Trial lawyers finally take one on the chin

Lawyers need more than good PR to polish their image.

Date published: 5/1/2005

SAN FRANCISCO--When someone in Washington tells you "it isn't about the money," you can rest assured on one point.

It's about the money.

The Association of Trial Lawyers of America insists that its members' opposition to tort reform isn't based on protecting their billions of dollars in annual contingency fees. Now they've installed a new chief, veteran Washington public relations specialist John Haber, to promote that fallacy by putting a good face on what really amounts to unbridled greed.

Haber is being paid a cool half-million dollars to transform the image of America's personal injury bar--the equivalent of giving Ebenezer Scrooge an extreme makeover. Which leads one to ask, "Why do personal injury lawyers--who love to portray themselves as Robin Hood--suffer from an image problem?"

One answer would be because they overestimated what the American public would tolerate. Whether suing fast-food restaurants, flooding the media and the Internet with carnival barker ads promising easy money, or systematically targeting our health-care system, the plaintiffs' bar has proved repeatedly there's little it won't try if there's money to be made.

Another reason is a growing acknowledgement that personal injury lawyers are subverting our justice system to the detriment of those who need it most. There may be no better example of this than the current asbestos litigation crisis.

In this, the largest mass tort in U.S. history, lawyers manipulate venues, file lawsuits based on junk science and recruit uninjured plaintiffs to join lawsuits--all at the expense of those who truly have been injured.

In a recent study by Academic Radiology, a board of independent doctors reviewed chest X-rays that had been entered as evidence by lawyers in asbestos lawsuits. In the original trials, doctors paid by the lawyers to serve as "expert" witnesses concluded that 96 percent of the X-rays showed asbestos-related abnormalities. Doctors conducting the study found that fewer than 5 percent of the X-rays showed such damage.

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Date published: 5/1/2005