How Entrepreneurial Are Entrepreneurial Class Actions?

Plaintiffs' lawyer-turned-professor Morris Ratner has published a new article on making litigation costs a profit center for class action plaintiffs. You may remember he wrote about this issue before with Professor William Rubinstein. This new article, titled Class Counsel as Litigation Funders, makes it clearer that he isn't talking so much about allowing plaintiffs' counsel to charge a markup on photocopies as he is trying to establish parity between the lawyers who fund a case by fronting the costs and the lawyers who work a case. (Remember, in larger cases, many lawyers are required by co-counsel to contribute to a litigation fund.) In other words, he wants these lawyers (let's call them the Bank) to be rewarded the way investors are rewarded, instead of simply being stuck with whatever their specific lodestar allows at the end of the case.