In the debate over whether John Edwards is a good candidate for 2008, many have leveled criticisms at his career as a trial lawyer. This one is representative:
In order to avoid what some see as a hijack of the Edwards thread, I’ve started a new thread to debate just this one claim about Edwards.
I think this claim represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the tort system.
First, whether or not there was merit to the claim of negligence in the case is precisely related to whether it was fighting for the downtrodden. If someone hurts you because that person was being unreasonable, you deserve to be made whole. If you’re poor, you have two options: ask nicely for money, or hire a lawyer. If that lawyer then gets you your just compensation, he/she has “helped the downtrodden.”
Second, the implication is that trial lawyer’s fee is too high. I’ll repeat what I said in the other thread. Unless there is some aspect of the market preventing fair competition, if lawyers could handle the risk of taking a lower contingent fee, they would. Where is the market failure here? Can you explain why good lawyers don’t take smaller fees in order to get many more clients? My explanation is that the risks are just too high because a lawyer has to lay all his money on the line from discovery, to expert witnesses, and throughout the trial. You can’t choose between higher contingent fees and lower ones, you can choose between some help for the poor or no help. I choose some help.
No one, not even Edwards, is arguing that he was a selfless knight out there fighting only for the rights of the poor during his trial lawyer career. The argument is that what he did actually helps poor people directly. What many of the other candidates did, did not.
I have nothing to say because I largely agree with you. I’d also be interested in a cite (from DSeid or someone else) showing that trial lawyers routinely collect 50 percent of a jury award for themselves. That percentage seems high to me, but I’m willing to be educated.
It’s just another case of prejudice - of a different sort. This time it’s against a profession. Lawyers already are not respected; this is just an extension of that.
It’s childish and knee-jerk, in my estimation, and does not represent a fair and honest appraisal of this type of lawyer or the work they do.
I’d like people who have actually been involved in these cases to weigh in. I’d like the people who are so blithely condemnatory of these lawyers to go talk to the families who have been involved in these cases. If the people who have employed these lawyers are not unhappy, then what business is it of anybody else’s?
I disagree. “Helping the poor” was simply an adjunct to “making money in the legal profession”. He is not doing it for free and he is not doing it in a way that actually is a detriment to his own life. He is doing a job and whether the client is rich or poor doesn’t change the morality of what he is doing. In my opinion he is “helping the poor” the same as a McDonalds cashier does when he sells a hungry poor person food. His job allowed him to get food to a hungry poor person. Does that make him a valuable asset for the hungry and poor? I think not.
Often law school graduates do have a choice about how they’d like to make money in the legal profession. Such choices are not necessarily value-neutral. I think there’s something to be said for choosing to, for example, represent indigent plaintiffs as a legal aid attorney rather than making $145,000 in your first year for a big corporate firm. Or working for the government or a non-profit organization and eschewing private practice entirely. Obviously the distinctions inherent in Edwards’s decision to be a plaintiff-side trial attorney rather than a defense-side trial attorney are not nearly so clearly defined, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that he’s just in it for the money. If he was just in it for the money, there are far easier (and less risky) ways to have accomplished that out of law school.
Seems to me that this either/or scenario has a rather large excluded middle.
A lawyer like Edwards need not necessarily be a knight in shining armor, on the one hand, nor a greedy asshole on the other. He might just be a good lawyer, doing his job, who happens to get just compensation for wronged clients.
On one level, i think DSeid’s criticism, quoted by the OP, is fair, and that Evil Joe has a point. What Edwards is doing is a job, and he gets paid well for it; just because he gets contingency fees rather than billable hours doesn’t change the color of the money that ends up in his bank account. Sure, as Gadarene says, lawyers make choices about the type of law they want to practice, but it’s quite possible to imagine a scenario in which Edwards, or someone like him, thinks that the best way to a really lucrative career is as a plaintiff’s attorney. It need not have anything to do with helping the poor and oppressed. Personally, i’d be more interested in knowing how much reduced-rate or pro bono work Edwards did for poor people than in focusing on a few big cases.
On the other hand, though, Quiddity Glomfuster is right. Americans, as i’ve observed before on this board, have a rather curious relationship with lawyers and the law. The same Americans who boast about the United States justice system will often also complain about the very lawyers who are an integral part of this system. They will champion the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” and in the next breath will bitch about defense attorneys who have the gall to represent rapists and murderers. They will defend their right to gain redress for grievances through the courts, and in the next breath will say that plaintiff attorneys are nothing but greedy bloodsuckers. Some Americans seem to want all the benefits of their current legal system, without the lawyers. It just doesn’t work like that.
You’re right, of course. The issue would be better stated as: is Edwards misleading us when hold up his work as a trial lawyer as having helped the downtrodden? I think a fair way to evaluate that is to compare his private sector experience with those of other candidates. Objectively, he helped the poor more than many of the other candidates. So it’s OK for him to trumpet this.
I think you’re right that just being a trial lawyer does not conclusively prove that you’re interested in helping the poor. But that point is equally true of many jobs that most people consider “helping the downtrodden.” There may be many motivations for working in any given job, and they only way to access those motivations is to ask the worker themselves. I don’t think there’s anything unique about trial lawyers that should make the presumption against them.
I guess so. Someone thinking that would be a complete idiot, though. Seriously, defense-side firms offer far more guaranteed money—and much earlier in a lawyer’s career—than plaintiff’s firms could ever hope to. It probably goes without saying, but most of those personal injury yokels with the late-night television commercials are decidedly not rolling in the dough.
I think something that has been ignored in the “Edwards was a scummy trial lawyer” discussion is something really simple: being a trial lawyer is fun.
It’s a fun job. A two week trial out of town is like summer camp for grown-ups; you colonize a bunch of hotel suites, stay up all night preparing and eating snacks and going steadily more batshit…it’s stressful and weird and genuinely fucking fun. There are people who make careers out of it, who wander around like gypsies from trial to trial. Cities that see alot of big litigation have entire small businesses that do nothing but provide support services to trial teams.
Some people might go into to trial work because they want to make big bucks, I guess. But in my experience you start liking it because you’re having a good time and living on an adrenaline rush while being away from the daily grind, and becoming good at it, you start making money as a natural consequence.
That said, Edwards has that little too shiny TV preacher thing going on, and kind of creeps me out.
I forgot to respond to this. It’s a fair question, and from the looks of it, Edwards didn’t take too many* pro bono* cases. I suppose his work at the Center on Poverty counts, but of course that didn’t begin until after it became useful for political purposes.
But contrary evidence is there in the form of the very guy that we’re talking about. John Edwards is a multi-millionaire. I’m not saying that his experience is typical, but we all know the power of wishful thinking. Most college football or basketball players never make it to the pros, but there are still plenty of guys who play college ball hoping to make a fortune. The fact that some plaintiff lawyers make a shitload of money might induce other young lawyers to follow this career path.
I…guess so. But if a young lawyer looks around and sees one thousand multi-millionaire corporate lawyers for every multi-millionaire plaintiff’s lawyer (a ratio which, although pulled firmly from my nether regions, is not wildly inaccurate), I think it’s fair to say that there’s some other motivation going on, savory or not, that causes them to choose the latter path over the former. Unless they’re not good enough out of law school to get a lucrative job at a big firm—which isn’t particularly hard, especially if you went to a decent law school—or unless they’re a flaming moron.
I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. He helped a very small number of injured parties (who may or may not have been poor) get a very large number of dollars from the corporations that injured them.
Objectively, that money doesn’t come from some kind of tort money fairy, it comes from the company’s bank account. The cost of dealing with torts, and the threat of torts is rolled into the cost of every product and service you buy. Money spent on lawyers and insurance could just as easily be spent hiring more staff, providing better service, expanding operations, or just making products more affordable.
You don’t necessarily see the person not hired because of corporate money woes, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get hurt.
Yes, corporations that behave unreasonably dangerously will lose money. And this might mean that they cannot hire more workers, or pay their workers more highly. But, of course, this is good. We want that result. Does this really negate the fact that Edwards helped people (some of whom were poor)? I don’t think it does.
I was just going to bring up that last point, Cheesesteak, by saying that whether the “downtrodden” are helped is a matter of perspective. Who are the downtrodden in some of these scenarios? My grandmother worked her entire life in a factory, which was eventually shut down due to a large class-action suit against the company that owned it. It was a large company, and the division my grandmother worked in didn’t have anything to do with the lawsuit. But nonetheless, that plant and a lot of others were shut down during the bankruptcy protection years. By that time, grandma was retired, so it affected her pension, but not her job. There were a lot of people like her, though…not-very-highly-skilled workers who were put on the street, and a lot of little towns like the ones she lived in were sent into a downward spiral because of it.
I am not commenting on the legitimacy of the lawsuit or the verdict, but I am just saying that these kinds of things have far-reaching implications, and not all good ones.
I think that’s an intuitive and uncontroversial conclusion, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees with you. The meat, of course, is in the part of your sentence that you hand-wave away: that is, the legitimacy of the lawsuit and the legitimacy of the verdict. (Quite different things, of course.)
Sorry, to be clear, “we want that result” is referring to “corporations that behave dangerously will lose money.” It is unfortunate that innocent workers will be harmed, but you should blame the corporation for that, not the lawyers.
Ever since MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. people have been telling the world how the tort system will doom production in the U.S. Yet the U.S. still produces goods cheaply and efficiently, and, importantly, safely. If you can’t make it adequately safe, don’t make it at all. And if that means some employees are displaced (presumably to the competitors who aren’t making unsafe products) then that may well be the cost of not having kid’s pyjamas that spontaneously combust.
This is fine when the corporation is actually malignant, (and they are sometimes) but there are plenty of times when the corporation is just trying to do business the best way they can, and something goes wrong. Those corporations have to spend just as much on their own lawyers and insurance to avoid getting hurt by a suit.