The Washington Post quotes me on the hubris that the now-disgraced class-action potentate came to symbolize (Carrie Johnson, “Guilty Plea to End Crusading Lawyer’s Lucrative Run”, Sept. 19). Few tears will be shed in Silicon Valley (Wired “Epicenter” blog, Sept. 18). The John Edwards campaign says it’s handing over Lerach’s contributions to charity, and the Joe Biden campaign says it’s already done so; no word yet from Hillary Clinton, who took Lerach money for her Senate bid (Josh Gerstein, “Fortunes Darken for Lawyer Melvyn Weiss”, New York Sun, Sept. 19). More coverage: Lattman, What About Clients?, NAM Shop Floor. Plus: Ben Smith at Politico has more on the John Edwards connection: “Though he’s giving away the $4,600 from Lerach, Lerach is also listed as a bundler, and employees of the lawyer’s firm are his third-largest group of donors, mostly giving in the first quarter.” (Sept. 19).
Posts Tagged ‘Bill Lerach’
Lerach’s guilty plea
Following up on Walter’s Sep. 18 roundup, Lerach should be proud of his lawyers: his plea deal is for a single count of mispaying Steven Cooperman, drops all of the Torkelsen-related charges, will likely get him out of prison in under two years, requires the government to forgo prosecution of his current law partners, and doesn’t require him to cooperate with the prosecution of Melvyn Weiss. He may well be disbarred afterwards, but he’ll also be a multimillionaire in his late sixties who can retire comfortably even after paying an $8 million fine, and nothing stops plaintiffs’ firms from offering small fortunes to Lerach to act as a “non-legal consultant.” [plea agreement; WSJ; The Recorder; NY Times]
Relatedly, Wired reprints its 1996 “Bloodsucking Scumbag” article.
September 18 roundup
- L.A. city council debating settlement of Tennie Pierce (firehouse dog food prank) case, apparently for several million [AP/Mercury-News; earlier]
- Lerach said to accept jail term of 2 years or less in plea deal, won’t testify against former partners [Washington Post, Point of Law; earlier]
- No shock, Sherlock: divorce cases said to have the highest rate of perjury in open court [Oregonian via WSJ law blog]
- Things you might not have known about the Duke/Nifong case unless you’ve read the new Stuart Taylor/K.C. Johnson book [Leo, Minding the Campus; Thernstrom]
- Take a wild guess as to one reason doctors are reluctant to communicate with their patients via email, despite the many potential advantages [Medical Economics via KevinMD]
- Latest suit charging casino should have recognized customer’s gambling addiction [Indianapolis Star; earlier]
- One brother kills the other in anger in the North Carolina woods, both members of a logging crew; ruled compensable under workers’ comp [Coppelman]
- My client, the dog: another trend piece on steady expansion of animal law [Boston Globe]
- Prankster gets American U. alumni mag to print erroneous report of two classmates as being gay. Defamatory? [New York Post, Smoking Gun; Julie Hilden a while back]
- Trial begins in Kentucky of civil suit arising from the string of McDonald’s strip-search hoaxes Ted wrote about last year [OnPoint News, Louisville C-J/USA Today]
- Woman who nearly froze to death after a night of drinking sues city, emergency personnel and taxi driver who dropped her at home [five years ago on Overlawyered]
September 4 roundup
- Hush up with those jokes, now: Lerach Coughlin lawyer hailed as hero after jumping from his BMW to save pregnant woman attacked by pit bulls [ABA Journal]
- The “murky area between zealous advocacy and improper conduct”: Judge Preska sanctions Cleary Gottlieb for litigation abuse [WSJ Law Blog, Lat]
- Out-nannying them all? Edwards says his health plan will legally oblige everyone to go in for checkups with the doc [AP; MagicStats, Howard, Althouse]
- Apparently we missed out on the Aug. 31 celebration of Love Lawyers Day [Giacalone]
- To settle lawsuit by psychiatrist’s family, Augusten Burroughs agrees to call “Running with Scissors” a “book” rather than “memoir” [Althouse]
- Will contest over Maryland judge’s estate has dragged on for fourteen years [Washington Post]
- Recap of Flea fiasco (doc liveblogging his own trial); we get randomly mentioned [American Medical News; earlier]
- “Viacom charges man with violating his own copyright, after he YouTubed their program that used his video.” [Reynolds](but see: Evan Brown via Coleman]
- Is your lawyer a “chicken catcher” or a “chicken plucker”? [KevinMD]
- When if ever should “best interest” custody standard override parent’s right to free exercise of opinion, religion, cultural affiliation, etc.? [series of Eugene Volokh posts]
- Don’t forget to join our new Facebook group with distinctive content [if you’re a member]
- New at Point of Law: Texas judge’s son withdraws from odometer class action; what do environmentalist litigators have against whales?; N.Y. Times’s born-yesterday Vioxx coverage (and this from Ted, which is pretty devastating); Dickie Scruggs takes down an insurance commissioner; sexual assault foreseeable when fraternity left in possession of unsupervised motel room? Marshall, Texas dignitaries rally to save their special court; and much more.
Lerach’s retirement speech
A commenter on Peter Lattman’s blog catches Lerach using the line “This is the business we have chosen”—which, in an oddly appropriate swipe, is a line of the mobster Hyman Roth in The Godfather II. A shanda fur die goyim.
Lerach retires; nearing a plea deal?
Law.com reports in its summary:
Renowned plaintiffs attorney William Lerach, lead partner at Lerach Coughlin, announced Tuesday he’s stepping down from the firm he started when he split off the West Coast offices of what is now Milberg Weiss. Lerach said he’s planning to take some time off. That could include going to prison, or at least the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Lerach is said to be nearing a deal with federal prosecutors related to legally questionable payments Milberg Weiss made to its lead plaintiffs and a former expert witness.
The WSJ Law Blog similarly reports that “Lerach has not been charged, but he is in advanced talks with prosecutors on a plea deal that could be announced in September and involve serving prison time, according to two people familiar with the investigation.” It also has Lerach’s departure memo to colleagues at the law firm that will now be known as Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins (cross-posted from Point of Law).
Sebok on the Pearson pants suit
Anthony Sebok’s Findlaw column on the Pearson pants suit cites Overlawyered and repeats two points regular readers of Overlawyered and Point of Law have seen before:
- Meritless cases often settle for nuisance value, thus making them profitable to bring;
- Rule 11, as currently constituted, “has proven to be a very toothless weapon against abusive plaintiffs” and “does not effectively protect defendants from frivolous, or even, in some cases, fraudulent suits.”
Yet Sebok concludes that there is no epidemic of fraudulent litigation. I suppose it depends on one’s definition of “epidemic” and “fraudulent”; as we’ve noted before, Bill Lerach successfully swiped several billion dollars in nuisance settlements bringing meritless Enron litigation, helped by an erroneous district-court class certification. (Such erroneous class certifications helped make Madison County a judicial hellhole.) Sebok acknowledges that “lawyer-driven” cases where plaintiffs act as their own attorneys might merit loser-pays rules to deter meritless lawsuits that would be cheaper to settle than fight, but what makes most class-action litigation any less “lawyer-driven” such that they should be subject to different rules? (Cross-posted from Point of Law.)
By the way, Pearson has announced that he will appeal the trial court’s decision against him.
Oops!
Perhaps one reason trial lawyers so frequently accuse reformers of manufacturing popular outrage is because such astroturfing is a common trial-lawyer tactic: Peter Lattman uncovers eight identical letters to the editor written at the behest of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (now going by the AAJ misnomer), all on behalf of Bill Lerach’s bogus Enron suit and criticizing the Bush administration officials who dare to stand up to the attempted extortion. Similar astroturfing regularly goes on in the comments section of the Lattman blog.
June 8 roundup
- Litigation as foreign policy? Bill authorizing U.S. government to sue OPEC passes House, and is already contributing to friction with Russia [AP; Reuters; Steffy, Houston Chronicle; earlier here, here, and here]
- Albany prosecutors charge boxing champion’s family with staging 23 car crashes, but a jury acquits [Obscure Store; Times-Union; North Country Gazette]
- New at Point of Law: Bill Lerach may retire; Abe Lincoln’s legal practice; Philip Howard on getting weak cases thrown out; “Year of the Trial Lawyer” in Colorado; and much more;
- Multiple partygoers bouncing on a trampoline not an “open and obvious” risk, says Ohio appeals court approving suit [Wilmington News-Journal]
- Skadden and its allies were said to be representing Chinatown restaurant workers pro bono — then came the successful $1 million fee request, bigger than the damages themselves [NYLJ]
- Who will cure the epidemic of public health meddling? [Sullum, Reason]
- Turn those credit slips into gold, cont’d: lawsuits burgeon over retail receipts that print out too much data [NJLJ; earlier]
- Lawprof Howard Wasserman has further discussion of the Josh Hancock case (Cardinals baseball player crashes while speeding, drunk and using cellphone) [Sports Law Blog; earlier]
- “Women prisoners in a Swedish jail are demanding the ‘human right’ to wear bikinis so they can get a decent tan.” [Telegraph, U.K.]
- Disbarred Miami lawyer Louis Robles, who prosecutors say stole at least $13 million from clients, detained as flight risk after mysterious “Ms. Wiki” informs [DBR; earlier at PoL]
- Indiana courts reject motorist’s claim that Cingular should pay for crash because its customer was talking on cellphone while driving [three years ago on Overlawyered]
June 5 roundup
- Everyone’s got an opinion on Dr. Flea’s trial-blogging fiasco [Beldar, Childs, Adler @ Volokh (lively comments including Ted), Turkewitz (who also provides huge link roundups here and here), KevinMD]
- Sidebar: some other doctor-bloggers have shut down or curtailed posting lately amid pressures from disapproving employers and patient-privacy legal worries [KevinMD first, second posts; Distractible Mind, Blogaholic]
- Amusement park unwisely allows “extremely large” woman to occupy two seats on the roller coaster, and everyone lands with a thump in court [Morris County, N.J. Daily Record via Childs]
- Prosecutors all over are trying to live down the “Duke effect” [NLJ]; how to prevent the next such debacle [Cernovich]
- Bad for their image: trial lawyers’ AAJ (formerly ATLA) files ethics complaint against Judge Roy Pearson Jr., of $65 million lost-pants-suit infamy [Legal Times]
- More suits assert rights to “virtual property” in Second Life, World of Warcraft online simulations [Parloff]
- Plea deals and immunity in the Conrad Black affair [Steyn, OC Register]
- Another round in case of local blog sent nastygram for allegedly defaming the city of Pomona, Calif. [Foothill Cities; earlier]
- “There once was a guy named Lerach…” — Milberg prosecution has reached the limerick stage [WSJ Law Blog comments]
- Government of India plans to fight Americans’ claims of intellectual property over yoga postures [Times Online; earlier here and here]
- After car-deer collision, lawyer goes after local residents who allegedly made accident more likely by feeding the creatures [seven years ago on Overlawyered]