Eugene Anderson, of Anderson Kill & Olick, on the Business Week website:

Personal experience has forged my attitude about class actions. Forty years ago, I represented a financier claimant in a lawsuit against a major financial scam operation. Our financier’s case was consolidated with a class action against the same scam. I cooperated with the class action lawyers and thought that we were brothers. Their part of the arrangement was that the class action lawyers would keep all the case files. After several years of litigation, I learned that the class action lawyers had settled their case with the defense lawyer. (I still suspect that there was a symbiotic relationship there.)

All discovery files, documents, etc., had been returned to the defendant. These included my firm’s detailed notes regarding the documents and somewhat less detailed notes about witnesses. I never suspected that the defendant would ask for the files, and was completely confounded when I learned that the class action lawyers had agreed.

At the next hearing the judge was furious at me and so was my client. Eventually my client settled for peanuts. My firm got the crumbs on the floor.

Forty years later, I am a happy lawyer, and the class action attorney is living at government expense in a low-security Federal prison. Somehow I can’t help but believe our disparate attitudes toward class actions account for the differences in our respective epilogues.

Filed under: class actions