Pro-business advocates continue to lobby for establishing the United States as a “free fraud zone” where “anything goes” conduct is acceptable. A recent advertisement by the Washington Legal Foundation, a self-described “advocate for freedom and justice” which campaigns for pro-business legal reform, claims that securities fraud lawsuits “are lawful Ponzi schemes,” and that “the lawyers who enrich themselves at the expense of their clients are no different from the high-living CEOs who do the same to their shareholders and employees.” In its ad titled “Bull Market for Plaintiff’s Lawyers,” the Foundation tries to deflect attention from the abuses of Wall Street by complaining that, “amid all the discussion about increasing business regulation, no one has considered protecting consumers from the unaccountable litigation industry’s excesses.” The Washington Legal Foundation conveniently ignores that what it describes as the “unaccountable litigation industry’s excesses” are, in fact, lawsuits spawned by true Ponzi schemes, massive frauds in the sales of securities and excessive risk taking by so-called investment professionals in an effort to pad their own pockets without regard for the consequences to others.
Blaming the lawyers is a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, in which a character famously said, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” What is not so well known is that the speaker of that line was planning an overthrow of the government, and the statement was intended to eliminate those who might stand in the way by advocating true freedom and justice?not just for the rich and powerful who can establish foundations to advance their legislative and judicial agendas, but for the common man who wants nothing more than a level playing field. A not-so-famous paraphrase of the same sentiment has been attributed to Hitler, who reportedly once said “I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.” Enough said.
According to Craig T. Jones, an Atlanta investor fraud lawyer with the firm of Page Perry, “Lawyers did not cause the subprime crisis or the collapse of the financial markets. Lawyers will, however, help defrauded investors recoup losses from unscrupulous broker-dealers. ”
The criticism of lawyers that they are motivated by greed is curiously ironic given the conditions that brought about the present financial crisis in the first place. There is plenty of greed?and blame?to go around, but lawyers are not the cause of it. “If you think that lawyers are expensive,” says Jones, “imagine a world without lawyers, a business world without economic consequences for those who break the rules.” When Wall Street firms get into trouble, they call their lawyers. Why shouldn’t the investors who were misled by those firms do the same thing?
“If those who lost their life savings to Wall Street scam artists want to recover their losses,” says attorney Jones, “they need to hire lawyers. The government is not going to give the investors a bailout, and Wall Street does not mail out refunds.” Many investment fraud lawyers will represent investors on a contingent fee or percentage basis, and others prefer an hourly fee arrangement. “At Page Perry,” says Jones, “we work with the investor to tailor a win-win arrangement,” adding that “we sometimes negotiate a blended fee arrangement with a reduced hourly rate and a contingency kicker out of any recovery” in order to incentivize the attorney as well as minimize the ultimate cost to the client. Page Perry is based in Atlanta but handles investor fraud cases all over the country.