5 ms·

The Lawyer Whose Clients Didn’t Exist

62 points by prostoalex 7y ago

pseingatl 7y ago
There is no need for these class action cases. Where there is a legitimate class of injured plaintiffs, treat them under the worker's comp statutes.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Worker's compensation only applies to employees. Shrimp fishermen are not employees of BP; opiate addicts are not employees of Purdue Pharma; passengers are not employees of cruise lines, and so on. Besides, worker's compensation isn't geared to handle large classes of plaintiffs either! The entire point of the mass tort / class action system is that it's a way of handling a large group of plaintiffs in a single case. Worker's compensation works with one plaintiff at a time, which means that a large group of plaintiffs (like the 40,000 alleged here) would completely overwhelm the courts.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Class actions are cheap and efficient, especially where the alternative is thousands of individual cases.
  - worik 7y ago
    Perhaps it would be a good idea to read the article before commenting like that. Near the end it has this gem: "...Yale Law School professor emeritus Peter Schuck, the author of Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts. While they can empower the so-called little guy to go after corporate wrongdoers, mass torts are vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation, he argues. Even when everything’s on the up-and-up, they’re “an extremely inefficient way of compensating victims,” Schuck told me. They take a long time to litigate, have high transaction costs (up to 40 percent of the total outlay, according to Schuck), and can lead to unpredictable rewards." So given the law professor calls class actions (mass torts) inefficient with high transaction costs, what is the opinion "Class actions are cheap and efficient..." based on?
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Don’t these criticisms apply equally (if not more) to the alternative of thousands of individual suits?
      - worik 7y ago
        There are other options. This is a place where the state has the opportunity to justify its existence
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        They do. That one book is really about one country trying to sue another country for the use of military weapons against enemy combatants that knowingly and deliberately used civilian populations as human shields. They should be suing their own government.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Efficiency is not the purpose of the courts, and especially not of tort law. If we were to make anything about the courts less capricious, I wouldn't start with one of the only tools we have for controlling the evil deeds of corporations.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Personal experience as a class action litigant and as a lawyer in a class action on both sides. I don't know why one legal professor's book about a class action by an entire nation involving a weapon of war is relevant to a discussion of wholly civil class actions. Of course a class action is inefficient for addressing the injuries of war; that should be addressed by diplomacy.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  How would you get the appropriate party (here, BP) to pay for the damages that they caused? Under this theory, only the employers of injured employees would foot the bill.
H8crilA 7y ago
Can someone tl;dr?
- klyrs 7y ago
  I haven't read/grokked the whole thing, but here's a very brief. Class action suit against BP got complicated because the folks who were tasked with finding clients only gathered names of local shrimpers -- not enough to even find those folks again, much less prove damages.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    And, in many cases, it appears that those folks also gathered names which were either made up or didn't belong to people who were affected. (Some examples in the article included "victims" who were dead, working abroad, and family pets.) A major question in the resulting lawsuit was whether the liability for these errors fell upon the people collecting names, or on the law firm for ignoring the problem after they recognized it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzzybear3965 7y ago
  Expect some loss with this compression... In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, a high-powered class-action attorney hires a team of field agents to recruit disenfranchised gulf fisherman as litigants. The field agents established a network of local recruiters to outsource clientele acquisition. Said agents bumble the solicitation of clients/fisherman, accepting fraudulent documentation from per-head subcontractors ($10 to $50 per litigant found). So, high-powered attorney receives documentation for tens of thousands of fisherman clientele to support his class action.... But, they don't exist. Realizing this, he pursues the case anyway since abandonment disadvantages the small fraction of clientele that are legitimate (in that they are unable to litigate against B.P. in the future). High-powered attorney wins the class action, ensuring to stipulate that no recourse can be had in the event that the clientele are found to be non-existent (the known case). The U.S. government drags high-powered attorney and recruiting staff into criminal court. He defends himself and establishes a defense claiming himself to be a victim of his field agents. Field agents are sentenced to many years in prison and high-powered attorney is found not guilty by a jury of his peers. You may need a TL;DR for this TL;DR.
dcole2929 7y ago
The story doesn't really paint any of these people in a good light. The real question in my opinion, which the article does a poor job of addressing is at what point, could Watt have dropped people from the suit without compromising their ability to later file suit. It outlines that he basically knows the 40,000 number is bunk from very close to the beginning, but it's certainly hard to imagine there were no mechanisms from which he could have cut people out. Certainly seems from here like Watt pushed on in hopes he could get the money and figure out the rest later, knowing he could throw the people who sourced the clients under the bus if anything went left.

62 points by prostoalex 7y ago

There is no need for these class action cases. Where there is a legitimate class of injured plaintiffs, treat them under the worker's comp statutes.

duskwuff 7y ago
Worker's compensation only applies to employees. Shrimp fishermen are not employees of BP; opiate addicts are not employees of Purdue Pharma; passengers are not employees of cruise lines, and so on. Besides, worker's compensation isn't geared to handle large classes of plaintiffs either! The entire point of the mass tort / class action system is that it's a way of handling a large group of plaintiffs in a single case. Worker's compensation works with one plaintiff at a time, which means that a large group of plaintiffs (like the 40,000 alleged here) would completely overwhelm the courts.
gamblor956 7y ago
Class actions are cheap and efficient, especially where the alternative is thousands of individual cases.
- worik 7y ago
  Perhaps it would be a good idea to read the article before commenting like that. Near the end it has this gem: "...Yale Law School professor emeritus Peter Schuck, the author of Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts. While they can empower the so-called little guy to go after corporate wrongdoers, mass torts are vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation, he argues. Even when everything’s on the up-and-up, they’re “an extremely inefficient way of compensating victims,” Schuck told me. They take a long time to litigate, have high transaction costs (up to 40 percent of the total outlay, according to Schuck), and can lead to unpredictable rewards." So given the law professor calls class actions (mass torts) inefficient with high transaction costs, what is the opinion "Class actions are cheap and efficient..." based on?
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Don’t these criticisms apply equally (if not more) to the alternative of thousands of individual suits?
    - worik 7y ago
      There are other options. This is a place where the state has the opportunity to justify its existence
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      They do. That one book is really about one country trying to sue another country for the use of military weapons against enemy combatants that knowingly and deliberately used civilian populations as human shields. They should be suing their own government.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Efficiency is not the purpose of the courts, and especially not of tort law. If we were to make anything about the courts less capricious, I wouldn't start with one of the only tools we have for controlling the evil deeds of corporations.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Personal experience as a class action litigant and as a lawyer in a class action on both sides. I don't know why one legal professor's book about a class action by an entire nation involving a weapon of war is relevant to a discussion of wholly civil class actions. Of course a class action is inefficient for addressing the injuries of war; that should be addressed by diplomacy.
gnicholas 7y ago
How would you get the appropriate party (here, BP) to pay for the damages that they caused? Under this theory, only the employers of injured employees would foot the bill.

H8crilA 7y ago

Can someone tl;dr?

klyrs 7y ago
I haven't read/grokked the whole thing, but here's a very brief. Class action suit against BP got complicated because the folks who were tasked with finding clients only gathered names of local shrimpers -- not enough to even find those folks again, much less prove damages.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  And, in many cases, it appears that those folks also gathered names which were either made up or didn't belong to people who were affected. (Some examples in the article included "victims" who were dead, working abroad, and family pets.) A major question in the resulting lawsuit was whether the liability for these errors fell upon the people collecting names, or on the law firm for ignoring the problem after they recognized it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fuzzybear3965 7y ago
Expect some loss with this compression... In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, a high-powered class-action attorney hires a team of field agents to recruit disenfranchised gulf fisherman as litigants. The field agents established a network of local recruiters to outsource clientele acquisition. Said agents bumble the solicitation of clients/fisherman, accepting fraudulent documentation from per-head subcontractors ($10 to $50 per litigant found). So, high-powered attorney receives documentation for tens of thousands of fisherman clientele to support his class action.... But, they don't exist. Realizing this, he pursues the case anyway since abandonment disadvantages the small fraction of clientele that are legitimate (in that they are unable to litigate against B.P. in the future). High-powered attorney wins the class action, ensuring to stipulate that no recourse can be had in the event that the clientele are found to be non-existent (the known case). The U.S. government drags high-powered attorney and recruiting staff into criminal court. He defends himself and establishes a defense claiming himself to be a victim of his field agents. Field agents are sentenced to many years in prison and high-powered attorney is found not guilty by a jury of his peers. You may need a TL;DR for this TL;DR.

dcole2929 7y ago

The story doesn't really paint any of these people in a good light. The real question in my opinion, which the article does a poor job of addressing is at what point, could Watt have dropped people from the suit without compromising their ability to later file suit. It outlines that he basically knows the 40,000 number is bunk from very close to the beginning, but it's certainly hard to imagine there were no mechanisms from which he could have cut people out. Certainly seems from here like Watt pushed on in hopes he could get the money and figure out the rest later, knowing he could throw the people who sourced the clients under the bus if anything went left.