L.A. federal prosecutors are entering year six of trying to indict lawyers at former class action giant Milberg Weiss, and the biggest problem they're facing may be that nearly everyone in the case, from targets to key witnesses, is a lawyer.
With no one delivering the big prize, former Milberg star William Lerach, investigators have to take a slower route, wading through mountains of paperwork to sort the complexities of legal relationships -- and draw a line between ethically questionable conduct and flatly illegal acts.
Lerach and his former partner Melvyn Weiss, hugely successful class action lawyers and major Democratic donors, made millions taking some of America's biggest companies to court over stock fraud. Investigators are trying to prove that they paid illegal kickbacks to plaintiffs to get to nine-figure cases ahead of competitors.