How The Mighty Lerach Has Fallen: Power Lawyer To Prisoner

by Quin Hillyer - August 17th, 2008 - D.C. Examiner

When he was on top of the world, flamboyant class-action plaintiffs lawyer William S. Lerach made more than $100 million during the 1990s for himself and even more for his now-disgraced firm, Milberg Weiss.

Silicon Valley tech executives shuddered and Fortune 500 chief executive officers reached for their checkbooks at the mere mention of being "Lerached." At one point, Lerach boasted that he had won more than $4 billion in damages for shareholders in 400 class-action securities suits.

Lerach is the epitome of the problems with our court system. Though he took advantage of its ability to be used as a system of extortion, his excesses are merely symbols of how the system actually works. No one can rely on following the law. Acquire any wealth and the extortionists in our court system will find some way to take it away from you. Abiding by the law is no excuse. Look at tobacco. The courts decided it was immoral and they extorted hundreds of billions of dollars from the tobacco companies and farmers who grew this legal crop. Please note, tobacco is still a legal product today. The irony is that the same corrupt lawyers who practiced this scam against tobacco, and against corporations for the outrage of making money, are today predicting that they will bring down the evil McDonald's for making you fat. The new argument is that McDonalds wants to make you fat so they can sell you a product that is popular.

Lawyers like Lerach made hundreds of millions of dollars, in most cases exaggerating the idea that if you smoked and had health problems, they were presumed to be the fault of evil tobacco moguls. Evidence that many non-smokers suffered from the same maladies as mokers was ignored. Some who had problems with cancer before they started smoking were still awarded judgments on the assumption that smoking some how or other retroactively caused the cancer. The logic was simply absurd. And yet that is typical of the absurdity of our court system today. It is a system of extortion that immorally enriches evil abuses like Lerach's. Just as they now plant to close down McDonalds to stop you from buying the hamburgers they are selling with such (according to the lawyers) evil intent. Oh yeah, before they close them down they want them to pay huge penalties for ever having wanted to sell a good tasting product. How dare they.

Please note that the courts have not taken away the illegally extorted millions from Lerach. When he gets out of prison, he will still be rich beyond belief, thanks to a system that anyone with a conscience would find contemptible.