For years, trial lawyer William Lerach was known as a master of “rush to the courthouse” class-action lawsuits, specializing in billion-dollar securities cases against American companies. But now Mr. Lerach is rushing off in a different direction — to prison — and his downfall has a lesson to offer for trial lawyers everywhere.
In a deal with prosecutors filed this week, Lerach pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge following a federal investigation into allegations that he and his former law firm, Milberg Weiss, covertly (and illegally) funneled at least $11 million in kickbacks to plaintiffs who served as frontmen in dubious shareholder class-action lawsuits.
Lerach’s guilty plea has saved him from the worst, and he’ll serve a prison sentence of just one to two years. But the plea agreement cannot spare class-action litigation in general — and many shareholder lawsuits in particular — from harsh judgment.
The Shakedowns
This one trial lawyer’s fate only confirms what many critics of the trial bar have long suspected: The “shareholder” lawsuits pioneered by Milberg Weiss were phony cases concocted solely to enrich tort lawyers at the expense of innocent companies and their shareholders.
That’s from Investors Business Daily this morning [1]
(BBCT: Billy) [2]
There’s more of course, and you should go RTWT. The whole thing, however would seem to raise a question that nobody dares ask; Since when did we start treating lawyers like they were invariably honest? Certainly, his colleagues still think the guy worthy… As the article indicates…
Worst of all, while Lerach “crossed a line and pushed too far,” as he put in a statement this week, he remains admired and emulated by the trial bar.
Yeah, well… OJ Simpson, pushed too far as well.
Oh… One other comment on this story that caught my eye:
Asked to comment on Lerach’s undoing, a law professor at Columbia described it to the Washington Post as “the fall of a titan.”
Columbia? Isn’t that where that thug Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak? Now we see that the lack of judgment pervades far more than just the president’s office at Colombia.
But what do you really expect from a group of people who place more emphasis on what is legal, and illegal, then they do on what’s right and what’s wrong.