Angry Judge Says Lerach Won’t Get Community Service Credit for Teaching Class
Former inmate and lawyer William Lerach won’t be able to help satisfy his community service requirement by teaching a law school class. In fact, he won’t be teaching the class at all.
On Monday, an “incensed” U.S. District Judge John Walter of Los Angeles denied Lerach’s motion to get community service credit for his teaching and complained that the ex-inmate apparently lacked remorse for his crime, the National Law Journal reports. And a spokesman for the school, the University of California, Irvine School of Law, tells the publication Lerach won’t be teaching there in any event.
Walter said he regretted accepting the plea deal, and it was “way too lenient,” according to the NLJ account. He complained that Lerach had indicated in a number of articles that he wouldn’t do anything different. “He misled and fooled the court into believing he had remorse at the time of his sentencing,” Walter said.
Lerach, a former partner at the law firm once known as Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, was sentenced in 2007 to two years in prison for paying kickbacks to lead plaintiffs in securities class actions. The sentence also called for 1,000 hours of community service and a $250,000 fine.
Lerach was released from prison this spring. In a motion filed with the court, he said he wants to teach a class at Irvine called “Regulation of Free Market Capitalism—Are We Failing.” Law school spokesman Rex Bossert told the NLJ that there were preliminary discussions about teaching the class, but “it never came to fruition.”
