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Judith Regan’s $10-million in walking-away money

It emerged this week that Judith Regan – fired from HarperCollins a couple years ago, following the O.J. confessional tome debacle – won $10.75-million in damages in a subsequent lawsuit over her dismissal. Why did this emerge? Because she allegedly didn’t want to pay her lawyers. According to Bloomberg writer Patricia Hurtado:

In its complaint filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, the Dreier law firm alleged Regan retained it to represent her in February 2007 and agreed to pay 25 percent of any money she recovered as a result of a judgment or settlement.

“Regan terminated petitioners for the single purpose of attempting to avoid the contingency fee,” Dreier alleged in its complaint. “Upon finalizing the settlement, Regan terminated” the law firm “and has since failed and refused to pay them the fees and disbursements to which they are entitled.”

Don’t feel too bad for them, though. Late in the piece, Hurtado notes that the head of the law firm in question, Marc Dreier, was just charged with “cheating hedge funds out of more than $100 million.”