The Washington Examiner reported last week on a longstanding but increasingly common scheme by trial lawyers to enrich themselves, often at the expense of clients.

Breccan Thies’s story outlined how plaintiff’s lawyers are both enriching themselves and cheating members of the class on whose behalf they purport to be suing.

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The scam works like this: trial lawyers sue a large company, purporting to represent a broad class of plaintiffs. Then, after making the requisite legal threats, the lawyers settle with the giant company for an amount that includes millions in attorneys’ fees, a large donation to some woke social justice group or other, and practically nothing for the members of the plaintiff class. The company’s lawyers play along with such settlements because it lets them, through a process akin to the purchase of woke indulgences, to escape accountability for whatever actual harm they might have done to real people.

For example, the plaintiffs’ lawyers suing Google for collecting data on consumers using its Street View cars agreed to a $13 million settlement with the company. This included $4 million in attorney’s fees and $9 million in donations to leftist organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union. This settlement is, fortunately, being challenged in court, but it illustrates how lawyers can use their favorite leftist causes to inflate their own fees. Typically they take a percentage of the total settlement, which they can make numerically larger by inflating the settlement with such donations.

Another case involved Wawa, the convenience store chain. Attorneys representing a class of customer data breach victims attempted to secure a settlement that would pay themselves three times as much money in attorney’s fees as the actual victims were to get.

In another lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson over its use of benzene in one of its sunscreen brands, plaintiffs’ attorneys are trying to reward themselves with $2.6 million legal fees, while members of the plaintiff class get practically worthless $5 coupons for their trouble. The coupons, it should be noted,

Another illustrative case mentioned in Thies’s piece is a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, settled in 2020. The agreement between that company and the attorneys bringing the case required the company to “invest” $310 million in so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives that won’t help any of the victims, but might even provide Alphabet with a public relations benefit in the end. Meanwhile, as Alliance for Consumers executive director, O.H. Skinner pointed out, “Whatever went to the actual people hurt was like a rounding error.”

One of President Trump’s wisest executive actions, which Joe Biden has since reversed, was to abolish such third-party settlements in cases where the government was a party. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to provide protection for consumers who are harmed and then represented as a class by distant, unscrupulous trial lawyers prepared to line their own pockets without doing much good for their clients.

There are excellent organizations, such as the Center for Class Action Fairness, which routinely challenge such abusive settlements. But that’s just one group — these abuses are so common that more has to be done.

A legislative prohibition on these abuses is needed, and fortunately, a precedent exists.

As part of the Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017, the U.S. House voted to amend the federal rules of civil procedure. First, any attorneys’ fees awarded in such cases would have to wait until after the injured plaintiffs themselves were paid. Second, in cases involving monetary relief, attorneys’ fees would be “limited to a reasonable percentage of any payments directly distributed to and received by class members” — note that this excludes from the calculation any amount donated to non-profit groups. “In no event,” the legislation added, “shall the attorneys’ fee award exceed the total amount of money directly distributed to and received by all class members.”

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In cases of equitable or non-monetary relief, attorney fee awards would be “limited to a reasonable percentage of the value of the equitable relief, including any injunctive relief” — again, not including the value of any donations in a given settlement to the trial lawyers’ pet woke causes.

The measure did not pass at the time. But the problem remains. The U.S. House should revisit this provision and stop a grave injustice that is enriching trial lawyers and politically correct activists at the expense of injured plaintiffs.