WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Whenever consumers are victimized by shoddy products and dishonest business practices, news cameras roll, headline-hungry congressmen posture for the media and liabilities lawyers scramble to be first to file suits at the courthouse.

But what happens when it’s the lawyers admitting guilt and going to jail as government investigators and federal judges turn up alarming and growing evidence of widespread bribery, fraud and perjury?

Most of the recent headlines heralding such crimes were incited by the Milberg Weiss scandal that has seen three of the most celebrated partners in the New York class action liabilities admitting guilt in an $11.8 million kickback scheme involving hundreds of cases stretching as far back as 1979.

Milberg Weiss is far from the only firm caught up in scandals involving the worst kind of judicial abuses. For example, hundreds of liabilities lawyers in Texas and Mississippi filed claims based on fraudulent diagnoses by doctors who spent little or no time with alleged victims in the Silica Products Liability Litigation case in the U.S. District Court in Corpus Christi.

In that case, Judge Janis Graham Jack noted that aggressive advertising by liabilities lawyers in Mississippi coincided with such a rapid increase in the number of cases being filed that “the worst industrial disaster in recorded history” had occurred.

Judge Jack noted that “this appears to be a phantom epidemic, unnoticed by everyone other than those enmeshed in the legal system: the defendants, who have already spent millions of dollars defending these suits; the plaintiffs, who have been told that they are suffering from an incurable, irreversible and potentially fatal disease; and the courts, who must determine whether they are being faced with the effects of an industrial disaster of unprecedented proportion — or something else entirely.”

Elsewhere, three liabilities lawyers face federal mail fraud charges in a Kentucky court after being charged with keeping millions of dollars that should have instead gone to their clients in litigation sparked by the diet drug fen-phen.

In Miami, asbestos lawyer Louis Robles pleaded guilty to defrauding thousands of former clients and faces up to 15 years in prison. And in Houston, famed liabilities lawyer John O’Quinn was recently ordered to repay the $41.4 million he over-charged clients in a breast-implant case.

But are such cases isolated examples or the tip of an iceberg that cries out for congressional investigation? Sherman Joyce, president of the American Tort Reform Association, thinks there are more than sufficient grounds for such a probe.

“Congress should look into this, if for no other reason than to determine how prevalent the problems are,” he said. Joyce pointed to the need for lawyers to disclose all of their fees before and after a case “and make sure that clients know that they have the option to pay by the hour rather than just on a contingent basis.”

But such a congressional investigation is unlikely, according to Overlawyered.com’s Walter Olson: “We now know that the most prominent and influential law firm in the class action business was crooked from the top down, and that this was an integral part of its business plan over a period of decades.”

But Congress won’t investigate, Olson contends, because “some influential members of the majority in Congress assailed the prosecution when it was announced and must now be embarrassed, if they are embarrass-able at all, by the string of guilty pleas.”

"Lawyers Gone Wild" is a series of special reports by The Examiner looking at the cost and consequences of class action lawsuit abuse in the United States. Read the latest articles in the series.