Scott Drake speaks with Irwin Levin (Cohen Malad)

A Central Indiana concrete company with ties to Muncie and East Central Indiana government projects has agreed to pay $29 million to settle a class action anti-trust lawsuit alleging it and six other companies conspired to fix the price of ready-mixed concrete.

The Indianapolis Star reported Tuesday that plaintiffs' attorney Irwin Levin of Indianapolis announced the settlement. Defendant Irving Materials Inc. of Greenfield confirmed the agreement but did not specify the amount. The settlement still must be approved by a federal judge.

Scott Rothstein

Great, just what we needed as a profession, more traffic and news with our trade name dragged into what looks to be a growing fraud in which the term Structured Settlements was used to lull investors into thinking this scam had the legitimacy and security offered by structured settlements.

You can read the entire FBI press release by clicking here.

What is also distressing is that what looked to be a $100 million scam and limited to a few cases is now being announced by the FBI as potentially exceeding $1 billion in losses and involving a network of individuals who were working with Scott Rothstein.

The Legal Broadcast Network will be following this story closely over the next few week but as a special guest we had Civil Action Attorney Jan Schlichtmann join us today to discuss from the perspective of a trial lawyer the distressing trend of lawyers being implicated in not just frauds, but in the betrayal of their clients and associates all in the name of greed. Watch today's extended interview with Jan Schlichtmann on Voices of the Law and tune in next week as we continue to bring in more commentators and news on this scam, as well as shine light on the "cash now" industry that seems to have been the model for how this program was designed.

Watch Attorney Jan Schlichtmann discuss the Scott Rothstein fraud and the issues confronting trial lawyers nationally regarding the proliferation of "cash now schemes" that are being offered to lawyers, plaintiffs and investors with little or no regulation or oversight.

Tax Law Channel host Rob Wood discusses structuring legal fees...a versatile tool only available to contingent fee lawyers.

If an attorney has a contingent fee arrangement with a client, the lawyer may enter into a structured legal fee arrangement under which the defendant, instead of paying the attorney’s fees for the case in a lump sum at the time of settlement, can fund an arrangement that pays the fees over time. As discussed below, payments under a structured legal fee arrangement have been held to not be taxable until actually paid to the attorney. Structured legal fee arrangements are designed to level out the peaks and valleys that generally characterize the fluctuating income of plaintiffs’ attorneys. These arrangements let lawyers defer paying taxes on their fee income. Structuring legal fees is a good way to spread out income, reduce income tax burdens, provide for retirement, or contribute to estate planning.  

A structured fee arrangement will generally be funded by an annuity purchased by an assignment company. That company purchases the annuity with funds provided by the defendant in the case—funds that would have paid the lawyer’s fee. Properly set up, a legal fee structure takes the lump sum that would otherwise go to the client and puts it to work in a tax-deferred annuity. The lawyer pays tax only as he or she receives the periodic payments. For example, instead of receiving a $500,000 lump sum, the lawyer might receive $70,000 a year for ten years. The extra $200,000 in this example is attributable to the tax-deferred return on the money.

With all the talk of tort reform in Washington, plaintiffs’ lawyers may feel discriminated against by Congress in various ways. Even so, they are entitled to a benefit no one else receives: the ability to structure their legal fees. Indeed, contingent fee lawyers are the only ones who can structure legal fees.

J. KimmelBack in June, Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said ..."Capital market developments of the last several decades are not going to be fundamentally reversed, nor should we want them to be. Reform by nostalgia is not usually an effective approach, since it tends to forget the problems of the past and deny how much has changed. The task is to refashion a regulatory structure so as to encourage the efficient allocation of capital to productive uses, while protecting the financial system from the defects and excesses that are inherent in financial markets."

National Securities Analyst Jordan Kimmel says transperency is the first big step we must take.

"The Top 10 things The IRS Wants You to Know When Contractors Become Employees"

 Download the PDF

"When the Good Lord created tax law experts, He wanted them to be like Rob Wood" (Lao Tzu)

 Scott gets the lowdown from Rob Wood:

Section 104 regulations PDF

For students now, the promise of the big law firm career — and its paychecks — is slipping through their fingers, forcing them to look at lesser firms in smaller markets as well as opportunities in government or with public interest groups, law school faculty and students say.

The frenzy has even pushed the nation’s top firms, a tradition-bound coterie, into discussing how to reform the recruitment process with an earnestness that would have been unthinkable just years ago.

Read the article in the New York Times

Washington and Lee Law School Dean Rod Smolla discusses the current job market and the school's revolutionary 3L curriculum with LBN host Scott Drake.

You may read the entire opinion by clicking the link here, The case number is 08-1409 and the name is United States, ex rel. Mark Eugene Duxbury and Dean McClellan, Plaintiffs vs Ortho Bio Products.

This case was spearheaded by Attorney Jan Schlichtmann on behalf of the relators Duxbury and MacClellan and when the trial court dismissed the claim, the appeal was filed and argued in mid 2008 and today's decision affirmed part of the decision but cleared the way for the Duxbury claim on kick backs and rebating tied to the off label marketing and use of Procrit in oncology clinics and hospitals.

In this exclusive interview, Duxbury and McClellan's attorney Jan Schlichtmann discusses the courts ruling, shares his thoughts on the elements that were affirmed as well as the next steps in this long dormant but now front page Whistle Blower case regarding Procrit and the marketing of it's off label use. As long time readers of this page will recall this was also featured in a Wall Street Journal profile on the case at about the time of  the original trial in 2007 and while many had given the case up for dead, the Appeals Court has done a comprehensive analysis of what the bar is to filing a Whistle Blower claim and brought in a real stunner on what could be a massive potential claim against Ortho Biotech.

Scott Drake interviews Simon Frankel, a partner in the San Francisco office of Washington's Covington & Burling, who represents all four amicus organizations.

Article PDF

Scott Drake interviews the host of the Tax Law Channel and partner at Wood & Porter in San Francisco, Robert Wood.