When a lawyer takes any lawsuit on a contingent-fee basis, the lawyer is providing the financing for the lawsuit in exchange for a percentage of the recovery.
What happens if the lawyer does not have enough money to pay for all the needed expenses of the litigation, including the various expert reports, the copying of 1,000,000 pages of documents produced by the defendants at $.10 per page or so, the travel expenses of going to various cities for depositions for several years, the costs of perhaps 25 depositions at an average cost of $700-$1,000 per deposition transcript, and the cost of trial, including the travel and lodging fees of the various witnesses needed at trial.
Lawyers who finance these expenses take a percentage of the lawsuit, and person who would provide money only (and no legal services) as investors in the lawsuit would want a lesser percentage.
The problem, of course, is whether the offering of shares in a lawsuit is lawful.
You should read the material in LawMall on this topic and form your own conclusion. If you have any questions, please call or fax your inquiry to attorney Carl E. Person, at telephone number 212-307-4444 or by fax to 212-307-0247. Please do not use e-mail to Mr. Person because it is definitely going to result in a slower response, often because his e-mail has several hundred messages of various types waiting (mostly from lists), and will not take any more messages without removal of some of the message backlog.
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