The dirty little secret about the tobacco lawyers

"L'audace, l'audace -- toujours l'audace!" exclaimed George C. Scott, in his memorable role as the wartime Gen. George S. Patton, quoting the old German commander Frederick the Great. ("Audacity, audacity, always audacity!")

While you were giving thanks to the almighty, a remarkable story appeared Thanksgiving Day in a leading Missouri newspaper. And like Patton the historian, celebrating the indispensable uses to which audacity should be put in combat, a few greedy, private attorneys are doing their little audacity number.Tobacco suit lawyers asked for fees that topped other states'

Private attorneys say they would have won $130 billion at trial

This was the headline over a story by Terry Ganey in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Ganey reports:

"Private lawyers who represented Missouri in its case against the tobacco industry say they would have won 'at least $130 billion' for the state and several billion dollars for themselves had their lawsuit gone to trial in St. Louis last year." Ganey estimates the lawyers would have been paid -- he avoids the verb "earned," as well he might, and hold the snickers, please -- more than $7 billion under their contingent fee contract with Attorney General Jay Nixon.

"The estimates were included in documents the lawyers filed ... with an arbitration panel" that will decide on fees.

"Missouri's private legal team didn't request a specific amount. But the lawyers asked for more than what lawyers in many other states received."

Missouri's lead private attorney cranked up his whining big-time. "Politicians and the press have slandered me," moaned lead plaintiff attorney Tom Strong, who along with the other four dozen lawyers was handpicked from his campaign contributor list by the state's chief law enforcement officer, Nixon. The primary object of Strong's fit of pique is this writer, who filed a suit that went to the Supreme Court trying to stop this, the biggest rip-off in 180 years of statehood.

"I wanted to try this case," Strong continued. "I still do. But I don't have any interest in all the other nonsense -- the politics, the lies that have been told about me and about some of the other members of the legal team."

For those who don't regularly dine in the company of such as the Board of Governors of the Missouri Bar Association, and the members of our state's supreme court, here's the dirty little secret reverberating around Missouri legal circles: They did next to nothing for the fee they're about to rake in. Missouri was something like the 27th state to file suit, making these lawyers quite late to this gravy train. All the tough spadework had already been done in other states. What about risk in pursuing the litigation, the kind of risk that might begin to justify such obscene fees? By the time Missouri hopped aboard, there was next to no risk to the lawyers pursuing the beached whale of Big Tobacco, a fact attested to by Prof. Lester Brickman of the Benjamin Cardozo Law School in New York City. Brickman is a leading national expert on the ethics of lawyer fees and on this, which he likens to the James Gang, looting us yet again.

Memo to Tom Strong and the other lawyers in on this rip-off: Know from now on that when you walk down the street, thousands of us are busting a gut laughing. And to the Board of Governors, you have seminar material for your next little session probing why lawyers are held in disrepute.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.