Legal Vultures

THE MONEY LAWYERS

The No-Holds-Barred World of Today's Richest and Most Powerful Lawyers

By Joseph C. Goulden

Truman Talley/St. Martin's. 428 pp. $27.95

In his new book, "The Money Lawyers," Joseph C. Goulden joins the many writers who've warned that pursuit of the almighty dollar is destroying the legal profession.

As those writers have it, the law was once practiced by wise, learned attorneys committed not only to their clients' needs but also to the public good. Today, however, a formerly honorable calling has become just another money-grubbing business. The plaintiffs' bar is bent on racking up billion-dollar class-action judgments against big corporations even where there's little evidence of wrongdoing; meanwhile, the well-heeled Wall Street litigators who defend those corporations use every tactic imaginable to drag out legal proceedings for years (all the while bickering about how to divvy up law firm profits). Far from achieving justice, these class-action wars merely jack up the costs paid by the rest of society, from increased insurance rates to more expensive products on our supermarket shelves. In short, lawyers have lost their souls, corporations have lost their shirts, and the public is losing its faith in the profession.

This story line has been a compelling one for the past decade or so, at least judging by the number of books that explore one variation or another -- Walter K. Olson's "The Rule of Lawyers" and Anthony Kronman's "The Lost Lawyer" and Kermit Roosevelt's debut novel, "In the Shadow of the Law." But Goulden has a special claim to this crowded territory. An investigative journalist with 18 nonfiction books to his credit, he's perhaps best known for a forerunner of the lawyers-run-amok genre, "The Superlawyers." That 1972 bestseller exposed how Washington insiders like Clark Clifford used behind-the-scenes influence with Congress and federal agencies to get whatever their clients needed.

But if Goulden was troubled by his examination of the legal profession more than three decades ago, he's downright appalled today. Much of "The Money Lawyers" is devoted to damning profiles of prominent class-action plaintiffs' attorneys, such as William S. Lerach and Melvyn Weiss, who made fortunes suing companies for securities fraud -- often, Goulden suggests, on the slightest of evidence. He also takes to task the attorneys responsible for the silicone-breast-implant litigation, which cost manufacturers dearly and netted fat lawyers' fees without, Goulden reports, any scientific evidence that the implants harmed women. Goulden pulls back a bit when it comes to the diet-pill lawsuits of the late 1990s, giving plaintiffs' lawyers credit for proving that the pill-makers ignored clear signs that their product caused heart damage. But he heaps scorn on all the scratching and clawing among the attorneys fighting to be on the Plaintiffs' Management Committee for the litigation (and thus in the best position for a big payout).

There's no disputing Goulden's passion for his subject. He devoted more than four years to interviewing the men and women discussed in his book, and he does a creditable job of explaining the complex class-action lawsuits that made them obscenely rich. The larger question is what exactly Goulden hopes to add to the debate about the state of the legal profession. Lerach and his ilk have been dissected in the media for years, and the current class-action system's pros (companies such as Enron are made to pay for their misdeeds, and victims get recompense) and cons (groundless lawsuits cost shareholders millions) have been grist for article after article in newspapers and academic journals -- not to mention whole Web sites and some of the aforementioned books.

True, Goulden ranges beyond the "Class Action Club," "the coterie of insider lawyers" who dominate such litigation. He spends a good deal of time on the superstar lawyer David Boies, who's most famous for representing both the U.S. government in the Microsoft antitrust case and Al Gore in the legal battle over the 2000 presidential election. And Goulden provides a stark account of how partners at a once-genteel New York firm kicked out some of their colleagues in an ugly battle to reap higher profits for themselves. But again, Boies has been profiled endlessly, and the battle for money in corporate firms is an oft-told tale, from numerous media stories to Lincoln Caplan's meticulously researched 1994 book, "Skadden: Power, Money and the Rise of a Legal Empire."

With not much new in these pages, we're left with Goulden's concluding question: How should we fix the mess we're in? Here, he limits himself solely to the issue of reining in class-action product-liability lawsuits, leaving aside (among other things) questions about the conduct and culture of big defense firms. It takes Goulden just six pages to dismiss Congress, the courts, the bar and law schools as possible sources for tort reform. He shows particular disdain for the last of these, rolling his eyes at the "high-minded blather from law school deans" and then ridiculing a single law professor involved in the much-derided suit against McDonald's for allegedly making its customers obese. Goulden ends by declaring, in boldface, that people should "take individual responsibility for some of the things that go awry in their lives and not foist off blame (and expenses) on others." No argument here. But Goulden's own book proves, as he admits, that this prescription isn't likely to be enough. The reader deserves more by way of a solution from the author after plowing through almost 400 pages on what's wrong with lawyers today.