It's taken a really long time, but federal prosecutors in L.A. seem to be closing in on the Milberg Weiss law firm. Charges are expected to be brought this week against Melvyn Weiss, one of the biggest targets in the criminal prosecution of the firm. It would come just days after former partner Bill Lerach copped a plea and more than a year after Milberg and two then-name partners were charged with fraud. (The case goes back to 1999.) They're alleged to have paid kickbacks to clients to induce them to serve as lead plaintiffs in securities class actions and shareholder suits. The Weiss indictment is said to have been helped along by a deal with Steven Schulman, another attorney indicted in the probe. Here's more from Fortune, which broke the story today:

Together with Weiss, Lerach had built a lucrative volume business in securities lawsuits, many of which followed a sudden drop in a company's stock price. The ready availability of investors willing to serve as plaintiffs in a lawsuit allowed Weiss and Lerach to be first to file cases against hundreds of public companies whose stock had faltered, allowing them to control the cases and maximize their fees. Lerach specialized in suing Silicon Valley companies, and his abrasive ways and aggressive tactics - always in the name of defrauded investors - earned him the hatred of CEOs. One famously called him "lower than pond scum." But Lerach was also enormously effective, expanding the frontiers of securities litigation by bringing new types of cases and naming banks and accounting firms as defendants, forcing corporations to pay billions of dollars to investors and hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees. In the Enron class-action case, Lerach recovered a record $7.3 billion in settlements, mostly from banks that helped finance the energy giant.