Contingent Fee Lawsuits Can Be Very Taxing For Plaintiff’s
Lawyers  At the WSJ Law Blog:  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s
Legal Newsline reported on Wednesday that the U.S. Department of
Treasury may be about to grant plaintiffs’ attorneys long-sought
tax write-offs for the costs associated with fronting
contingency-fee lawsuits.       Of course, every other business
in American gets to deduct its expenses. Some favored
industries, like oil companies, get to deduct more than just
their expenses:   That’s just one of the goodies Congress doles
out to upstanding corporate citizens like BP, which will pay at
least $10 billion less in taxes as the result of its own oil
spill, since it gets to deduct all of the cleanup costs, the
compensation it pays out to victims, and the loss in value of
the well.  But not plaintiff’s lawyers. The IRS requires that we
treat expenses on our cases as actually being profits, since we
might, years down the road, recover those costs. (Nevermind
that, even then, it’s not profit, it’s