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Looking to Expand Into Mass Torts?
The wild world of mass torts can be irresistibly enticing to plaintiffs' attorneys from small firms. With the promises of huge fees and the suggestion of a nominal amount of work on each case, mass torts seem too good to be true.
However, John Grisham's novel, “The Litigators,” tells the cautionary tale of plaintiffs' attorneys who unwittingly follow the siren's song of mass torts only to shipwreck on the rocky island of sanctions, malpractice suits and financial ruin. In “The Litigators,” the “boutique firm” of Finley & Figg deviates from its meat-and-potatoes personal injury (PI) practice to pursue a bad drug claim against one of Big Pharma's most powerful companies. The story winds through creation of multidistrict litigation (MDL), deceptive negotiations by the pharmaceutical company and shifting allegiances of the mass tort firms that purport to be on the plaintiffs' side. Attorney David Zinc goes with the partners at Finley & Figg on their journey up the river of mass tort madness, which plays out like a litigation version of “The Heart of Darkness.”
Zinc is a wide-eyed associate who is new to plaintiffs' litigation, and his intentions are as pure as the driven snow. As the protagonist, he offers an outsider's view of both the messy world of PI practice in the tort reform era and the developing field of mass torts. In fact, “The Litigators” has a happy ending only because Zinc altruistically settles a traditional injury case; were it not for the fee he earned on that PI case, Finley & Figg would have been destroyed as a result of their venture into the world of mass torts.
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