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I’ve just read a long but mighty interesting piece in The American Lawyer — “Mississippi Blues” by Susan Beck. You can tell why I stuck with it to the end by the way it begins:

The legend of Richard Scruggs is by now well-known. His fame took root in the 1990s, when he won settlements for shipyard workers in Pascagoula, Mississippi, who had been exposed to asbestos. It blossomed in 1998, when the former Navy fighter pilot pressured tobacco companies to agree to a $248 billion settlement. And, in recent months, his story descended into the realm of scandal when the 61-year-old Scruggs, his son David “Zach” Scruggs, and three others were indicted in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, for trying to bribe a judge to get a favorable ruling in a fee dispute.

But the legend of Dickie Scruggs, as commonly told, generally omits a key fact. Scruggs’s reputation as a giant killer of the plaintiffs bar is outdated. Even before the indictment his career was in decline [see "High-Wire Act"]. In the ten years since the tobacco settlement, Scruggs has taken on a series of quixotic cases. These matters were much ballyhooed in the press, but in the end they shared two things: big enemies and bad results. The only major success he’s seen in the last decade hasn’t been for the underdog plaintiffs that he champions, but for a big corporation that he defended in a product liability case. …

Beck presents Dickie Scruggs as a “principled” and “idealistic” jouster-for-the-little-people who has, nonetheless, “an unrealistic expectation of the power of the legal system to cure social ills, and perhaps an inflated view of his abilities.” Along the way, she sprinkles in some tangy quotes:

“There’s no question he didn’t know about any bribery scheme the way the government describes it,” Keker says. [Emph. mine]

“We understand how to play this game now in ways that haven’t been played before,” [Dickie] announced to Newsweek in 1999.

“God didn’t give me all this money to settle,” Scruggs said …

“Scruggs came in with a whole crew of people,” recalls Zlotnick. He enlisted friends from Mississippi, like John “Don” Barrett of The Barrett Law Office in Lexington, Mississippi, who has allied with Scruggs on many cases. Milberg Weiss and Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein also signed on. “They had a different style of litigating than I do,” adds Zlotnick about the Mississippi contingent. “The Gulfstream style.” (Scruggs and Barrett commuted to California on separate private jets.)

Scruggs, it seems, isn’t eager to join a case where he can’t be the leader. “I’m probably not the best person in the world to work with others on a coequal basis,” Scruggs told The American Lawyer in 1996. “I like to make decisions and call the shots.”

See why I read to the end? Think you might want to? Maybe this is a good one to file away for the weekend . . .