Oppose Soliciting at Disaster Scenes : Bar Units Set Roadblocks for ‘Ambulance Chasers’

Ambulance-chasing lawyers are finding the roads to major disasters increasingly blocked these days by state bar associations.

For example, within hours of last week’s deadly crash of a United Airlines DC-10 at Sioux City, the Iowa State Bar Assn. put up what amounted to a lawyers-not-welcome sign at the scene of the tragedy where 111 died. Another 185 passengers survived.

Iowa’s unfriendly welcome to lawyers reflected new and rapidly spreading legal profession efforts to shield disoriented survivors and distraught families of victims from aggressive lawyers or their representatives who race to the scenes of calamities in search of clients.

Lawyers are lured to disasters by prospects of profitable litigation and big settlements. Although the number who engage in this practice is relatively small, they have a negative impact on the image of attorneys.

“The public has perceived this kind of conduct as the blackest of the black conduct that a lawyer can engage in,” says Jim Sales, former president of the State Bar of Texas. A leader in the movement to keep client hustlers from disaster scenes, Sales says they behave “like rabid dogs in a feeding frenzy around the corpses at a mass disaster. It is unseemly conduct that must be stopped.”

“I can’t think of anything you’d dislike more than trying to deal with personal tragedy and have some yo-yo trying to persuade you to sign a retainer agreement,” says A. James Elliott, former Georgia State Bar Assn. president.

State bar associations in Iowa and at least five other states, including California and Texas, now have disaster response plans designed to curtail solicitation of business by lawyers and agents for lawyers. Most have put those plans in place within the last year. Bar associations in at least four other states are in the final stages of drafting disaster responses.

“I think (these plans) really respond to the need to protect the public,” says James Bascue, the State Bar of California’s chief trial counsel. The association is prepared, Bascue says, to send investigators to the site of any disaster where California lawyers are engaged in questionable conduct. “We would have sent them to Alaska (after the Exxon Valdez spill) if there had been a complaint.”

That is the kind of attitude Elliot would like to see in all states. “One of the things we’re trying to do is get bar counsels--the lawyers who do discipline for bar associations--to cooperate,” he says. “That way we can say to a lawyer that not only do we consider we have jurisdiction but we have already notified the disciplinary authorities of your bar association. I think most people at that stage will decide it is probably just as well to pack up and get the hell back out.”

“Within the next 12 months every major bar in the country will have a contingency plan ready,” said Phoenix lawyer Mark I. Harrison, chairman of an American Bar Assn. special committee on professionalism that is drafting a set of guidelines for state bar associations.

The Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America, whose members represent disaster victims and their families, also opposes solicitation by lawyers at the scenes of tragedies, including contact by representatives of the airlines’ legal teams and insurance companies.

Activities of lawyers and representatives of lawyers at recent disasters prompted action by the legal profession.

Last July when a department store collapsed in Brownsville, Tex., families of the 14 dead and 47 injured were solicited by lawyers and agents for lawyers posing as Red Cross workers and clergymen.

“They were signing them up before they had even been seen by a doctor while they were under this tremendous emotional stress, pain and even under medication,” Sales said.

In Detroit, after the August, 1987, crash of a Northwest Airlines plane that killed 156 people, a man posing as a Roman Catholic priest consoled relatives and steered their legal business to a Florida lawyer.

And the Assn. of Trial Lawyers drafted its “Victims Bill of Rights” attacking solicitation at disasters after American client-seeking lawyers descended on Bhopal, India, in 1984 when a toxic gas release from a Union Carbide factory killed more than 3,300 people.

Iowa Response

Iowa’s response to last week’s crash of United Flight 232 typifies the reception various bar associations have planned for lawyers who rush to disaster scenes. Within hours of the late afternoon crash, the Iowa State Bar Assn. had:

--Arranged for an office inside the Marian Medical Center where most of the injured were taken and dispatched two top officials to the scene, including Carl Nielson, who serves as the association’s executive director and secretary of the Iowa Supreme Court commission that disciplines lawyers.

--Notified media throughout Iowa that an office was being set up to monitor the conduct of lawyers.

--Briefed hospital personnel on what was ethical and unethical conduct by lawyers and explained that they were not obligated to give attorneys access to patients.

--Arranged for an eye-grabbing advertisement in the Sioux City Journal designed to inform victims and their families that lawyers could not solicit business, make recommendations to anyone who did not ask for them or use agents to solicit clients. The ad contained a phone number for complaints and put lawyers on notice that their conduct was being monitored.

Bar associations have an obligation to police improper conduct, says Northwestern University professor Mark F. Grady, an expert in economics and the law. “But if it’s simply a matter of a lawyer representing himself to be a lawyer and saying: ‘Listen, I’d like to represent you and this is what the fee would be,’ that’s completely benign.

‘Competitive Process’

“This is basically a regulation of the competitive process,” Grady added.

Los Angeles lawyer Alan Gutman, who went to Sioux City after the crash, is also critical of the restrictions.

“In a criminal procedure setting, a person accused of a crime has a constitutional right to speak to an attorney prior to being questioned,” says Gutman, a 28-year-old Hollywood attorney. “There is a parallel in play here because these people have substantial interests and rights that are being affected and there ought to be some sort of prohibition in effect that would prevent the insurance investigators of the airlines from questioning any of these individuals about anything prior to the time they talk to a representative on their side.”

“Most of the programs are designed to suggest to survivors and families of victims that they ought to go slow in dealing with anybody,” says Harrison, “not just plaintiff lawyers. That has been a real concern in dealing with the problem, being even handed.”

Gutman says he made no attempt to solicit clients while in Sioux City but adds: “We are interested in representing people who have claims arising from the disaster, yet I was not interested in circumventing the laws of Iowa.”

Iowa’s state bar began preparing a disaster response plan after a February American Bar Assn. meeting in Denver where lawyers discussed plans for responding to catastrophic disasters.

“We did have some thought on it before (a disaster) ever happened,” says Nielsen. “We had the ad ready with only a blank to fill in as to what kind of a disaster it was. We didn’t know if we’d ever have a disaster but if we did, we wanted to be ready.”

So far the Iowa bar has notified Florida bar officials about questionable conduct by a Miami attorney and is investigating a second lawyer who is allegedly soliciting still-hospitalized crash survivors.

One of the first attempts to police unethical activity by lawyers at disasters was in California when the State Bar sent two investigators to Cerritos after the 1986 collision of an Aeromexico DC-9 and a private aircraft.

“We have a little more sophisticated plan now than we did then,” says Clayton R. Anderson, director of investigations for the State Bar of California. “What we have now is a plan wherein we will have packages of information that we will take to the area. We will advise the people what lawyers can and can’t do so they aren’t intimidated, so they feel free to escort a lawyer out of the immediate area where survivors may be. We would probably set up an office and we are just drafting (an ad) now.

“We are trying to condense the rules that pertain to solicitation down to a manageable form for an ad,” says Anderson. “The board of governors for the State Bar approved all of this and they didn’t get any negative comments.”