Asbestos lawyers’ scams

Here’s the start of an interesting Washington Examiner article about asbestos laywers’ scams:

A Supreme Court vacancy has forced the Senate Judiciary Committee to delay other business, including a bill that would create a trust fund to compensate victims of asbestos-related illness. In the meantime, trial lawyers continue the feeding frenzy that this bill could halt.

New light was recently shed on their brazen scam by Lester Brickman, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. Writing in the Hofstra Law Review, Brickman details ethical lapses of a plaintiff’s bar run amok. Grab a sick bag and we’ll give you an overview.

Through 2004, about 845,000 people had filed claims in asbestos cases, with 60 to 70 defendants named in each case. About 90 percent of claimants are unimpaired by any illness. How, then, do they become litigants? Most are recruited through advertising and massive, assembly-line screening operations designed solely to collect evidence for asbestos lawsuits.

To attract class-action prospects, trial lawyers run hard-sell ads in mass media, send out reams of letters and maintain shrill Internet sites. Milliondollarlungs.com, for example, opens with this measured pitch: “Find out if YOU have MILLION DOLLAR LUNGS! If you worked with or around asbestos prior to the year 1972, you could be entitled to millions of dollars … yet you might not know it.”

It gets better. Check it out here.