A CASE OF JURISIMPRUDENCE

JAN SCHLICHTMANN WAS THE SORT OF lawyer who inspires anti-lawyer jokes. He was arrogant, humorless and sleekly vulpine in his $1,000 suits, $65 ties and Porsche 928. Jonathan Harr was a baby-faced magazine writer in old jeans, beat-up boots and a rumpled sports jacket who did his best work when blending with the furniture.

An unlikely matchup. But with Schlichtmann's cooperation, Harr has turned a sprawling, complex liability case into a suspenseful narrative full of intellectual surprises and bold-faced characters. Based on Harr's fly-on-the-wall reporting, A Civil Action (Random House; 500 pages; $25) chronicles a lawsuit brought in 1986 by eight families in Woburn, Massachusetts, against Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace. The plaintiffs charged that toxic waste on properties owned by the giant corporations had infiltrated town drinking water and caused an outbreak of leukemia.

Schlichtmann, then an ambitious young personal-injury lawyer in Boston, took the case despite warnings from his partners that their firm was too small and its cash flow insufficient to finance a war with not one but two conglomerates at the same time. Even if they won, two-thirds of any settlement or verdict was pledged to Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, a Washington group that farmed out the suit to Schlichtmann. There would be staggering expenses for expert witnesses, legal specialists and clerical work. Last, and sometimes it seems least, was the compensation for families whose children and spouses had suffered or died from leukemia.

Insiders routinely described the case as a "black hole." Harr was told he would be "digging quarters out of car seats" before he finished being Schlichtmann's Boswell. Jerome Facher, Beatrice's attorney and a Harvard Law School instructor, offered an equally dire assessment. "The truth," he said, "is at the bottom of a bottomless pit."

That bit of legal deconstruction may undermine the concept of justice, but it proved prophetic in the Woburn case. It was not difficult to establish that the carcinogenic solvent trichloroethylene had contaminated soil at the defendants' plants. But had the TCE discovered in the town drinking water come from those sources? If so, could it have caused the blood cancers and other disorders?

Both sides spent fortunes to sway the jury with testimony from scientific experts. The crucial difference was that the defendants had corporate treasuries to tap, whereas Schlichtmann and partners had to borrow heavily, not only to pay for medical and hydrology studies but also to keep up appearances. Anything less than the leading experts or the best hotels and restaurants might signal that they could not go the distance.

Which they couldn't. Eventually the judge let Beatrice off the hook--though post-trial reports from the federal Environmental Protection Agency supported the plaintiffs' claim against the food giant. Schlichtmann then settled with Grace for $8 million, not enough to cover his firm's bankrupting debts or get back his repossessed Porsche.