hmmm. I need to raise this point in a new post. More later.

The “phenomenal lawyer” business I can’t even really argue about. I’ve balked at people who call him a “trial lawyer,” or in terms of courtroom success and conventional notions of what a litigator does. On the other hand, he really has spearheaded total-war approaches to tort litigation that greatly raised the stakes and dollars involved. Even if the ideas he used weren’t original to him, he made remarkable use of them. You’d have to view the level at which he succeeded as phenomenal.

But you also have to take into account a few things: First, his acknowledgment as long ago as the interviews about the tobacco settlement that part of his methods involved working “the dark side.” It seems clear to me that back as far as the asbestos era he made decisions to pursue his ends by fair means or foul. Second, his choice of methods included things like massive public relations wars that, while not illegal, raise strong ethical and moral issues for me.

I would say his particular genius was more public relations– he was brilliant at selling, or getting someone to sell, narratives that journalists would take to like ducks to water (and resell them in new contexts– e.g. the repeat performances of the Insider theme). The lawsuit-as-total-war idea he seemed to have often looks (if you review the dockets of cases his firm was litigating) like pointless flailing around to me. I wonder if the approach ever worked for him outside a context where he had a judge giving him the advantage of home cooking.

David Novak did time as a white-collar crook at Eglin Federal Prison Camp (Pensacola, FL), aka Club Fed. Now he advises first-time felons on how to survive life on the inside. Hey, Ken and Jeff (and Bernie and Sam and Dennis), would you like his number?

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/62/realitycheck.html?page=0%2C0

My reason for referring to a kangaroo court.

Orey notes that Chancellor Williams Myers got the case by default, and Myers was appointed to the court by Governor Fordice. I don’t want to besmirch anyone’s reputation by the above question, but that’s what happens when a lawyer has a pattern of behavior as Scruggs did. One begins to question whether every successful case involved corruption.

Orey notes on page 266 ( regarding the hiring of Pete Johnson to “slip a minor word change into a bill” that “authorized the attorney general to hire counsel for a contingent fee” ) that “[e]ven though Johnson’s stealthy maneuvering proved unnecessary, it indicates the lengths to which Scruggs was willing to go to pave the way for success.” Thus my question: could the wheels have been greased in the Jackson County Chancery Court?