Did You Hear the One About ‘Lawyers’?

You could argue persuasively that this is the era of shirking personal accountability for misfortune, of blaming others for problems that we nurture ourselves.

It’s not a healthy or productive way to live, as “20/20” correspondent John Stossel asserted in his 1994 ABC News special, “The Blame Game: Are We a Country of Victims?” In some ways Stossel’s latest provocative hour, “The Trouble With Lawyers,” extends that theme: It’s their fault, we say, so let’s get a lawyer and sue ‘em.

And for every case, however exotic, asinine or fraudulent, it seems, there is a lawyer.

Like all craftily produced programs with an agenda, “The Trouble With Lawyers” gets you thinking about its conclusions, and also what techniques the messenger uses to deliver the message. Stossel believes, apparently, that our litigious society--where petty lawsuits and mere threats of legal action earn big money--affirms that even pricey attorneys are often little more than shiny suits greedily grubbing for fame or dollars. He charges that they’re profiting more than their clients. He builds his case mostly by talking to law professors and some of the posh legal hotshots he targets.

Long gone are the days when lawyers were naively defined largely by TV’s morally correct Perry Mason or even the protagonist attorneys of NBC’s “L.A. Law,” most of whose flaws rarely equaled the sum of their admirable traits.

Instead, Stossel’s ally here is a waxy yellow buildup of raw emotions and anti-lawyer anger, for fresh in many minds is the do-anything-to-win strategy of the swanky defense team that won acquittal for accused murderer O.J. Simpson. To say nothing of finagling by the other side and fat book contracts signed by the two lead prosecutors. And the swarm of lawyers who used the Simpson case to fatten their TV pedigrees and media careers. And the stepped-up legal ads for ambulance chasers during the trial.

As for less cosmic civil cases, last week the CNN legal series “Burden of Proof” smirked at legal action brought against a 9-year-old boy by a spectator hit by a wayward throw at a Little League game. “You wonder why people have bad opinions of lawyers, this is why,” observed Roger Cossack. “It’s stupid,” agreed his co-host, Greta Van Susteren.

Possibly. And Stossel is surely right that “fear of suits is changing the way we live.”

His own employer, ABC, fed that terror last year when it capitulated to Philip Morris and publicly apologized for elements of a “Day One” investigation about the manipulation of nicotine in cigarettes after blowing millions defending itself in a suit brought by the tobacco company. That is not mentioned in “The Trouble With Lawyers.” Nor is the case’s chilling impact on CBS, which last November pulled a reportedly explosive “60 Minutes” interview with a former Brown & Williamson employee merely on grounds that it might provoke the tobacco firm to sue.

Many Republicans for years have sought legal limits on lawsuits. Yet it was a Democrat, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who pushed hardest for a controversial new bill that would make it harder for shareholders to sue for securities fraud. President Clinton’s veto of it was overridden by the Senate last month.

The urge to sue does appear to be growing along with the urge by defendants to settle and make things go away by paying, even when suits against them have little merit.

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Yet there’s something facile and glib about Stossel trumpeting the obvious, that “some lawyers are getting very rich,” and his using such hot-button labels as “hired guns” and “racket” to nourish his over-broad indictment of lawyers. You could infer at times from his language, also, an elitist view that juries, a bulwark of the U.S. legal system, are as untrustworthy as those who argue cases before them.

It was judges and juries, Stossel remarks about ace Houston attorney Joe Jamail’s success, who “liked him enough . . . to earn him $90 million in 1994.” It was the jury, he adds about an epic judgment the attorney won from Texaco, that “bought Jamail’s version” and ordered billions be paid the plaintiff. Elsewhere in the program, we’re told that lawyers arguing alleged damage from silicone breast implants “just need to convince a jury.” And “another choice of birth control may soon vanish,” we hear, “because lawyers got a few juries to send a message.” Yes, hired guns plus those pesky juries, all with their hands in the public’s pocket.

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You have to take Stossel’s word for that, though. He offers no evidence to support his claims, true or not, that the cost of lawsuit insurance dramatically drives up consumer prices for football helmets, automobiles, pacemakers and even haircuts.

From the fringes of the frivolous Stossel plucks the litigator from hell, a San Francisco woman who “makes money suing people.” Thirty, 40 times, who’s counting? If Stossel’s facts are correct, she and the permissive courts that encourage her deserve condemnation.

Little is gained, however, by pulling from the crowd some of the loopy people who sue at will and, by implication, making them metaphors for the multitudes. Yet what of the plight of Stossel in his role as a kids’ soccer coach? He says here he was instructed that “if a child gets a nose bleed or there’s dry blood on a uniform, I must stop the game, put on latex gloves and clean all the blood away.” From which he concludes that “America’s running scared” of lawyers like Jamail.

Another view would be that instead of lawyers, the fear is of AIDS being spread, and that the health rules quoted here for soccer read much like those imposed on NBA players who get bloodied in a game.

Stossel doesn’t omit his own brushes with litigation. He notes that he sued a professional wrestler who decked him on camera after Stossel suggested that the alleged sport might be rigged. What Stossel doesn’t explain is why, given his present distaste for the practice, that in this instance he sued.

He also recalls being sued himself for slander by a dentist and how the case crept along four years before going to trial. Even though he prevailed in these suits, Stossel says, “I didn’t feel like I’d won. Why? I think it has something to do with the way the system works.”

How should it work?

Already on the books are laws allowing judges to impose sanctions on lawyers who initiate frivolous suits, but proving frivolity is difficult. Another proposal vigorously pressed by Stossel would require losing plaintiffs to pay defendants’ court costs as well as their own. But trial lawyers argue that the potential risks would protect the mighty while inhibiting the poor and middle-class from seeking legitimate redress through the courts.

What to do? Yale law professor John Langbein tells Stossel that our legal system is a “laughing stock.” So watch “The Trouble With Lawyers” and be amused.

* “The Trouble With Lawyers” airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. on KABC Channel 7.