Word: settlements
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...trial-lawyer foe. Corporate executives complain that the cost of fighting lawsuits, let alone losing them, drives up prices of products ranging from ladders to automobiles and holds down wages and job creation and profits. Adding to the outrage: many plaintiffs' lawyers are getting very rich. The tobacco-settlement legal fees--to be shared by more than 100 law firms--are already approaching $10 billion. Scruggs alone will get about a third of the $1.2 billion being paid to his firm...
...something changed in the '70s: the awards began to get a lot larger. In 1978 Jamail brought a case against Remington for defects in a gun that injured a man in a hunting accident. The $6.8 million settlement landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Furth won his clients $70 million in 1973 on an antitrust price-fixing case against gypsum-wallboard manufacturers (and got a $4.3 million...
...state tobacco litigation succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. A whistle-blower, former Brown & Williamson chemist Jeffrey Wigand, turned up with damning testimony and internal documents. In the end, Big Tobacco folded, accepting a settlement that included major restrictions on advertising--no billboards, for example--and $246 billion in damages, to be paid to the states over 25 years...
...Boston for alleged improprieties involving escrow fees. The lawyers were awarded $8.5 million in fees, which was taken directly from customers' bank accounts. One class-action member discovered that $91.33 in legal fees had been deducted from his account--although he received only $2.19 in interest from the settlement award. Even in more traditional fee arrangements, the sheer size of some damage awards can mean that lawyers end up pocketing gargantuan amounts. Fees in nationwide tobacco litigation, for example, could top $30 billion. That's money that could be going to address the underlying problems at which the lawsuits were...
That one declaration would be of far greater import than any of the parameters of any settlement. On finality hinges everything...