William S. Lerach, the class-action lawyer who pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy in September, is morphing into Thomas Paine. Or at least that is the image he is trying to build for himself, in opinion articles he has written for some big-city newspapers.

Lerach wrote an essay in the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook page last month, for example, and he appeared again in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday. The most recent article calls the Bush administration's agreement to freeze interest rates for some subprime mortgages "a weak half-measure." He calls for "bold action" to help out the "average Joe."

"The financial elite—policymakers who rotate between the pillars of power in Washington and the towers of finance in New York (think Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson)—already are bailing out Wall Street," Lerach wrote. "Now they need to bail out Main Street."

An author's note at the end of the article describes Lerach as "a longtime shareholder advocate and pioneering plaintiffs' lawyer who recently resigned from his firm and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Lerach can be reached at WilliamLerach@gmail.com."

Lerach's guilty plea relates to the seven-year probe and prosecution of his former firm, Milberg Weiss, on charges that it engaged in a long-running scheme of paying secret kickbacks to stockholders to serve as the named plaintiff in securities-fraud cases against corporations.

Lerach, who lives in San Diego, split from his partner Melvyn Weiss in 2004 and formed his own firm. Weiss has been indicted and vows to fight the charges at his trial.

Many of Lerach's competitors believe he cut a favorable deal for himself by agreeing to plead guilty to the single conspiracy count and consenting to pay $8 million in fines and penalties. "His bar bill," scoffs one plaintiffs' lawyer.

(Lerach himself is not shy about his drinking. "Scotch is my exercise," he told The New Yorker when the magazine profiled him in September 2002, at the outset of his class action against Enron.)

The plea agreement notes: "Defendant is not required by this agreement to cooperate in any way with the U.S.A.O., the United States Attorney's offices for each of the other judicial districts of the United States" and so on. In other words, Lerach went down silently, unlike his former partners David Bershad and Stephen Schulman, who cut deals this fall agreeing to sing to the feds.

Lerach will probably serve one to two years in prison when he is sentenced in January. Many call the $8 million in fines chump change, and they have a point: Lerach has made a staggering income for a long time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that Lerach's cut of lawyers fees in the class action against Enron Corp. alone could be as much as $50 million.

The essays look like Lerach's attempt to resurrect his image as a champion of investors, as portrayed in The New Yorker piece, and somehow forget about the legion of other stories that use descriptive words like "loathed" and "mean." Chief among the latter is a 1999 story in Fortune entitled "The King of Pain Is Hurting."

As a reporter at The National Law Journal for many years, I wrote my fair share of Milberg Weiss stories. This included one about a 1999 trial in which Weiss and Lerach had to testify about their incomes; they lost the case and the jury rendered a $45 million verdict against their firm for maliciously suing an economist to ruin his reputation. My 1996 profile of Lerach for Wired magazine appeared under the headline, "Bloodsucking Scumbag"—words that my editor wrote, not me.

In his Washington Post essay, called "Loser C.E.O.'s, Raking It In," Lerach lamented the "massive payoffs that corporations are handing to failing executives." He cited the departures of E. Stanley O'Neal from Merrill Lynch and Charles O. Prince from Citigroup; together, they left their companies "with $360 million in their own pockets."

Mentioning his own guilty plea, Lerach went on to ponder, "But what about accountability for Wall Street C.E.O.'s who line their own pockets while making stupid decisions that rob shareholders and pensioners of millions of dollars?"

Toward the end of his essay, Lerach sounded downright revolutionary.

"Someone told me recently that Lenin was wrong about communism but right about capitalism," he wrote. "Maybe he was. I'm on my way to prison because, in my zeal to stand up against this kind of corporate greed over the years, I stepped over the line."

The November 11 Op-Ed did not sit well with at least one member of Congress. In a letter to the editor, Representative Richard Baker, a Republican from Louisiana, said that in the class-action lawsuits Lerach essentially "extorted fees from the shareholders he purported to represent."

Baker added, "Ripping off shareholders by renting plaintiffs may be a profitable business model, but evidently it has one small drawback."

That drawback would be prison.

The day after the Post published Lerach's essay, Howard Kurtz, the paper's media columnist, wondered in print, "How do you have a guy who's a newly confessed crook have the standing to start lecturing us about the problems with C.E.O.'s?"

Perhaps Lerach, wily as ever, took a look at the reincarnation of Martha Stewart after her time in prison and thought that role might fit him nicely. The trouble is that he practices law, which, unlike baking brioche, requires a license.

Something else: For all the ink that's been spilled over Lerach by writers (including me), I wonder what the average citizen thinks of him.

Stewart, after all, has a fan club. As far as I know, Lerach does not.