by Lisa Rickard, US Chamber of Commerce
Former plaintiffs’ superlawyer Stanley Chesley spent his 50-year career claiming to find justice for millions of his class-action clients, and from these efforts amassed great personal wealth.
This month, justice found the Ohio lawyer.
A Kentucky judge ruled Chesley and three others liable in a $42 million judgment for a scheme to take tens of millions of dollars from settlement proceeds in a class-action lawsuit against a diet drug manufacturer.
The now-disbarred lawyer’s infractions included helping to set up a phony charity to siphon off and hide some of the settlement money from his own clients.
Chesley is by no means the first such lawyer to be punished for doing wrong. In recent years, numerous powerful lawyers have been found guilty of using the law to help themselves rather than their clients.
Among them, securities class-action lawyers Bill Lerach and his former partner Melvyn Weiss, and Mississippi lawyer Richard F. “Dickie” Scruggs, once known as the “king of torts,” all went to jail for illegalities related to their law practice.
And then there is the most recent example of Steven Donziger, the plaintiffs’ attorney who won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadorean court.
In March, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Donziger “formulated and conducted a scheme to victimize a U.S. company through a pattern of racketeering” in the case, including bribing the Ecuadorean judge.
But beyond amassing (or attempting to amass) hundreds of millions — to billions — of dollars by corrupt means through litigation, their actions had another thing in common: the class-action lawsuit.