Overlawyered » Melvyn Weiss

“Melvyn Weiss’ Quest For Redemption”

Walter Olson — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:06:47 +0000

Now released from prison, the former class-action baron “declined to say whether he regretted his actions.” Weiss — once acclaimed as the plaintiff’s bar’s top spotter of financial fraud — also turns out to have lost a ton of money to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The report is balanced, and cites Michael Perino’s work finding evidence that Weiss’s lies to judges worked to his own benefit as opposed to that of class members. It also recalls the heated claims by Democratic U.S. Reps. Charles Rangel, Gary Ackerman, Carolyn Maloney and Robert Wexler that Weiss was being railroaded on political charges — before he admitted the scheme and pleaded guilty, that is. [Jewish Week]

Tags: Charles Rangel, Melvyn Weiss

“Melvyn Weiss’ Quest For Redemption” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

The Milberg Weiss Four after prison

Ted Frank — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:40:08 +0000

All four have completed their sentences and don’t seem to have it so bad, judging by a March 19 Bloomberg story. William Lerach is going to teach at a law school and work for a “progressive think-tank.” And for the Milberg law firm itself? “Over the past couple of years, while everybody has been laying off lawyers and cutting pay, we’ve been giving lawyers raises and extra bonuses.”

Tags: Bill Lerach, Coughlin Stoia, crime and punishment, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

The Milberg Weiss Four after prison is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

October 10 roundup

Walter Olson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:47:37 +0000

Greenwich, Connecticut real estate board may discipline member whose blog (often linked in this space) regularly pokes fun at overpriced houses. Antitrust/First Amendment problem? [Chris Fountain, For What It's Worth]
“Religious group sued for allegedly inciting harm through prayers” [USA Today]
Legally driven waste of water in parched California should reopen Endangered Species Act debate [Max Schulz, American Spectator] “More Unintended Consequences — Endangered Species Edition” [Ronald Bailey, Reason; related AEI panel]
“Apple v Woolworth re Apple Logos In Australia” [Trademark Blog]
Speaking of Australia, Consumers Union’s Consumerist site publishes fake “Aussie McDonald’s fraud plot” memo as real — revises post later, but without mentioning it was taken in by hoax [HardArticle]
Pennsylvania couple learns about squatter’s-rights law the hard way [Hazleton Standard Speaker]
Maybe Saratoga Springs, N.Y. will let middle schoolers bike — or even walk! — to school [Albany Times-Union, Lenore Skenazy/Free Range Kids, Patrick at Popehat, Doug Mataconis/Liberty Papers]
Milberg, the disgraced class action firm of Mel Weiss and Bill Lerach fame, is hot again [NLJ]

Tags: Apple, Australia, Bill Lerach, California, churches, Connecticut, endangered species, McDonald's, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss, Pennsylvania, real estate, schools, trademarks, urban legends about lawsuits

October 10 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Milberg hires judge who ruled in its favor

Walter Olson — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:47:54 +0000

Last year New York trial judge Herman Cahn ruled in favor of class-action giant Milberg in a high-profile dispute over whether it could share its winnings from past cases with disgraced felon and former name partner Melvyn Weiss, the firm’s former driving force. Judge Cahn stepped down from the New York bench in December, and now it develops has been hired by Milberg as its “distinguished” new attorney. And you — with the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists today — certainly have a suspicious mind. There probably won’t be any shortage of funds with which to pay the former jurist: an American Lawyer headline last month read “Milberg Among Plaintiffs Firms Awarded $120 Million in Xerox Class Action”.

Tags: judges, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss, New York

Milberg hires judge who ruled in its favor is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Mel Weiss invested with Madoff

Walter Olson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:14:30 +0000

American Lawyer has the story (more: AmLaw Daily, ABA Journal). Because, if you asked why the former dean of the shareholder class-action plaintiff’s bar deserved those hundreds of millions in court-ordered fees, you would have been told that society needed to reward his unsurpassed skills at sniffing out securities fraud. Can you imagine how Weiss as a lawyer would have shredded some hapless middleman financial defendant who thought it wasn’t necessary to do due diligence on an investment manager in placing funds because, well, he seemed like a nice guy at the time?

Weiss is in jail now on unrelated charges, of course, but he might make a fun person to name as lead plaintiff in a suit against Madoff.

Tags: Bernard Madoff, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

Mel Weiss invested with Madoff is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Microblog 2008-12-19

Walter Olson — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:58:17 +0000

Newest “Trial Lawyers Inc.” report is on Louisiana [Manhattan Institute, Point of Law]
Mel Weiss disbarred automatically w/strong language from judges [Matter of Weiss h/t @erwiest]
Pro se claimant: I wrote down cure for cancer and then the darn hospital stole it! [Above the Law]
“California Supreme Court Ruling May Deter Good Samaritans” [The Recorder; SF Chronicle with copious reader comments, GruntDoc, our coverage last year]
Due diligence on dodgy funds? Sometimes it seems everyone’s relying on someone else to do that [Bronte Capital] Madoff fraud may date to 1970s, maybe “recent laxity” angle has been overdone [Securities Docket] “Ponzi crawl” = pub crawl whereby new person is added at each location and has to buy a round [Re Risk]
Radley Balko on Julie Amero malware-prosecution story [Reason, earlier]
Join Paul Ehrlich in some of the world’s most famously refuted predictions, and you too may get to be Obama’s science adviser [John Tierney/NYT, John Holdren]
~~Wisconsin~~ Minnesota pig-sitter trial set for March, claim is that defendant let star porker overfeed and gain a hundred pounds [LaCrosse Tribune h/t @kevinokeefe]
More on the Patent and Trademark Office “acceptable error” employment case [Venture Chronicles, Jeff Nolan; earlier]
Procter & Gamble “Satanism” case finally settles, soap giant got $19 million verdict against four Amway distributors who spread rumor [OnPoint News]
Once filing of a suit severs the channels of communication, attorneys and clients alike begin to make up “what really happened” narratives [Settle It Now]
Sometimes lawyers need to be formal. Don’t IM “Court denied your appeal u will b executed saturday thx” [Beck & Herrmann]
Bangladesh hoping to build replica of Taj Mahal despite copyright claims [Times Online h/t @mglickman]
Midnight regulations? “OMB Watch” vigilant (and with reason) during this R-2-D transition but sang different tune in 2000′s D-2-R [Gillespie, Reason]

Tags: California, copyright, Good Samaritan, hospitals, Louisiana, Manhattan Institute, Melvyn Weiss, patent quality, pro se, Wisconsin

Microblog 2008-12-19 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Ignatius on trial bar scandals; New Yorker on Scruggs

Walter Olson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:09:36 +0000

“At its worst, the system is close to legalized extortion. … It would be nice if the class-action lawyers reformed themselves, but if not, someone should file a lawsuit.” But op-ed columnist David Ignatius regards Melvyn Weiss and Dickie Scruggs as “good guys” gone wrong and says what occasioned their downfall “was a system in which the money just got too big”. This suggests their practices were more honest and aboveboard at an earlier stage in their careers when the stakes were smaller, but Ignatius does not offer evidence for this view, and I wonder whether he has any (“Reining In the Kings of Tort”, Washington Post, Jun. 5).

Relatedly, the New Yorker published a big article last month on the Scruggs scandal by correspondent Peter Boyer. (“The Bribe”, May 19, abstract; PDF at WSJ law blog). David Rossmiller, unsurpassed chronicler of that scandal, does an excellent job explaining why the article is, not wrong, exactly, but disappointing (May 27).

Tags: Dickie Scruggs, Melvyn Weiss, scandals

Ignatius on trial bar scandals; New Yorker on Scruggs is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“The paid plaintiffs and their corrupt attorneys”

Walter Olson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:32:49 +0000

Judge Walter, pronouncing sentence, wasn’t buying any of the “victimless crime” spin from the Mel Weiss camp:

The wrongdoing, which included submitting false statements to courts overseeing the lawsuits, “strikes at the core — at the heart of the judicial system,” the judge said. …

Judge Walter said he was dubious of arguments that the conspiracy was a “victimless crime” because the firm, best-known simply as Milberg Weiss, vigorously represented investors in the cases that were brought. “In effect, the absent class members were at the mercy of the paid plaintiffs and their corrupt attorneys in this invidious scheme,” the judge said. The lead plaintiffs taking the secret payoffs may have been more interested in boosting Milberg’s fees than in getting the maximum recovery, the judge said.

Josh Gerstein at the Sun has more on the sentencing, including hints as to the curious role of a Denver, Colorado lawyer named Gary Lozow. (“Lawyer Weiss Gets 30-Month Sentence for Kickbacks”, Jun. 3).

Tags: Melvyn Weiss

“The paid plaintiffs and their corrupt attorneys” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Weiss sentenced to 30 months

Walter Olson — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:37:13 +0000

The judge chose to go near the high end of the plea-negotiated range of 18 to 33 months. (Bloomberg; earlier guilty plea, letters asking leniency from Arthur Miller et al., background).

Tags: Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

Weiss sentenced to 30 months is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Mother Teresa, move aside”

Walter Olson — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:58:31 +0000

Mel Weiss — yes, that Melvyn Weiss, of Milberg Weiss, the one who ran a corrupt but lucrative kickback scheme premised on systematic lies to judges over decades, then stonewalled its disclosure through years of investigation — “deserves recognition as ‘one of the greatest humanitarians of our time,’ according to a sentencing memo his lawyer filed Friday.” (Ben Hallman, “Urging Leniency, Big Names Go to Bat for Mel Weiss”, American Lawyer, May 28).

Included were more than 240 supportive letters filed by friends and well-wishers of the famously piratical class-actioneer. It’s hard to read the WSJ law blog’s excerpts from these letters without shedding a tear of admiration:

“Donald Kempf, the former chief legal officer at Morgan Stanley says that after an unexpected on-the-street encounter, Weiss offered to help Kempf find a certain kind of watch. “And he did.”

According to a letter submitted by a friend and art dealer in Sun Valley, Idaho, in a “spontaneous” gesture while in Vienna, Weiss bought the art dealer’s wife an expensive pair of boots.

(WSJ law blog, May 27). The roster (PDF) of character vouchers and pleaders for leniency includes many names familiar to readers of this site, including Stephen Susman, Benedict Morelli (president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association), David Boies, Stan Chesley, Edward Labaton, and Christopher Seeger; the list is headed by lawprof and frequent Milberg Weiss expert witness Arthur Miller. We commented in February on the similar batch of letters on behalf of Weiss’s felonious collaborator Bill Lerach.

Tags: Bill Lerach, class actions, David Boies, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

“Mother Teresa, move aside” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system