As the era of asbestos and tobacco class actions winds down, America's most aggressive class action law firms have in place a fee structure in search of an investment strategy. In their quest for ever-larger contingency fees, trial law firms have resorted to dramatic innovations. As the U.S. market for large-scale class actions has become more competitive, some of the firms have begun to specialize in lodging foreign contingency fee cases in U.S. courts. Of course, to maximize contingency fees, plaintiff class size matters. So leading contingency fee law firms have introduced a breathtaking concept: burdening U.S. courts with "global class actions," filed on behalf of thousands of foreign plaintiffs. To expand recoveries even further, the firms have begun aiming U.S. lawsuits at "defendant classes," some comprised of hundreds of deep-pocketed U.S. and foreign defendants, including heads of state, U.S. and foreign corporations operating abroad, and wealthy individuals.[1]

Most recently, the trial lawyers have seized upon the 200-year-old Alien Tort Statute ("ATS") as a target of opportunity for a novel source of mass tort liability. . . .

 Click here to view the full text of this Briefly as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.