Roundup plaintiffs' attorneys plead guilty in $200M extortion scheme
justice.gov
justice.gov
"Timothy Litzenburg has spent the bulk of his career battling the manufacturers of cancer-causing products. That kind of undertaking is akin to David v. Goliath, but he has found that when the truth is on your side, the playing field becomes more level."
https://thenationaltriallawyers.org/profile-view/Timothy/Lit...
I imagine that because their the CA case had some unusual facts, they must have thought it would be easier to switch-sides for a small fee rather than trying to catch lightning in a bottle again.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-02/the-bl...
The biggest issue with American civil law is cost to resolve disputes. It's obscene.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michael-avenatti-guilty...
These are high profile examples, and they might be the "smoke" to a "fire" somewhere most people don't yet know about.
Edit: This is already causing confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622823 Flagging for your attention.
The extortion is this:
1. They were responsible, in part, for suing Company 1, presumably in the high-profile Monsanto lawsuits.
2. They offered Company 1 a deal: if Company 1 bribed them for $200M, they would deliberately throw the case.
3. Company 1 reported that misconduct to the DoJ.
4. Assuming Company 1 is Monsanto, the original lawsuits were successful; one case in particular awarded two plaintiffs $1B each.
The extortion here is that the lawyers were offering to throw the case and cost Company 1 only $200M instead of (presumably) $2B+, plus legal fees.
Bribery, on the other hand, under federal law requires that the person being bribed is a public official, outside of special provisions relating to sporting contests and port security (separate provisions, not common to those two circumstances.) Well, and one other inverted scenario involving Members of Congress, etc., bribing private entities by using official acts to sway hiring decisions on partisan political grounds. But nothing that seems applicable to the kind of thing going on here.
Tort reform is important. That being said, there needs to be a way to punish companies when they do bad stuff. Unfortunately, class action lawsuits are often viewed by the corporations as a cost of doing business, and most of the money goes to the trial lawyers, and the consumers end up getting a $5 voucher or even less.
I propose an alternative to class action law suits. Singapore style caning of the the C-Suite and board of directors for corporate malfeasance. I think consumers who have been scammed would feel more that justice was done than if they got say 1 month's free credit monitoring. In addition, it would align incentives for the management if their ass was literally on the line. It would also be cheap to administer and would not contribute to our prison population.