Fraud week IV: lawyers who should know better

Where there is highly organized claims fraud, there are often found clusters of lawyers, doctors and their associates.

In Las Vegas’s Medical Mafia case, “physicians who played ball are said to have been assured protection from malpractice suits from many feared attorneys, while those not in on the scheme appear in some cases to have been at extra peril.”

Disloyal insurance company employees or counsel are sometimes in on the game too. California’s 1980s “Alliance” scandal, “a covert joint venture between plaintiffs’ and defense lawyers to manufacture and prolong legal claims for which the insurers would be obliged to employ legal counsel, bilked large insurance companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1980s.”

We could multiply examples many times over from mass tort fields like asbestos (with its creative witness-coaching and memory-massaging approaches to the issue of product identification) but for a good single episode, check out the banana pesticide litigation against Central American producers. Like many litigation campaigns, it generated a not-so-indie “documentary” (financed by plaintiff’s lawyers) billed around the film festival circuit as exposing multinational corporations’ guilt. That was before a federal judge described the litigation before her as a “pervasive conspiracy to defraud” its target, Dole.

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