Cozy Bed: Trial Lawyers, Democrats, Media, Hollywood

The following summarizes an article by Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank:

Trial lawyers. Melvyn Weiss, the dean of U.S. securities litigation, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in what a judge called a decades-old “nationwide conspiracy” of lawyers using illegal kickbacks to recruit plaintiffs for lawsuits against corporations.

Media. Given the magnitude of Weiss’ cases, his sentencing, which marked the end of his career, might have seemed like a slam dunk front-page newspaper story. It wasn’t at all.

Democrats. Obama rails against a “corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed.” Yet while Weiss’ former partner, William Lerach, is jailed for obstruction of justice and the biggest misdeeds are piling up in front of the trial bar, they don’t elicit outrage or calls for reform.

Hollywood. Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the Mississippi plaintiffs’ attorney who wrestled with the tobacco industry in the 1990s, was portrayed heroically in the movie “The Insider.” He pled guilty in March to trying to bribe a local judge.

Meanwhile, trial bar offenses in the decades-long asbestos litigation frenzy, in which lawyers have ginned up phony diagnoses using compliant doctors, and paid kickbacks to union officials to recruit workers as plaintiffs, go unnoticed. Defendants have already paid out a staggering $70 billion in claims that wrecked dozens of businesses, cost thousands of workers their jobs, and enriched plaintiffs (many with no demonstrable health problems and no medical bills) and especially their lawyer, who’ve claimed more than half the awards in fees and expenses. As judge Denis Jacobs noted, many asbestos claims are based on “fraud, corrupt experts, perjury, and other things that would be deplored and persecuted by the legal profession if done within other commercial fields.”

A cadre of lawyers has relentlessly pursued and dealt devastating financial blows to a series of industries, from construction firms to vaccine makers, to manufacturers of scientifically-proven safe products like silicon breast implants, to publicly held firms whose only offense was a sharp drop in share price. Yet you have to look hard to find editorial outrage about the trial bar’s dubious methods.

Contrast that with the massive coverage and indignation over corporate misdeeds. Enron CEO Kenneth Lay in 2004 garnered more than 1,000 stories in just a few days. But whereas Enron quickly produced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, all the trial bar’s shenanigans seem to have shaped in Washington is more friendly legislation on their behalf. In the hopper now is the Energy and Tax Extenders Act of 2008, which includes a provision to allow plaintiffs’ attorneys to deduct upfront from their tax bill the expenses of pursuing a case on a contingency-fee basis.

The direct victims of the trial bar are mostly deep-pocketed institutions like companies, governments and big nonprofits (hospitals, for instance) that elicit little sympathy from the press, while trial lawyers skillfully cultivate the press, providing them scoops in advance of lawsuits. It was a trial firm, for instance, that originally provided the New York Times transcripts of a meeting of Texaco managers which (falsely, it turns out) purported to show them using racial epithets.