Never Go, Jack. Never Go full retard. https://youtube/watch?v=7wVagQ_LVd4 Buttoned-down and otherwise sober executives would vehemently denounce Lerach as a bloodsucking scumbag, or an economic pirate. (One Silicon Valley executive went so far as to publicly wish him out of human existence.) A verb had even been given his name. In boardrooms, to be Lerached meant being threatened with having to surrender more than a million documents and risk testimony from CEOs on down to the lowliest document clerks in order to fend off a $100 million lawsuit. More often than not, CEOs and the boards they served would decide against fighting these Lerachian wars of attrition and would enter out-of-court settlements. They were expensive but not as costly as litigation -- especially a lost trial. The circumspect executives would chalk it up to the cost of doing business and turn to their insurance carriers to bail them out, but they came to believe that what Lerach was doing was nothing less than legalized extortion. They werent alone in this assessment. When Lerach came to Washington, D.C., in 1995 to lobby unsuccessfully against a Newt Gingrich–driven tort reform intended to put him out of business, California congressman Christopher Cox likened him to Al Capone. Silicon Valley venture capitalist L. John Doerr, who helped raise more than $40 million in a 1996 statewide Get Lerach Initiative aimed at clipping his wings in California courts, referred to him as a cunning economic terrorist. When George W. Bush talked in two presidential campaigns about frivolous lawsuits, he was referring in large part to the class-action securities litigation that Lerach and his colleagues brought against businesses Bush had championed, including those of his longtime friends. Among them was Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, who oversaw the nations seventh-largest company, with 22,000 employees and vast, complex holdings ranging from broadband trading to energy and commodities to risk management. Fortune had called it Americas most innovative company for six straight years until, in 2001, its tangled financial web collapsed and it was forced to declare itself bankrupt. When it did, Lerach pounced. Before orchestrating a $7.3 billion settlement, the largest in history with the banks that suppported it, Lerach had successfully portrayed Enron as the very symbol of the corporate scandals that had rocked Wall Street throughout the decade. With thespian-worthy performances that began, prior to the beginning of the trial, by displaying boxes of shredded Enron documents before the press outside the Houston federal courthouse, Lerach not only skillfully picked over the bleaching bones of Ken Lays company; he shook down Wall Street and embarrassed the president of the United States. After declaring victory, Lerach issued a public warning that would have repercussions. With this judgment we got Kenny boy and his friends, he announced.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 02:04:19 +0000
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