Law of the jungle

National Review, Sept 15, 1997 by Matthew Scully

Those lawyers sure know how to throw a convention. I have never seen anything quite like it: 13,000 lawyers of the American Bar Association, 2,000 guests, 2,500 meetings, 1,525 featured speakers, a 375-page schedule, 23 hotels, a fleet of buses shuttling around the clock. A press room covering 9,200 square feet, 200 phone lines, 12 Internet connections. And documents -- every law manual, journal, study, or handbook you ever dreamed of owning. To quote an ABA press release, "150,000 pounds of materials" borne in on "five semi-trailers," plus another "450,000 pounds of sundry documents produced on site." It was "the largest gathering of lawyers ever in one place."

I figure at a total of 600,000 pounds of documents, and 15,000 total members and guests, I was entitled to exactly 40 pounds of material. As my footman did not accompany me on this trip, however, I was able to carry off just 23 pounds. The documents are now piled here right beside me awaiting my study and review.

Well, maybe a few preliminary observations are in order first. One thought might bear upon this very mass of material. Why is there so much of it? The law necessarily involves paperwork and documentation. But you get the feeling after a week with the ABA that in the legal profession these days, quantity is everything. In what other walk of life would they try luring you to their convention with brochures touting "1,525 confirmed speakers"? Success in law seems to be measured now by volume, and accomplishment in tonnage.

I missed a lot in the blur of events, but one thing that stands out was the ABA EXPO 97. You walk in there, a hangar-sized ballroom at the Hyatt, and the first thing you notice is that nearly every one of the 185 services and products for sale is aimed at expanding legal practices and raising their profits, without any apparent sense of limits. This is now taken as the self-evident and proper aim of each attorney and practice.

There were the obvious operators like the man who handed me a pamphlet for something called Injury Helpline. The way this works is, you buy into an 800 number they advertise in targeted TV markets around America, "targeted" meaning their ads will be aired during Rolanda and afternoon reruns of Seventies sitcoms. They'll refer the injured and aggrieved to you, in exchange for which you pay a monthly fee but keep (as a banner over their booth puts it) "profits from cases, cases, cases!" They also sell a book called Guerrilla Marketing Attack for Attorneys. "Maximize Marketing " says the brochure of a similar outfit, FreeAdvice.com, which will find you slip & fall accident cases, illegal-immigration cases, drunk-driving cases, whatever. "You keep all the fees you generate."

But even moving on to more respectable-looking booths, what's striking is the common theme. It used to be you had the dirty-shirt personal-injury lawyers who are always with us, but then the starchy legal types who seemed to retain some sense of belonging to an honorable profession. Civil litigation used to be recognized as by definition an unproductive enterprise. In the grand economic scheme, it's all overhead. Now it's seen as just the opposite. Litigation is a giant industry all by itself, producing trouble, legal fees, and little else, without even much pretense any more about the purpose of it all.

The higher-end vendors will help you form class actions or consolidations for "mass torts" cases. They'll find you medical experts, product-liability experts, experts specializing in other areas of law, experts in most anything -- all "screened" for previous courtroom experience, as one brochure puts it, "for those intangible personal qualities that make for a compelling witness."

"Please send me more information on the following Mealey titles," says a leaflet from Mealey Publications: "Asbestos, Biotechnology, Breast Implants, Emerging Toxic Torts, Superfund, Tobacco," and so on. You'll get this "often on the same day a story breaks," the better to get in on the deal early.

I guess I am the last person in America to discover there is no such thing any more as a plaintiff lawyer hanging out his shingle and waiting for clients to come a-calling. You have to be aggressive today. You need a marketing strategy. You need data bases, litigation support services, client finders, jury profilers, witness screeners. "Law," as Mealey's puts it, "is business," and indeed there is even a regular publication called Mealey's Attorney Fees devoted entirely to breaking news on the fee front: "Missouri Appeals Court Affirms Attorneys' Fee Award in Class Action." "Sixth Circuit Affirms Contingency Fee, Interest in $103.5-Million Case."

Take even a futile but lofty-sounding project like The World Law Institute Inaugural Forum, soon to be hosted in Atlanta by Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev. Along with world peace and the rule of law, I notice, the Institute also seeks to spread the benefits of our own damage-award system -- in which lawyers get a third or more of the swag -- out across the planet.