Publication
New Jersey Lawyer Magazine
02.01.2012
For well over a century, courts have wrestled with the challenge of compensating lawyers who have taken up the cause of a definable group of victims of a mass wrong, outside the concept of the normal attorney-client relationship.1 To the lawyers themselves, and the advocates of the victims’ causes, these attorneys are saviors who have taken the ultimate contingency risk. To the critics of class actions in the political and business worlds, they are mercenaries who have exploited nominal class members chiefly for their own financial benefit.