"he is known as something of a conservative pit bull chewing on contingency fee abuse." The traditional arguments in favor of the contingent fee system in American law are that 1) they permit access to the legal system for those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer, and 2) they provide incentives for attorneys to work diligently for plaintiffs, as they will be paid only if they win the case. Advocates of the contingent fee argue that the lawyers' fee of 25 to 40 per cent of the recovery is necessarily high because of the risk of losing cases. Professor Brickman has asserted, in more than a dozen articles since 1989, that plaintiff attorneys generally do not accept cases that involve any meaningful risk, and that their effective hourly rates are as high as $25,000 in some cases. In a frequently-cited article published in the Washington University Law Quarterly in 2003, Brickman asserted that "Since 1960, the effective hourly rates of tort lawyers have increased 1000% to 1400% (in inflation-adjusted dollars) while the overall risk of nonrecovery has remained essentially constant—though it has decreased materially for such high-end tort categories as product liability and medical malpractice." He argues that the American Bar Association has abdicated its ethical responsibility to curb what Brickman considers to be fee-gouging and greed on the part of the plaintiff bar, especially in mass torts like asbestos litigation, and class actions of all kinds, but especially the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. Asbestos litigation Lester Brickman began speaking and writing about asbestos litigation in 1991, testifying on the asbestos litigation crisis before the House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and Judicial Administration. His first articles on the subject appeared in the Cardozo Law Review in 1992. Since then, he has become one of legal academe's most outspoken critics of asbestos litigation and its economic and ethical context, stating in a 2003 article in the Pepperdine Law Review that "When the complete and unexpurgated history of asbestos litigation is finally written, that litigation will surely come to be considered for entry into the pantheon of such great American scandals as the Yazoo land scandals, Credit Mobilier, Teapot Dome, Billy Sol Estis [sic], the salad oil scandals, the Savings & Loan scandals, WorldCom, and Enron." Brickman has published (as of summer 2016) fifteen articles on asbestos litigation, and testified on the subject three times before