Following corporate accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and elsewhere several years ago, Congress quickly went to work tightening the regulation of corporate governance. But the Congress yet to acknowledge three of the nation’s most powerful, widely known plaintiffs’ lawyers who have all pled guilty to federal felonies in connection with their corruption of American civil justice system. Melvyn Weiss of the firm formerly known as Milberg Weiss, his former law partner William Lerach, and Mississippi legend Richard Dickie Scruggs each copped to conspiracy charges — Weiss and Lerach for paying a stable of on-call shareholder clients used in trumped-up securities litigation, and Scruggs for bribing a judge over the distribution of lawyers’ fees in a Hurricane Katrina insurance lawsuit.
There’s also a growing body of bullet-proof evidence documenting comparably endemic corruption in asbestos and silica litigation, and a 2006 Harvard School of Public Health study concluded that four out of every 10 medical malpractice lawsuits filed in America each year are “groundless.”
But this Congress doesn’t seem to care. In the past, lawmakers showed an interest in reining in the trial bar’s abuses. The Class Action Reform Act, signed into law by President Bush in early 2005, has been credited with reducing the number of speculative, constitutionally questionable class actions that personal injury lawyers had previously shopped to friendly state court judges around the country, regardless of where the plaintiffs and defendants resided or did business, or where the alleged injuries in a given case may have taken place. The House a in 2004 also passed the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act, which aimed to reinstate serious sanctions for attorneys found by a judge to have filed a “frivolous” claim or motion. Both times, senators failed to consider the measure.
Dick Weekley who is active in community affairs and the CEO of TLR seems unhappy of the turns of events as many foreign countries with which America competes economically maintain commonsense safeguards against lawsuit abuse. And the crimes of Dickie Scruggs, Bill Lerach and Mel Weiss aren’t qualitatively different than the crimes of Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco or Jeff Skilling and the late Ken Lay at Enron.
