Stephen D. Susman, the founder of my firm and a titan in the antitrust bar, pioneered representing private antitrust plaintiffs on a contingent-fee basis.
Nobody knew better than Steve how to manage risk in antitrust cases — how to choose them, staff them, litigate them,
Sizable expenses
A big commercial case can cost millions in expenses — by which I mean out-of-pocket costs that the plaintiff or its counsel must pay net of attorneys’ fees. A portfolio of cases — for infringement of a patent or family of patents, say — can run many millions more. Who will bear that burden? And what will it cost?
Continue Reading The Cost of Third-Party Litigation Funding
Prologue
A story from a long-ago summer day highlights the big rewards that you can earn from taking purposeful risks.
In a little over a month, on August 5, 2015, 151 years will have passed since a commander took a gamble during the Battle of Mobile Bay.
The commander knew that the defenders had rigged
Keys to the court house
The contingent-fee option enables a claimant who has a valuable claim but can't afford hourly fees to hire a lawyer. He pays with a promise to share his recovery with the lawyer in return for the lawyer's sharing the many risks of pursuing a claim — including the risk of
Short-payment of royalties
Today we come to number three in Blawgletter's seven-part series on The Hottest Oil & Gas Claims for 2015, a paper that we presented at the 66th Annual Oil & Gas Conference in Houston. The third topic describes an area of legal uncertainty around a common oil and gas term — "well"
The collapse in oil prices since June 2014, and the significant drop in those for natural gas, have put tremendous pressures on relationships in the industry. The stresses — between operators and non-operators, lessees and royalty owners, principals and contractors, investors and investees, among others — make legal disputes both more likely and harder to
The hey-day for exotic bets on credit risk spanned most of the first decade of the 21st century. The popping of the housing bubble in 2008 did it in. People lost homes that they bought with debt they couldn't repay; and plenty of investors watched in horror as the value of the junk they'd bought — collateralized debt
Since 1982, California law has required contingent fee agreements between a lawyer and a "plaintiff" to meet certain tests.
Ten years after the law took effect, a California court of appeals held that the law doesn't apply "outside the litigation context." Franklin v. Appell, 8 Cal. App. 4th 875, 892 (Cal. App. 1992) (involving
Well, they did it.
After months of high tension — 26 of them, in fact – the Supreme Court of California at last ruled this week on whether cities, counties, villages, water districts, wide spots in the road, and other public entities may hire private lawyers to represent them in public nuisance cases on a contingent
Does a contingent fee give lawyers too much control over public nuisance cases?
Or can public entities control the lawyers enough to prevent abuse of the governmental power they wield?
The Supreme Court of California heard argument on those questions this week (finally). Kimberley Kralowec at The UCL Practitioner gives us a blow-by-blow.
The Rhode