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.