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Trial lawyers vow to battle 'attack' from White House

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) The Learjet lawyers have landed - targeted by the White House, vilified by business, unrepentant against a storm of legislation in Congress and statehouses coast to coast.

By the time James Carville lit up the ballroom at the Hilton hotel, the battle cry to the Association of American Trial Lawyers was loud and clear: You are outnumbered and under siege by powerful Republican forces.

"A lot of you have been blessed, you've done better than you ever thought," the political consultant told a room with more than a few beneficiaries of million-dollar verdicts.

"Now," he warned, "everything you believe in is at risk."

Even the bar had the feel of a bunker, albeit with walnut paneling and Dom Perignon.

"We are under attack," said Dallas attorney Bryan Pope, who described his fellow trial lawyers as the last legal protection for injured people against corporations that resist taking responsibility for their mistakes.

"We are like the last warriors standing," he said.

Part pep rally, part strategy session, the recent four-day gathering of the nation's trial lawyers at a pair of hotels in downtown San Francisco was an opportunity to raise money and assess the growing efforts by corporations and the GOP to cap their contingency fees in big-dollar cases.

Plaintiffs lawyers, who sue corporations and contribute to Democrats, are locked in an escalating battle against business interests, which have aligned themselves with Republicans in a fierce campaign to limit lawsuits against business involving tobacco, asbestos, chemicals and faulty products.

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Business says the attorneys are getting rich filing excessive lawsuits that drive up costs for consumers. The lawyers, who typically pocket a third of an award on contingency, say they represent consumers by making sure corporations properly compensate people they injure.

According to the Washington-based American Tort Reform Association, 2003 has been its most successful year. Twenty-one states - including Texas - have enacted limits on judgments, mostly in medical liability cases.

In September, Texas voters will be asked to decide the fate of a constitutional amendment that would limit damages paid by any doctor, hospital or other health care provider to no more than $250,000. Opponents have collected $2 million from some of the state's biggest trial lawyers to try and defeat the measure.

Congress is considering federal legislation to curb class-action lawsuits, immunize drug companies, curtail contingency fees and cap monetary awards for medical malpractice victims.

In campaign fund-raising stops in Dallas and Houston in July, President Bush singled out tort reform as "a national issue."

So when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle showed up in San Francisco last month for the opening session of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America annual meeting, he found a very receptive audience.

"The more successful you are, the more fevered and well-funded the attacks become," Mr. Daschle said between bursts of applause.

Around the room above the heads of attorneys who shouted war-whoops of encouragement, sconces threw a golden glow against the blond wood and walls the color of rice paper.

"We may be outmuscled. We may be outgunned. But we enter this contest as many of you do when you enter the courtroom - with little more than right on our side," he said.

For Democratic presidential candidates, the gathering offered a chance to raise big bucks from one of the party's deepest pockets of campaign funds.

"I'm proud of what I did for 20 years," said Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, himself a trial lawyer and the favorite in the presidential sweepstakes among many in this group. "You should be proud of what you do, giving voice to people who have no voice."

Edwards, who won a $25 million judgment defending a 9-year-old girl mutilated by a swimming pool drain, chose to cast the campaign - at least to this audience - as a battle between old money and the nouveau riche.

"They hate the idea they will be in a courtroom and be treated the same as a child or a family. They (believe they) are better than we are," he told a closed-door luncheon for $1,000 donors to the ATLA PAC.

"His values are not our values," he said. "He has respect for one thing and one thing only - wealth. He wants to make sure those who have it, keep it. He comes from a world where wealth is inherited. We come from a different world."

Not to be outdone, even Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts cast himself as a trial lawyer during a closed session of the organization's political action committee, recalling how he once represented victims of hair-transplants that went bad.

"There are those outside this room who are lined up to assault the bar," Kerry said.

"This is the greatest effort by corporate America to take away from people their ability to undo things that are wrong," he warned ominously.

Organized labor and personal-injury trial lawyers are the two most important sources of campaign money for Democrats. Republicans raise more money, but it comes from a wide range of business interests.

The Washington-based trial lawyer PAC contributed more than $4 million in the 2002 elections (behind only realtors and the labor unions), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Individual trial lawyers contributed millions more.

This election, Edwards is running a close second to Kerry in fund-raising with nearly $12 million to win the Democratic nomination, most of it from lawyers. He's the top money-raiser in Texas among the Democratic field - $1.5 million.

Even as the attorneys were meeting at the Hilton hotel, the debate over limiting lawsuits raged a few blocks away at the Moscone Center where several hundred state legislators gathered for a summer legislative conference.

Legislators - many of whom have led efforts in their own states to curb court judgments and limit legal fees - packed a workshop on the issue.

"Insurance companies are more than just deep pockets to pay the bills," said Julie Gackenbach of the National Association of Independent Insurers. "We are companies. We have stockholders. We have employees. We have to make a profit."

Jay Angoff, former insurance commissioner from Missouri, said the problem is not rising jury awards, but rising insurance premiums. He called for stricter regulation of insurance companies.

"There is no evidence that tort reform works," he said.

State legislators peppered the pair with questions, which produced a tower of competing statistics and considerable heat, if not light.

Sen. Jack Westwood of Kentucky, a Republican, shook his head.

"I'm just trying to find a way to keep our doctors from leaving the state," he said.

Back at the hotel where the trial lawyers were meeting, the exhibition hall was festooned with booths offering products and services specifically tailored to this crowd.

An advertising agency promoted its television spots with a continuous loop of TV commercials featuring lawyers with 800 numbers across their chests pitching themselves to victims of accidents and diet pills.

There were booths with color posters of bodily injuries, plastic femurs and tibias as props for a jury.

One poster of a broken leg said: Settlement $2,100,000. Another featuring internal injuries said: $3.2 million Verdict.

In a make-shift theater, the marquee announced "Dial L For Litigation," a film noir-style video suffused with long shadows and '50s style dialogue promoting software to help lawyers write briefs, search records and organize cases.

There were rows of expert witnesses: MedQuest (medical expert testimony) and Martex (marine expert witnesses), and a pair of former truck drivers who offered their expertise in truck and school bus accidents.

"ATLA is the greatest place in the world to be. From this, we'll get 20-30 cases," said Don Asa of D&A Consultants of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Artist Trevor Goring displayed paintings of famous lawyers as noble images, evincing justice: Cicero, Blackstone, Clarence Darrow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

He pointed to his painting of David and Goliath.

"That's a perfect trial lawyer image," he said.

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