| CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LIST OF ALL 400 DONORS Lawyers & Lobbyists Eight attorneys who sued Big Tobacco tried to smoke the GOP, firing up 3.9 million dollars for the Democrats.
by Amy Paris March 5, 2001 The unprecedented legal victories against major tobacco companies in 1998 gave trial lawyers plenty of money to lavish on Al Gore -- and plenty of reasons to oppose George W. Bush. Eight of the 19 lawyers on the Mother Jones 400 won big fees suing Big Tobacco, and to protect their business they invested $3.9 million of the proceeds in politics. Heading the defense team for the Democrats was Peter Angelos (No. 7), a Baltimore lawyer who represented the state of Maryland in its tobacco case. His outstanding fee of $1 billion, a quarter of the state's total settlement, was 1,042 times larger than the $959,500 he contributed to the Democrats. The record-setting legal fees made the lawyers easy targets for Republicans. In Texas, Bush attacked the five attorneys who won $17.3 billion from the tobacco industry for the state, calling their $3.3 billion fee excessive. Although the state contracted with the lawyers to prosecute the case, the Republican attorney general launched an investigation to challenge the attorneys' fees. That didn't sit well with the Texas lawyers, such as John Eddie Williams Jr. (No. 24), who gave $621,000 to the Democrats, and his partner F. Kenneth Bailey Jr. (No. 268), who contributed $203,750. Another attorney who prosecuted the tobacco case, John O'Quinn (No. 10), handed over $840,250 to Democrats. Two other lawyers whose firms took part in the case also chipped in: C. Cary Patterson (No. 62, $443,000) and Glen Morgan, who gave $137,000. Diane Scruggs (No. 179, $264,000), whose husband Richard sued tobacco in Mississippi, backed the GOP: Her brother-in-law is Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Underlying the fight, however, was an issue that involves far more than the fees enjoyed by wealthy attorneys. Rather than viewing the tobacco lawsuit as a way to hold corporations accountable, Bush wants to curtail the damages that workers and consumers can collect when they sue companies for injury or wrongful death, protecting corporations from costly lawsuits. "Tort reform" was one of the principal reasons that almost every industrial sector backed the GOP -- and it was the driving force behind the $81 million that lawyers and lobbyists lavished on Democratic campaigns. If the Bush administration succeeds in limiting corporate liability, consumer advocates say, it will be impossible for average citizens to win the kind of damages that have altered the bottom lines of companies like Philip Morris and W.R. Grace. And that would hurt the bottom lines of class-action attorneys who are currently considering lawsuits to prevent drug companies from selling products that haven't been proved safe and to enable patients to sue HMOs for punitive damages -- precisely the types of legal actions that Bush seeks to limit. The antitobacco attorneys acknowledge that their own fees are at stake -- but they also note that large jury awards are often the only way to punish reckless or irresponsible businesses. "The only thing you can do to a corporation that commits a crime," says O'Quinn, one of the Texas attorneys, "is take away their money." | | |
