Class-Action Crime?(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Law: An indictment turns a spotlight on the unseemly business of plaintiff-shopping. Some supposed knights in shining armor may end up with a few dents.

It's too early to tell what the criminal justice system will do to Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman. But this king of class-action law firms may soon face another kind of justice -- poetic.

Last week, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles handed down an indictment of a long-time Milberg Weiss plaintiff, retired lawyer Seymour Lazar, charging him and several of his family members with taking $2.4 million in illegal kickbacks from 1981 to 2001. Milberg Weiss was not named in the indictment, which said Lazar allegedly was paid out of legal fees collected by a "New York law firm." But there's no doubt about that firm's identity.

Milberg Weiss more or less wrote the book on class-action suits against corporations, especially suits on behalf of shareholders against publicly traded companies. It has managed to stay out of serious trouble.

The Lazar indictment may change that, especially if current and former Milberg Weiss senior partners such as Melvyn Weiss, David Bershad and William Lerach (who left the firm in 2003) are implicated by name. These crusaders against corporate corruption would then find themselves on the defensive.

Even now, the case serves as a reminder that the class-action industry is hardly the plaintiff-centered enterprise it pretends to be. It's the lawyers who initiate the cases, and it's the lawyers who reap the meaningful rewards while most of the alleged victims typically get next to nothing.