WP, pg1: Guilty Plea to End Crusading Lawyer Lerach's Lucrative Run

[DeepModem Mom]

Guilty Plea to End Crusading Lawyer's Lucrative Run
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; Page A01


William Lerach, 61, one of the nation's best known and wealthiest plantiff lawyers, pled guilty to a single criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice charge that ends a seven-year federal investigation that he and his former partners at the Milberb Weiss law firm enlisted people to buy shares in big corporations and then paid them to serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits.

In a three-decade career, California lawyer William S. Lerach won tens of billions of dollars for his clients by suing executives embroiled in corporate scandal. Casting himself as the voice of victimized shareholders, he chalked up unprecedented awards in the Enron accounting mess and the Exxon oil spill.

His victories spawned a nationwide legion of imitators, who adopted his quick-draw tactics and bombastic rhetoric, transforming what was once a backwater, class-action investor lawsuits, into one of the most lucrative sectors of the legal business. That success, coupled with his brash style, won him enemies throughout corporate America and inspired Congress to pass a 1995 law imposing limits on shareholder cases.

Now Lerach, 61, is headed to prison, brought down not by adversaries in executive suites or on Capitol Hill but by his own hubris.

Yesterday, he agreed to pay the government fines and penalties of $8 million and to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. The deal ends a seven-year investigation into allegations that he and his former law firm secretly paid people to serve as plaintiffs. Under the terms of the plea, which requires court approval, he will serve at least one year and no more than two years in federal prison....

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By the 21st century, he shrewdly had taken center stage in the Enron investigation, the biggest corporate fraud case in a generation. In the Enron shareholder case alone, Lerach's law firm is on track to earn 8 to 10 percent of a $7.3 billion settlement pool -- the single largest payday ever for investors, according to legal experts. In the three years since Lerach bitterly split with his old law firm, Milberg Weiss, his new firm, Lerach Coughlin, has been named lead firm in 150 cases....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR2007091802211.html?nav=hcmodule