Lawrence Schonbrun No Fan Of Lawsuit Industry

Friends of Ours ^ | 01/04/12 | Friends of Ours

[AtlasStalled]

Lawrence W. Schonbrun, the executive director of Class Action Watch, is not a fan of the plaintiff lawyers who purport to represent the little guy, and in an op-ed piece for The Washington Times claims as a general matter that the "class action system was meant to protect us from businesses that cheat large numbers of people out of small amounts of money" but "the cruel irony . . . is that class action lawyers inflict the very harm the class action was intended to remedy." Schonbrun once practiced as a plaintiff's class action lawyer until he saw the light as he wrote last year in a confessional for The Huffington Post: "I can no longer look judges in the eye and tell them I am entitled to millions in fees for so-called class member 'benefits' which I believe actually harms the interests of class members, consumers, and society in general." Sadly, judges often are "quite willing accomplices" to a flawed process by which attorneys' fees are awarded Schonbrun alleged last month in a scathing critique on the In re Tyco Securities Litigation for The Huffington Post.

[TheConservator]

As an attorney who has also been involved in class actions as a class plaintiff, this guy has it exactly right.

A class action is filed, and then it is settled. In the settlement, the defendant pays the plaintiff’s lawyers millions of dollars in attorneys fees, and the members of the plaintiff class get a few dollars, or a coupon, or some other nominal recovery.

The plaintiffs attorneys win. They get a multi-million dollar payout. The defendant wins. They get complete immunity from further claims. And the members of the plaintiff class get completely screwed.

How to stop this? Congress should pass a law—in any class action, plaintiff’s attorneys fees are limited to double their fee calculated by multiple counsel’s regular hourly rate in non-class cases times the number of hours they expended on the litigation, or to 100 times the average recovery achieved by the average class member participating in the settlement, whichever is greater.

[Weirdad]

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