Now that Jack Abramoff has put a face (and one seriously regrettable chapeau) on the poison that is Washington lobbyists, the fixers on K Street aren’t rattling the ice cubes in their Johnnie Walker Blue quite so loudly. Well, at least not this month. But once the city thaws, there’s little doubt that the graft will once again burst forth like so many cherry blossoms alongside the Jefferson Memorial. Just ask those members of Congress who tried to give vaccine manufacturers some legal breathing room by attempting to pass the Vaccine Liability Protection Act.

According to Joseph C. Goulden, author of The Money Lawyers (Truman Talley Books, New York, 2006), “operatives working on behalf of the trial bar gently reminded the Democratic majority how much funding they’d brought to the campaign table, and the legislation was eventually killed. This apparently occurred even “after” plaintiff attorneys had brought a $30 billion suit against the $6 billion dollar a year industry. That’s $6 billion dollars worldwide, mind you. And while John Edwards might not walk in fear of avian bird flu, many outside of his profession are none too keen on how trial lawyers have turned class action lawsuits into a blood sport that costs the nation $200 billion dollars a year, according to the Manhattan Institute (www.manhattan-institute.org) think tank; or just about two percent of GDP.

Goulden’s earlier book, The Superlawyers, racked up bestseller status back in the early ’70s, and his latest title follows on from that material by delving deep into the firms and the personalities that have turned the legal profession into the “dollar-driven enterprise” that it is today.

Take David Boies, who waltzed into the Florida Presidential election debacle back in 2000 off the back of several high-profile cases that netted him superstardom in the field. He was treated to enough Southern inhospitality that he eventually resembled a… uh, bush league litigator. And that was “before” he got waxed in the Supreme Court. But Boies was able to take those lickings with a certain amount of grace, considering that his firm was also simultaneously settling the infamous Sotheby’s and Christie’s price fixing case. Their fees? Somewhere near the $27 million mark. Not bad, for four months of intensive multi-tasking.

When he gets around to examining Washington, DC’s heavy hitters, Goulden gives you enough insight into the nexus of politics and corporate power to once again illuminate how ultimately useless your on-line petitioning may be. His chapter on Thomas L. Boggs (“Tommy” to big sister Cokie Roberts) is where The Money Lawyers essentially becomes welded to your hands. The son of Hale Boggs, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana who was Majority Leader when his plane was lost somewhere in Alaska, Tommy Boggs was essentially born to be a Beltway powerbroker. His firm Patton Boggs is the medium through which many corporations channel their desires to the Hill. According to Goulden, there’s scarcely a piece of major trade legislation written over the past decade that Boggs’ firm doesn’t have its fingerprints on. Boggs began working with James Patton (an ex-CIA man who did time in Vietnam and paid visits to Fidel Castro during those warm pre-revolution days up in the Sierra Maestre) in the ’60s and together have grown Patton Boggs into the 13th largest legal outfit in the District, but perhaps one of its most powerful. With a roster that contains more than 50 Congressional or Executive Branch alums, Patton Boggs is hard-wired into the system and boasts a playbook that contains opening statements like “Patton Boggs was built on the idea that the law can be changed to achieve client objectives.”

But whether it’s inside the beltway or in courtrooms far outside Washington where class-action mercenaries jockey for phenomenal settlements from breast implant manufacturers or diet pills, the shape of American litigation gradually assumed some unholy contours as it marched towards the 21st century. While Goulden’s book is only a primer on the extent of how unwieldy the legal system has become, the rudimentary insight it offers makes for some gripping non-fiction. But even insiders, like this anonymous source from the Patton Boggs camp acknowledges, know that the public and their own regional institutions are somewhat complicit.

“Some day the folks who run local governments out beyond the Beltway are going to wake up and tell their [Congressional] member to get off his cotton-picking ass and go to work for them. Why should they pay some fancy Washington law firm to do the job they elected them to do? But until that day comes, we’re happy.”

Q&A with Joseph C. Goulden

Flagpole

What brought you back to writing about the role of the legal profession in America again?

Joseph C. Goulden

In the the early 1970s, when I first became a writer of books, the concept of power in America - who had it and how they used it - really fascinated me. I realized that we had a group of people here in town, the Washington lawyers, who exerted a lot of influence on public policy, yet they were virtually unknown to the general public. And for the first time as a journalist, I was able to go in and persuade these people to talk. Lawyers like to talk to about themselves, and at that point, they seldom had the opportunity to do so. So I got a feel for people like Clark Clifford, Lloyd Cutler and the big firm of Covington & Burling and [The Superlawyers] was the first inside look at how this worked. Four or five years ago, I started noting the proliferation of class-action suits and the enormous fees being reaped by lawyers in such litigation as tobacco, asbestos and breast implants. Secondly, I noticed a change in the thrust in American law. The old-time lawyer seemed to be bent on solving problems, rather than making them. Now we’ve turned into a litigation happy society. If you’re hurt in any way regardless of however much fault is laid at your doorstep, you want to sue somebody. I guess what pushed me off to write this book was when Penthouse magazine published photos of a nude woman and billed her as a Czech tennis star. It turns out that they had been hoodwinked and it was some other naked European woman. So some class-action lawyer put together a lawsuit against Penthouse for anybody who bought the magazine and felt they had been defrauded by seeing the wrong naked woman. Is this what American law was created for? I think not. In the United States, Dow Chemical devotes $1 in every $160 in sales to litigation. In Europe it’s $1 for every $40,000 in sales.

Flagpole

Do you think there’s a sufficient amount of public awareness about the costs of this sort of litigation?

Joseph C. Goulden

No, there’s not. People have been talking tort reform for years. It’s a big issue in the Congress. Newt Gingrich made it a big part of his Contract With America, but even with the momentum that he had in ’94 and ’95, it got nowhere. One reason is because lawyers give so much money to politicians. If you get campaign money from the American Association of Trail Lawyers, you’re not going to be very interested in breaking up their little playpen.

Flagpole

Do you think that the current spate of Congressional reforms being called for from both parties in the wake of the Abramoff scandal is valid? And even if they are, can they actually make any serious restructuring stick?

Joseph C. Goulden

I’m cynical about Congress, and always have been. I think, though, that public outcry is such that they’ve got to do something. Thomas Boggs had a searing experience through his father who was investigated for allegations of corruption that never came to anything. But I think that one scare that his father had made him very wary of getting into situations where his conduct would be questionable. And I’ve never heard a hint of wrongdoing with their lobbying, and they are the top lobbying firm in town. Some of this stuff is plain stupidity. But think about it: when lawyers start writing rules to reform their own profession, it usually winds up that there are a lot of loopholes.

JoE Silva silva_uk@yahoo.com