Fishing for clients:

Peter Romeo’s post highlights a scary trend. Instead of chasing ambulances, attorneys are now sitting around thinking about who might be in the market for legal services but have not had the foresight to initiate the contact themselves.

“After pounding a keyboard for 29 years, I foolishly assumed the English language was no longer Greek to me. But a Baltimore litigation firm set me straight Wednesday. The statement it issued clearly states, “Brower Piven Announces the Filing of a Class Action Lawsuit Against Darden Restaurants, Inc.” To me, that means a party named Brower Piven had filed a class action lawsuit against Darden Restaurants, the operator of Red Lobster and Olive Garden. But, oh!, was my participle dangling.

Turns out, if you read further, that a lawsuit had been “commenced,” which doesn’t necessarily mean “filed” under the rules of language that are now applied to law-firm press releases. As we’ve learned in recent weeks, many are trumpeting lawsuits that are not really lawsuits, or at best not yet. The hope is to scare up plaintiffs—specifically shareholders who lost money on the would-be defendant’s stock—who might like to join a legal action when one is actually undertaken. It’s the equivalent of a chain declaring it’s bigger than McDonald’s, then muttering in an aside that it just hasn’t opened the 35,000 units yet.”