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Doing Good, Doing Well Symposium, Howard M. Erichson
Doing Good, Doing Well Symposium, Howard M. Erichson
Faculty Scholarship
Rather than focusing on the differences between tort lawyers and activists as they ally with each other, this Article focuses on the motivations and explanations of the tort lawyers themselves. Positioned at the intersection of big-money practice and social change litigation, mass torts provide a useful study in multiple motivations. While financial incentives for plaintiffs' lawyers explain much of what happens in mass torts, policy objectives come into play as well, at least in the lawyers' rhetoric. Despite the obvious difficulty distinguishing reasons from rhetoric and rationalization, it is worth exploring the significance of mixed motives for lawyers who are …
Typology Of Aggregate Settlements, A , Howard M. Erichson
Typology Of Aggregate Settlements, A , Howard M. Erichson
Faculty Scholarship
It is odd, considering how often lawyers engage in aggregate settlements, that no one seems able to explain what "aggregate settlement" means. It is one of the most important yet least defined terms in complex litigation. Lawyers and judges talk about aggregate settlements as though it were obvious what the term signifies and as though it describes a single thing. In fact, group settlements in multiparty litigation vary significantly. And they vary in ways that make it difficult to determine whether certain deals ought to be understood as collective settlements or simply as groups of individual settlements bundled together. This …