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Roundup plaintiffs' attorneys plead guilty in $200M extortion scheme
- minerjoe 6y agoWow. Monsanto and Bayer, probably? Is this where the attourneys have clients that actually got cancer and they were going to pocket the money and not give the cancer victim anything? I do hope they rot.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoWe've changed the URL from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/virginia-attorneys-plead-guilty-orchestrating-200-million-extortion-scheme-targeting https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/virginia-attorneys-plead-guil... to an article with more background. Both are worth reading.
- zenexer 6y agoCan you change it back? The justice.gov link is much newer and contains significant new information. For example, the Reuters article emphasizes that the defendant was not yet guilty and a second person hadn’t yet been charged. However, the justice.gov link says both are now defendants, and both pleaded guilty. Edit: This is already causing confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622823 Flagging for your attention.
- dang 6y agoOk, I've changed it back from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-masstorts/doj-charges-roundup-plaintiffs-lawyer-in-200-million-alleged-extortion-scheme-idUSKBN1YM2L9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-masstorts/doj-charges.... That was from Dec 2019 while the OP is from June 2020. Sorry!
- gruez 6y agoWhat were they expecting? That Monsanto (presumably "Company 1") would give then 200 million and hope that they'll call off the lawsuit? What's preventing them from suing anyways? If the legal threat is real, what's preventing others from suing?
- pnw_hazor 6y agoThey already won a $289 million judgment in California and were threatening to leverage that result into more lawsuits. 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.
- zenexer 6y agoIt’s hard to be sure, but it sounds like they were lower-level lawyers at the firm that won the Johnson case and wouldn’t have directly benefited monetarily from winning additional cases. Seemingly, they were offering to ruin the case by deliberately botching the tasks that their firm assigned to them, presumably without the firm’s knowledge.
- zenexer 6y agoIt sounds like the defendants were lower-level lawyers at the firm that was initially suing Company 1. (According to one of the articles, it seems they were later fired and started their own firm.) Rather than offering to drop the case, they were allegedly offering to throw the case by deliberately botching certain tasks that their firm was assigning to them, presumably without the firm’s knowledge.
- pnw_hazor 6y agoKing of Torts IRL "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/Litzenburg/21639/ https://thenationaltriallawyers.org/profile-view/Timothy/Lit...
- trhway 6y agoThat is kind of surprising that a lawyer with so much battle experience would fall in such a simple way. Got carried away by greed?
- zenexer 6y agoI’m assuming he wrote that himself or had it written on his behalf. There aren’t a lot of facts available, but from reading the two articles (justice.gov, Reuters), it sounds like his level of experience is a matter of debate.
- mchusma 6y agoThe sadder part is that this is very close to a great many lawsuits go. This did not read to me to be much different than all civil lawsuits I have seen. Baseless claims followed by threats that it will cost more to defend than just settle. The biggest issue with American civil law is cost to resolve disputes. It's obscene.
- elliekelly 6y agoIf you know attorneys who are conducting themselves in this manner you should report them to the bar because they shouldn’t have a license to practice law. This conduct was far outside the bounds of their ethical obligations and is not at all what happens in a normal civil suit.
- hammock 6y agoIt's the same racket Michael Avenatti was caught doing to Nike. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/michael-avenatti-guilty-all-counts-nike-extortion-case-n1137106 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.
- nullc 6y agoIt's extremely rare for an attorney to get disbarred. Pretty much the only time someone will be reliably disbarred is if they steal a client's funds.
- digitaltrees 6y agoNo it’s not. Settling a lawsuit where money goes to the plaintiffs is normal. A lawyer offering to switch sides and knowingly create a conflict of interest using a pretext of a consulting agreement violates a lawyer duty of loyalty to their client. Agreeing to do that in exchange for payment under threat of harm to the company is extortion that is totally different than simply bringing a case in court where there is a venue for objective judgment.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago>That said, the criminal complaint against Litzenburg reads like a vindication of all of the ugly criticisms that mass tort defendants throw at plaintiffs’ lawyers. Tort reformers could not have made up a story that casts plaintiffs’ lawyers in a more damning light than the government’s allegations against Litzenburg. 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.
- adrr 6y agoI can’t see this standing up in court. Is there any case law saying that threats of legal action can be construed as extortion? There are thousands of legal demand letters that go out everyday.
- zenexer 6y agoThey already pleaded guilty; the link was changed to an outdated article. (See comment below by dang.) 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.
- adrr 6y agoInteresting, the real crime is that they weren’t acting in the best faith for their clients. Still doesn’t make sense as an extortion case unless soliciting bribes falls under extortion.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe federal extortion statute, most specifically 18 USC 875(d), seems quite applicable here: “(d)Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee or of another or the reputation of a deceased person or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” 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.
- ykevinator 6y agoThe only thing grosser than cancer chemical companies are lawyers
- mleonhard 6y agoI often see comments like this on Reddit, not on HN. HN comments that state an emotion usually go on to explain why they have a particular emotion. How about rewriting your comment to better fit with HN style?
- finnh 6y agoSounds like David Boies looking to extort people with Epstein sex tapes. Over to you, Money Stuff: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-02/the-blackmail-business-isn-t-easy https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-02/the-bl...
- iandanforth 6y agoWhen you do it to Monsanto, it's not a crime.