Cardozo law professor Lester Brickman has been a longtime critic of the contingency fee system. So it’s no surprise that his latest work, Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America (introduction here), has a lot to say about how contingency fees skew the incentives of plaintiffs’ lawyers. Among the most interesting observations
Lawyers
Insight from Other Strategists – Branch Rickey & Billy Beane
So, it’s the end of September. Let’s talk baseball. And, since my beloved Red Sox have reverted to their old habits, we’re not going to focus on this season. Instead, we’re going to go back nine years and sixty-four years. And we’re going to talk about two general managers. Billy Beane (the Brad…
Book Review – Law Student Special – A Civil Action
This is a tough year to be entering law school. Tuition is more expensive than ever. The job market for entering lawyers is worse than ever. And the combination of technology and cost pressures is changing the legal profession in ways that even longtime veterans have trouble getting their heads around. It’s tough…
Negotiation with Plaintiffs’ Counsel and the Dark Side of Rapport
It’s no secret that most class action plaintiffs and defendants usually view each other with great suspicion from across a great divide. (I can’t say all; I have a few good friends among the plaintiffs’ bar, and I think quite highly of several plaintiffs’ lawyers regardless of any substantive disagreements.) What may be surprising, though…
Second Circuit Says Subclasses Need Their Own Attorneys
[Note: Many thanks to the folks at the WLF Legal Pulse for asking me to write this entry. It’s cross-posted there.]
Given the stakes of class actions, which transform small-dollar claims into bet-the-company litigation, settlements are hardly unusual. And given the minuscule recoveries most class members receive compared to their lawyers’ multi-million paydays, neither…
Rhetoric – Advocacy Revalued
Law professor Geoffrey Hazard is well-known in legal and academic circles as an expert on civil procedure and legal ethics. So when he (with co-author Dana Remus) writes an article on the use of rhetoric in civil litigation, it’s well worth reading, even if it never mentions class actions specifically.
The problem that Hazard…
The Fall of the House of Zeus – The Plaintiffs’ Lawyer as Dealmaker
"Hey man, I don’t practice law. I talk on the phone." — Richard Scruggs, on federal wiretap
This week, Class Action Countermeasures introduces another regular feature: book reviews. Once a month, I’ll be reviewing a book that has some relation to class action litigation. The primary purpose of the review will be to determine what…
Rhetoric – Entities, Entrepreneurs, and Rogues
As I’ve discussed before, there are few areas of law as polarized as class actions. The plaintiff and defense bars in class-action law rarely agree on anything, from the proper scope of Rule 23 to what a class action is in the first place. And I’m not the only one to have noticed this divide. …
Are Class Actions Unconstitutional? Depends Who You Ask
Last year, I discussed Northwestern professor Martin Redish’s argument that class actions are unconstitutional. Redish had predicted–and I largely agreed–that the argument would fall on deaf ears. It turns out we were both wrong. Leaving aside those defense lawyers who adopted his arguments about the Rules Enabling Act, Alexandra Lahav of the University of…
Why Are Ignorant Plaintiffs Inadequate?
As I’ve written before, guessing at the motives and methods of plaintiffs’ lawyers in class actions can be much like old-style Kremlinology. But every once in a while, we get a little more information. The most recent comes from University of Minnesota Law School professor Stephen Meili, who just published his article Collective…