“Professor Brickman brings to this undertaking not only decades of teaching in the field but hands-on experience with mass tort litigations such as asbestos, silica, diet drugs, breast implants, and welding fumes. This practical experience allows the book to address with authority lawyers’ use and misuse of anticompetitive practices and ethical rules, why a lawyer’s stake in the outcome leads to perverse and unethical practices, and how judges (by expanding liability and engaging in brazen nullification of tort reform), legislatures, and law schools work to perpetuate these lawyer-favoring financial incentives.”— Margaret A. Little, Engage, June 2011

"Lester Brickman almost single-handedly ripped the lid off of the high-volume processing and questionable legal tactics the asbestos bar has used to pry billions of dollars from manufacturers over the years. Now the longtime professor of legal ethics at Benjamin Cardozo School of Law takes on the entire legal profession in a new book, Lawyer Barons, that suggests a contingency fees and self-regulation have combined to drive attorneys' pay to ridiculous levels at the expense of everybody else. . ."
— Daniel Fisher, "Contingency Fees, Self-Regulation Make Lawyering Expensive For Us" Forbes.com, 02-17-2011

"There is no shortage of books and articles deploring defects in lawyer ethics.  The novelty of "Lawyer Barons" is that it focuses on the contingency fee as a business model.  Mr. Brickman argues that the prevailing business model is based on a systematic conflict of interest on the part of lawyers who collect their large fraction on claims that have no appreciable risk; who collect fees on the portion of recoveries that were available at the outset, without counsel or litigation; who conduct class actions that serve no one but lawyers; who spread panic over questionable mass torts; and who corrupt medicine and science itself."
— Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs New York Law Journal (subscription only,)01-27-2011