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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (4975)	8/21/2002 5:30:31 PM
From: Jim Willie CB	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

SH lawsuits continue to mushroom, now Martha, who next? / jw

To: stockman_scott who wrote (4975)	8/21/2002 6:47:20 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

Who is Martha Stewart? Is she in the same business as Betty Crocker?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (4975)	8/22/2002 12:27:54 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 89467

I know Bill Lerach. He only lives 15 minutes from me. Bill Lerach To call Bill Lerach a CEO’s nightmare—as USA Today has—is to suggest he resides, like werewolves and ghosts, in a parallel world of the subconscious. In fact, he lives in Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb of San Diego. He decamped there from New York in 1976 and opened what is called “Milberg West,” a Pacific office for the Big Apple-based firm. Lerach, 55, has established the nation’s largest practice in the field of shareholder litigation, which means that there are few people who scare corporate America more. “We’ve recovered over $10 billion for investors over the past 20 years,” he says. In fact, the Securities Litigation Reform Act, a bill to place curbs on shareholder suits, has been known widely as the “Get Lerach Act.” Quite a compliment for a man whose distrust of corporate America has had a generation to gestate. As stock valuations ballooned in the summer of 1929, his father, Richard, put an inheritance into Wall Street and borrowed even more from brokers. That October he lost it all. There are ways to describe Pittsburgh native Lerach that aren’t fraught with Freudian implications. Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers, for example, prefers “lower than pond scum.” Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr goes with “cunning economic terrorist.” It’s all semantics until someone gets sued. That’s when Lerach goes into action, routinely accusing a company of being misleading or untruthful, and files a class-action suit. If he wins, he gets 20% to 30%, and investors split the rest. Not all his cases get far. About 25% are dismissed. Between 80% and 90% of the rest are settled long before they get to trial. Despite the insults, Lerach suffers from no lack of confidence inside the courtroom or (just) outside it: as he entered a San Diego courthouse elevator a few years ago and encountered the defense attorney, he informed his fellow passenger, “This case is going to bring an ignominious end to your mediocre career.” The list of companies that have had the bad luck to find themselves in Lerach’s sights reads like a Who’s Who of American technology: Symantec, Apple, Intel, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, and 3Com. boardmember.com