Some of the nation’s 1.2 million active lawyers view their profession as the 21st century equivalent of dueling. It’s a battle for justice they measure in the number of dollars carted away from the courthouse, settlement table or contract talks.
One Minnesota lawyer even flaunts the image of a freebooting pirate.
Other lawyers, driven by a fervor for politics or profit, wield lawsuits as instruments of social change to govern aspects of life or commerce that elected lawmakers didn’t see fit to regulate.
The result, to the eyes of many observers, is a nation that has lost its long reliance on personal responsibility and where courts have become the key to tapping corporate or insurance coffers to pay for injuries even to those who harm themselves.
In the latest record-breaking example, a Miami jury on Friday ordered the five major tobacco companies to pay $145 billion in punitive damages to an estimated 300,000 to 700,000 sick Florida smokers in a class-action lawsuit that took two years to try. If the verdict stands on appeal far from a sure thing the smokers’ law firm stands to reap a third of the award, about $48 billion.
It’s no wonder that respect for the legal profession is on the wane.
“Lawyers have not always been liked, but in the past they were respected. The loss of respect is recent,” says Major B. Harding, chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
But from operating room to classroom, big-league locker room to corporate board room even to swindlers’ boiler rooms only the most reckless dare attempt anything important without a lawyer at their elbow.
Lawyers playing offense make headlines with creative tactics to beat a criminal rap through a loophole. Or they sue for rich contingency fees, like the $32.4 million prize awarded in May by a federal judge in Philadelphia to the lawyers who settled a fraud case against IKON Office Solutions Inc. for $111 million.
On the other side in every case, a mirror-image team of roughly equal imagination fights to stay even.
With ranks swelling by nearly 55,000 new lawyers a year three times the number admitted 30 years ago the American bar has become almost a fourth branch of government and the United States has become a nation of, by and often for lawyers.
That means big bonuses for 12 or 14 hours of grinding work a day at top-line firms preparing the flood of new stock offerings. But competition squeezes lawyers at lower levels to find new ventures or face tough times.
“There are only so many fleas that can feed on a dog,” Ohio Common Pleas Judge Fred Cartolano observed April 12, after jailing a lawyer for stealing $91,000 from a client.
“It’s true that because there are so many lawyers in our society, many of them must look around for something to do,” says Alan E. Untereiner, a highly regarded appellate lawyer and partner at the District of Columbia firm of Mayer, Brown and Platt.
Indeed, Japan gets along with just 15,000 “bengoshi” serving a national population almost half that of the United States, according to the Japan Policy Research Institute.
Japan has 8,412 non-lawyers for every lawyer; here, the ratio is 227 to 1. Many tasks reserved in America for lawyers are performed by laymen in Japan as they are in Britain and Germany.
But many other nations, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East, have far more lawyers per capita than the United States. Worldwide, lawyers number about 7.3 million, one law review estimates.
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