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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (23280)	1/6/2004 11:55:58 PM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793685

..In California, Lawyers are sending out letters to businesses, accusing them of doing something wrong and threatening to take them to court if they don't settle. Don't even have a client. A nice racket. People have been doing that with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Very poorly written law.

To: LindyBill who wrote (23280)	1/7/2004 12:47:15 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793685

When I was just starting out, I worked at a firm that handled asbestosis cases. It was the defendants and the courts that turned those into class actions, not the plaintiff lawyers. Class actions are nightmares for small firms, but gigantic plaintiff firms handle them with ease using paralegals and law clerks. John Grisham recently wrote a book about class actions that showed how they can be abused. The primary abuse, it seems to me, is compromising good cases for pennies on the dollar in order to get the gigantic legal fee payoff. However, if the legal system succeeds in getting rid of that abuse, it won't be good for defendants, I assure you. Defendants benefit the most because they've figured out ways to insure that if you pay off the lawyers, they'll go away and never come back. If you remove criminal cases and domestic cases from the list of litigated cases, what's left is mostly business against business. Even now the little guy can't afford to take on Goliath. We just settled a case that was worth a couple of million for a fraction of that because the widow couldn't afford to lose.