Law Commons^™

When Bad Guys Are Wearing White Hats, Catherine A. Rogers

Catherine Rogers

Allegations of ethical misconduct by lawyers have all but completely overshadowed the substantive claims in the Chevron case. While both sides have been accused of flagrant wrongdoing, the charges against plaintiffs’ counsel appear to have captured more headlines and garnered more attention. The primary reason why the focus seems lopsided is that plaintiffs’ counsel were presumed to be the ones wearing white hats in this epic drama. This essay postulates that this seeming irony is not simply an example of personal ethical lapse, but in part tied to larger reasons why ethical violations are an occupational hazard for plaintiffs’ counsel …

Setting Attorneys' Fees In Securities Class Actions: An Empirical As, Lynn A. Baker, Michael A. Perino, Charles Silver

Vanderbilt Law Review

n 1995, Congress overrode President Bill Clinton's veto and enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act ("PSLRA"), a key purpose of which was to put securities class actions under the control of institutional investors with large financial stakes in the outcome of the litigation.' The theory behind this policy, set out in a famous article by Professors Elliot Weiss and John Beckerman, was simple: self-interest should encourage investors with large stakes to run class actions in ways that maximize recoveries for all investors. These investors should naturally want to hire good lawyers, incentivize them properly, monitor their actions, and reject …

The Scope Of Discovery Of Legal Ethics In Class Action Litigation, Bernard W. Freedman

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Setting Attorneys' Fees In Securities Class Actions: An Empirical Assessment, Lynn A. Baker, Michael A. Perino, Charles Silver

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 1995, Congress overrode President Bill Clinton's veto and enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act ("PSLRA"), a key purpose of which was to put securities class actions under the control of institutional investors with large financial stakes in the outcome of the litigation. The theory behind this policy, set out in a famous article by Professors Elliot Weiss and John Beckerman, was simple: self-interest should encourage investors with large stakes to run class actions in ways that maximize recoveries for all investors. These investors should naturally want to hire good lawyers, incentivize them properly, monitor their actions, and …

When Bad Guys Are Wearing White Hats, Catherine A. Rogers

Journal Articles

Allegations of ethical misconduct by lawyers have all but completely overshadowed the substantive claims in the Chevron case. While both sides have been accused of flagrant wrongdoing, the charges against plaintiffs’ counsel appear to have captured more headlines and garnered more attention. The primary reason why the focus seems lopsided is that plaintiffs’ counsel were presumed to be the ones wearing white hats in this epic drama. This essay postulates that this seeming irony is not simply an example of personal ethical lapse, but in part tied to larger reasons why ethical violations are an occupational hazard for plaintiffs’ counsel …

Regulating The Behavior Of Lawyers In Mass Individual Representations: A Call For Reform., Richard Zitrin

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Cases in which lawyers represent large numbers of individual plaintiffs are increasingly common. While these cases have some of the indicia of class actions, they are not class actions, usually because there are no common damages, but rather individual representations on a mass scale. Current ethics rules do not provide adequate guidance for even the most ethical lawyers. The absence of sufficiently flexible, practical ethical rules has become an open invitation for less-ethical attorneys to abuse, often severely, the mass-representation problem. It is necessary to reform the current rules, but only with a solution that is both practical and attainable, …

Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

This Article identifies a market-based solution for monitoring large-scale litigation that proceeds outside of Rule 23’s safeguards. Although class actions dominate the scholarly discussion of mass litigation, the ever-increasing restrictions on certifying a class mean that plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely rely on aggregate litigation (through multidistrict litigation and liberal joinder devices like Rules 20 and 42) to seek redress for group-wide harms. Despite sharing key features with its class-action counterpart, lik fe attenuated attorney-client relationships, attorney-client conflicts of interest, and high agency costs, no monitor exists in aggregate litigation. Informal group litigation not only lacks Rule 23’s judicial protections against attorney …

Merging Roles: Mass Tort Lawyers As Agents And Trustees, Charles Silver

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Attorney Fees And Expenses In Class Action Settlements: 1993–2008, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We report on a comprehensive database of 18 years of available opinions (1993–2008, inclusive) on settlements in class action and shareholder derivative cases in state and federal courts. An earlier study, covering 1993–2002, revealed a remarkable relationship between attorney fees and class recovery size: regardless of the methodology for calculating fees ostensibly employed by the courts, the class recovery size was the overwhelmingly important determinant of the fee. The present study, which nearly doubles the number of cases in the database, confirms that relationship. Fees display the same relationship to class recoveries in both data sets and neither fees nor …

Are Agreements To Keep Secret Information In Discovery Legal, Illegal Or Something In Between?, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

For at least eight years before the public and government authorities learned of the apparently dangerous combination of Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles ("SUVs") and their Bridgestone/Firestone brand of tires, Firestone had been settling lawsuits involving injuries and deaths caused by their tires failing on Ford SUVs. These settlements included terms requiring the plaintiffs and their lawyers to keep quiet about the settlements and about information learned through discovery, including information that might have alerted the public or the government to just how unsafe the Explorer/Firestone combination actually was. In some cases, these secrecy provisions were reinforced by court protective …

In Hell There Will Be Lawyers Without Clients Or Law, Susan P. Koniak, George M. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

More than twenty years ago, moral philosopher Richard Wasserstrom framed the debate in legal ethics by asking two questions. Does the lawyer's duty to zealously represent the client, constrained only by the bounds of the law, render the lawyer "at best systematically amoral and at worst more than occasionally immoral in ... her dealings with the rest of mankind[?]" And is the lawyer's relationship with the client likewise morally tainted in that it generally entails domination by the lawyer over the client rather than mutual respect? Wasserstrom answered both questions affirmatively. Though these questions have preoccupied legal ethics scholars ever …

Dueling Class Actions, Rhonda Wasserman

Articles

When multiple class action suits are filed on behalf of the same class members, numerous problems ensue. Dueling class actions are confusing to class members, wasteful of judicial resources, conducive to unfair settlements, and laden with complex preclusion problems. The article creates a typology of different kinds of dueling class actions; explores the problems that plague each type; considers the effect the Supreme Court's decision in Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Epstein, 516 U.S. 367 (1996), has had on these problems; evaluates the efficacy of existing judicial tools to curb them; and proposes an array of possible solutions. The more …

Plaintiffs' Class Action Attorneys Earn What They Get, Patricia M. Hynes

Journal of the Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics

No abstract provided.

Plaintiffs' Attorneys' Fees In Class Action Litigation: An Ethical Solution, David M. Young

Journal of the Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics

No abstract provided.

Class Action Against Class Counsel, Susan P. Koniak

Journal of the Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics

No abstract provided.

Financial Arrangements In Class Actions, And The Code Of Professional Responsibility, Daniel J. Capra, Thomas W. Jackson, John Koeltl

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Rules of Professional Conduct impose various restrictions relating to attorney fees and the payment of litigation costs, which are designed to preserve the lawyer's role as a zealous but objective advocate. Class actions stand apart from other kinds of litigation in that they are designed to promote efficiency by their combining like claims into single actions, and individual justice by their vindicating claims that if taken individually might not be economically viable. In light of these special concerns, the courts have carved out several exceptions to ordinary attorney's fees, litigation expense, and disbursement rules that they routinely apply to …