Are Lawyers Running America?

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Critics of trial lawyers say Scruggs and a cabal of his colleagues are using litigation to hijack hot-button social issues that should be resolved in Congress and the state legislatures. "Trial lawyers are an unelected fourth branch of government," fumes Walter Olson, an author and trial-lawyer foe. Corporate executives complain that the cost of fighting lawsuits, let alone losing them, drives up prices of products ranging from ladders to automobiles and holds down wages and job creation and profits. Adding to the outrage: many plaintiffs' lawyers are getting very rich. The tobacco-settlement legal fees--to be shared by more than 100 law firms--are already approaching $10 billion. Scruggs alone will get about a third of the $1.2 billion being paid to his firm.

Plaintiffs' lawyers retort that they are the only force in public life today that can be counted on to stand up for everyday Americans. "We're the last bastion," says Pensacola, Fla., trial lawyer Fred Levin, a key player in his state's tobacco litigation. "We're the last fighters available for the little guy." They say they've been on the right side of the big issues for decades, from getting air bags in cars to limiting tobacco companies' advertising to minors to forcing gun companies to install trigger locks.

Congress and the White House are so dependent on special-interest campaign contributions and so mired in partisan gridlock, plaintiffs' lawyers say, that it is often impossible to get anything done there. Exhibit A is Congress's failure to act on the Patients' Bill of Rights before it fled Washington for its summer recess. Ask Scruggs if trial lawyers are trying to run America, and he doesn't bother to deny it. "Somebody's got to do it," he says, laughing.

The top trial lawyers in the U.S. are living large. Texas tort king Joe Jamail is widely known as the world's richest lawyer, with a net worth of $1.2 billion. When Frederick Furth, a top San Francisco trial lawyer, isn't litigating antitrust cases, he is engaging his passion for wine at his 1,200-acre Chalk Hill vineyard in Sonoma County, Calif. Wayne Reaud (pronounced Ree-oh) has used his hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from asbestos and other "toxic tort" litigation to buy the local newspaper and a chunk of downtown real estate in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas. Maryland trial lawyer Peter Angelos, who has been involved in asbestos and tobacco litigation, owns the Baltimore Orioles.

Despite the luxe, most of them are populists at heart. Reaud has a photograph in his office lobby of one of his heroes, firebrand United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. Levin says one of his formative experiences was being part of the first racially integrated class at the University of Florida Law School. Furth, whose father was a union steelworker, is a fervent New Dealer who drives a Rolls-Royce with the license plate ROBEY ST. to remind him of his humble beginnings on the far South Side of Chicago.