Freed from Prison, Ex-Milberg Partners Play Golf, Go Skiing and Reflect
Updated: Four former partners at the law firm once known as Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach are out of prison and pondering their next move.
Business Week contacted all four and learned that two former name partners, Melvyn Weiss and William Lerach, are reflecting on their prison time and relaxing, either by hitting the links or ski slopes.
“I am enjoying my freedom,” Weiss, 74, told Business Week in a phone interview from his apartment in Boca Raton, Fla. “I am honing my skills at golf. I am thinking about the experience I just went through and what I should do with it.”
Weiss and the other lawyers went to prison after pleading guilty to paying kickbacks to lead plaintiffs in class actions. Weiss was released from prison in February, and Lerach was released in March. David Bershad and Steven Schulman were freed in July.
Weiss told the magazine he was given the nickname “Pops” in prison, where he was one of the oldest inmates. “They would call me Pops, because some of these people never had a father,” he said.
In prison, “you meet a lot of people who you feel a great deal of sorrow for, because they have grown up in sad conditions and there is seemingly no way out for them. These are all things that I am thinking about.”
Besides playing golf, Weiss said, he is doing charitable work and assisting the Haitian art community.
Lerach, 64, talked to Business Week while on a ski vacation in Steamboat Springs, Colo. In the months ahead, he plans to lecture at universities, go trout fishing in Alaska and explore his roots in Bavaria, according to the story.
He also plans to lecture on the failures of free market regulations at a law school he declined to name. He said he tried to keep current on the financial crisis while in prison. “You sometimes have to push and shove to get CNBC on rather than big truck crash programs, but that was all right,” he told Business Week.
Meanwhile, the National Law Journal reports that Lerach is scheduled to speak on April 12 at a panel discussion sponsored by the University of San Diego School of Law. The subject: “Where is Corporate and Securities Litigation Headed Post-Crisis?”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “After Serving His Time, Ex-Milberg Partner Lerach Blasts Wall Street”
Updated at 8:40 a.m. to include information from the National Law Journal.
