No. Cooperation between individual entities is not required. All that is required is that a certain critical mass of the people involved be too incompetant to understand the math, too corrupt to care, or just malicious.

Seeing as we're talking about lawyers and politicians here, I don't think this is all to stunning.

Ah, if you're talking about politicians that's a completely different issue - then you have a good point, because changing the law requires getting a majority of legislators to vote in favor of reform. I'm talking strictly about litigation.