The Lawyer Whose Clients Didn’t Exist

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/bp-oil-spill-shrimpers-settlement/609082/

by prostoalex • 6 years ago

62 27 6 years ago

pseingatl• 6 years 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.

duskwuff2• 6 years 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.

gamblor9563• 6 years ago

Class actions are cheap and efficient, especially where the alternative is thousands of individual cases.

worik2• 6 years 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?

gnicholas• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Can someone tl;dr?

klyrs• 6 years 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.

duskwuff2• 6 years 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.

fuzzybear3965• 6 years 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.

Judgmentality• 6 years ago

Wow. This actually inspired me to read the story, because that's crazy.

lonelappde• 6 years ago

Wow, this is why lawyers have a terrible reputation. Profiting handsomely while coconspirators rot in jail.

Jsharm• 6 years ago

This is almost exactly the plot of a John Grisham novel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rooster_Bar

ptero• 6 years ago

That's an excellent TL; DR. Thank you!

boublepop2• 6 years ago

“Realizing this, he pursues the case anyway since abandonment disadvantages the small fraction of clientele that are legitimate“

Let’s not attribute to well intentions what can accurately be attributed to entirely selfish monetary reasons. He pushed on because doing so meant he didn’t loose millions of dollars invested, and would net him millions as well as recognition and power. At no point did he give a damn about the numbers being fake or the people involved. The fact that he had someone to throw under the bus let him comfortably continue the scam. That seems extremely obvious.

The only reason the repercussions of people being pulled off the list is mentioned is because it would open up him to suits from the affected people because he knowingly included them without their knowledge in the first place.

BaitBlock• 6 years ago

Try out my chrome and firefox extension Baitblock (https://baitblock.app). It adds to TL;DR for links on the internet where available. You can also submit them for others so they can save time.

solarkraft2• 6 years ago

This is an ad. Don't do that. Submit a "Show HN" instead.

(But I'm still taking a look. The premise is wonderful, including that there is a Firefox version, which should be obvious but apparently isn't to many. )

dcole2929• 6 years 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.

The Lawyer Whose Clients Didn’t Exist

Related Stories