Yet Another Plaintiffs’ Lawyer Sanctioned for Greed

“The Kentucky Supreme Court has voted to disbar Ohio trial attorney Stanley Chesley, a legend of the plaintiffs’s bar whose reputation as a champion of the underdog was marred by accusations of greed,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The court said Mr. Chesley may not have been aware of the ‘direct deception’ of clients, but there was convincing evidence he had ‘knowingly participated in a scheme to skim millions of dollars in excess attorney’s fees from unknowing clients'” after a $200 million settlement in a diet drug case.

Commenting online in connection with the WSJ’s story, American Tort Reform Association director of communications Darren McKinney wrote:

Yet another tawdry example of unscrupulous behavior among plaintiffs’ lawyers, putting the lie to their collective claim that they live to stick up for the little guy who is supposedly too often victimized by big, bad, greedy corporations. Well, whether it’s bribing judges (Dickie Scruggs), rigging securities class actions (Bill Lerach and Mel Weiss), conspiring to gin up fraudulent asbestos claims (Robert Peirce and Louis Raimond), disgracefully stealing from clients (Stan Chesley, et al.) or otherwise abusing and degrading our civil justice system at considerable expense to our economy and society as a whole, it seems that plenty of plaintiffs’ lawyers are at least as greedy and self-serving as they’ve hyperbolically claimed corporate executives to be.