Jump to full article: Nieman Watchdog Project (Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University), 2009-05-09
Author: Morton Mintz / Nieman Watchdog
Intro: The Washington Legal Foundation, a self-described "advocate for freedom and justice," published one of its occasional quarter-page ads in the New York Times the other day. The headline: "Bull Market for Plaintiffs’ Lawyers."
"At least one industry—Litigation, Inc.—is expanding at a fast pace," the group's chairman, Daniel J. Popeo, declared in the May 4 op-ed ad. He characterized this newly-invented industry as a "parasitic," "unregulated," "multi-billion-dollar" business in "pursuit of riches [that] restrains U.S. economic recovery."
The ad appeared under a logo, "IN ALL FAIRNESS". But fairness to those who read Popeo's rant requires some background. I have in mind the long-standing ties that he somehow overlooked between WLF and the tobacco industry. . . .
It is thanks primarily to plaintiffs' lawyers who sued tobacco companies that damning, truth-telling internal documents that would otherwise have remained secret if not destroyed have surfaced in recent decades. . . .
A 1968 Philip Morris draft memo, for example, revealed an industry-wide "gentleman's agreement" barring cigarette companies from doing in-house biological research on the health hazards of smoking. The memo became public 20 years later in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., during the trial of a landmark smoker-death lawsuit titled Cipollone v. Liggett Group. It was among two dozen highly damaging industry documents that plaintiff's lawyer Marc Z. Edell and colleagues Cynthia Walters and Alan Darnell had obtained during years of costly pre-trial discovery and put into the public record. (I covered the nine-week 1988 trial for the Washington Post.)
The 32-year-old WLF and the tobacco industry have long been on the same wavelength regarding legal issues. When WLF attacks plaintiffs' lawyers as a class, it automatically targets those lawyers whose lawsuits have repeatedly brought to light devastating facts about the industry's conduct. . . .
In the five years 1995-1999, Philip Morris gave WLF $1,250,000; in the four years ending in 1998 the Tobhacco Institute donated an additional $125,000. (Click here for funding details.)
In 1996, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Foundation made an "unrestricted" $75,000 grant to WLF. . . .
Just in 2008, Philip Morris International sold 850 billion cigarettes outside the United States. Its profit was $16.3 billion—40,750 times the award that the Cipollone family—and their lawyers—never saw. PMI was not pursuing riches? Perhaps WLF will buy another op-ed ad so Popeo can tell us what else it was pursuing. Justice, maybe?
Plaintiffs' lawyers have not been alone in going after tobacco. State attorney generals have . . .
The WLF ad makes no mention of tobacco. It is silent, too, about corporate lawyers who defend the industry and, more broadly, pharmaceutical and other companies that have committed crimes or engaged in grave misconduct. The silence invites an inference that, in stark contrast to those "parasitic" plaintiffs' lawyers, corporate defense lawyers are honorable professionals, gentlemen through and through. That's not how Kessler saw tobacco lawyers.
"At every stage, lawyers played an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation of the Enterprise and the implementation of its fraudulent schemes," Kessler wrote. Both in-house counsel and outside law firms "devised" and "coordinated" strategy, directed scientists' research in favor of the industry, destroyed documents and "took shelter behind baseless assertions of attorney client privilege."
It should be noted that WLF gets significant funding from right-wing foundations, including those in the names of Lynde & Harry Bradley, John M. Olin, and Sarah Scaife. And perhaps this should be noted, too: advocacy ads that bring desperately needed revenue to news organizations can pollute the well of public knowledge.
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[A]dvocacy ads that bring desperately needed revenue to news organizations can pollute the well of public knowledge.
Morton Mintz, in a scathing rebuke of the Washington Legal Foundation's May 4 anti-trial lawyer ad in the NYT.
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