Via Lyle Roberts at 10b-5 Daily (Aug. 29), we learn of the latest advance in methods guaranteed to bring us a more ruthless legal profession: “Christopher Waddell, general counsel of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, said that he uses both bounty and sliding-scale fees in order to ‘incentivize’ his outside counsel to go after personal assets. CalSTRS, the nation’s third-largest public pension fund, has promised its lawyers a 2.5 percent bounty, plus an undisclosed fee, in a pending suit against the former directors of WorldCom.” (Sue Reisinger, “Securities Fraud: Attorneys Are Receiving Bounties for Pursuing Officers and Directors”, Corporate Counsel, Aug. 24). For the reasons most other countries’ legal systems consider contingency fees for lawyers to be unethical, see Chapter 2 (“A Piece of the Action”) of The Litigation Explosion (PDF).

Filed under: class actions, contingent fee, ethics, The Litigation Explosion