William Lerach is leaving the building. With rumors swirling that the lead partner at Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman & Robbins is about to reach a plea deal with prosecutors on allegations stemming from alleged kickbacks to plaintiffs by his former firm, the legendary class action attorney is leaving the firm.
The move will allow him to "travel, and do whatever I'm going to do," he told The Recorder, a sister publication to Legal Times. It will also permit him "to resolve the investigation about alleged events at my former firm more than a decade ago," he wrote in a memo to Lerach, Coughlin posted on The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog.
"[D]espite my mistakes, I am immensely proud that together we built a firm without peer and never shied away from taking on the world's most powerful and corrupt corporations," Lerach wrote. The firm declined to discuss any compensation he'd be getting on the way out the door, but The Recorder notes that his firm has already won more than $7 billion in judgments stemming from Enron's collapse.
Should it take place, Lerach's plea deal wouldn't be the first stemming from the payments to clients. Steven Bershad, a partner at Milberg Weiss, entered a guilty plea earlier this year.
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