the class, it also included 17,689 deceased IIM account holders whose settlement awards had not been distributed by the government. When taking over the administration in 2018, Kroll’s challenge was to identify and then deliver notices and claim forms to the potential heirs of these deceased IIM account holders.

Kroll’s extensive analysis of the data revealed two complexities:

• Many deceased class members were listed only by their tribal names, which could not be found by any traditional records searches.
• Of the 17,689 deceased class members, only 6,494 had traditional social security numbers. This also limited the usefulness of traditional records searches. Without the ability to conduct traditional records searches on tribal names and with the limited availability of social security numbers, Kroll initiated an extensive supplemental notice effort.

Kroll’s efforts touched upon virtually every method of notice, from direct printed notice, email, to print, radio, online and social media.

 

Direct Notice

“One group was so remote that the only way to deliver notice was via a mule train...”

Kroll conducted meticulous records searches for the potential heirs associated with the 6,494 deceased IIM account holders with social security numbers. These efforts yielded U.S. mail, and/or email records for 22,780 potential heirs.

To ensure that notices would be deliverable to these potential heirs, Kroll subjected those records to an update via the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address database and updated this list with address changes identified. Additional direct tribal outreach included preparation and delivery of packets including cover letters and claim forms to over 587 tribes nationwide. One of these tribes, the Havasupai Tribe in Arizona, resided in a remote section of the Grand Canyon. Kroll sent the Havasupai Tribe’s cover letters and claim forms via mule train, which carried the cover letters and claim forms down the trails along the walls of the Grand Canyon.