Lawyers foresee years of intense argument, appeals and counter-appeals, accompanied by fat fees, stretching into the indefinable future.
These guys get paid fat fees on an hourly basis despite their performance.
But even if mutual funds are here to stay, they are increasingly under pressure to scale down their fat fees.
Streaming video sites like Tudou, Ku6, OuOu and 6rooms all began paying fat fees to pipe video files around the country.
Investing has sunk to this: People are willing to pay a big premium for the privilege of getting their own money back, after fat fees, without interest apparently because it gives them the illusion of earning a high yield.
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Even the lawyers may be forced to throw up their hands (and the chance of fat fees) in the face of two things: public interest in celebrities' private lives and the sheer number of modern media outlets, including the internet.
For three decades they have acted as quasi-official regulators of public debt markets, and yet enjoyed the fat fees of financial intermediaries, all the while escaping the brunt of attacks on bankers, auditors and the rest of the financial industry.
Given the fat fees in this business and the lack of regulation that gives managers the ability to inflate performance numbers, it is not surprising that many mutual fund operators with mediocre performance in traditional asset classes are getting in the act.
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The fact that much of Wall Street sees only the fat transaction fees part of it does not make it any less so.
In recent years, western banks, lured by fat advisory fees and Russia's booming markets, stumbled over each other as they poured money into Russia, offering juicy loans at thin spreads to Russian companies with suspect managements and low ratings.
Mr Lerach's introduction of corporate-governance reforms into settlements helps him win round conservative judges (who, because settlements usually transfer funds from a company, already owned by its shareholders, to the same shareholders, minus fat legal fees, have tended to see shareholder suits as a negative-sum game).
He tried to make a go of it by extracting fat patent licensing fees from technology companies, some of which paid up, but it seems licensing was not a sufficient strategy for Intellectual Ventures.
This is great for the professional sports leagues and teams, as well as college conferences, who are getting fat increases in their broadcasting rights fees.
Brazil's professional football clubs are in fact departments of social clubs, whose amateur administrators often make a fat illicit living from the transfer fees paid for their stars by foreign clubs.
If unbundling fees means firms having to pay a fat retainer for advisory work, so be it.
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