'The King of Torts'
by John Grisham
Doubleday, $27.95
After venturing into other forms of fiction, John Grisham returned to the courtroom with last year's thriller, "The Summons." He re-enters the fray with his latest courtroom thriller, "The King of Torts."
In his new novel, Grisham takes on the sleazy world of mass-tort lawyers who specialize in suing large corporations in enormous class-action lawsuits, securing huge fees in return for relatively small recoveries for their clients. "The King of Torts" offers everything one expects from Grisham: fast and suspenseful action, a thin and extremely implausible plot and a stunningly predictable conclusion.
Clay Carter is an overworked, underpaid public defender in Washington, D.C., representing a motley collection of junkies, repeat offenders and violent criminals. Stuffed in a dismal, cramped office, he is burned out and disheartened. When his longtime girlfriend walks out on him, egged on by her preening and socially ambitious parents, Carter finds himself at the end of his rope. But suddenly, as so often seems to happen in Grisham novels, a well-dressed stranger appears, offering Carter a deal too good to resist. Max Pace is a legal "fireman" hired by big corporations to deal with potential legal troubles before they explode. Pace's client is a big pharmaceutical company whose drug experiments went dangerously awry, leading to a string of deaths. The offer? Represent the victims, broker quiet settlements and releases, and earn a fee of $15 million in return.
Carter wrestles with the decision, but ultimately accepts the offer. He quits his job, recruits several colleagues, and opens shop in a posh law office set up by Pace virtually overnight. Bankrolled by the $15 million windfall, Carter gets down to work quickly.
With Pace providing a series of inside tips, Carter files a series of mass-tort suits, using expensive nationwide television advertising to drum up thousands of clients. He is soon hailed as the "King of Torts," a boy wonder of the mass-tort bar, and is initiated into the small network of big shot, self-proclaimed fighters for the underdogs.
At first repulsed at his colleagues, who seem more interested in buying the biggest jet, the fanciest sports car or the most palatial mountain retreat, Carter's resistance is slowly overcome as he slips ever deeper into the lifestyle of the rich and ostentatious mass-tort lawyer. Along the way, he engages in blatant insider trading in the stocks of the corporations he is suing, betrays virtually all of his clients and their interests, files lawsuits with little or no evidence to support them, and accepts advice from and invests millions on the word of people he barely knows. The ethical violations and assorted criminal behavior in just the first 100 pages would make an outstanding law-school ethics exam.
Of course, the entire plot strains the patience of even the most credulous readers. Why would a lawyer, who has heretofore suffered on a public-defender salary (despite a sparkling law-school career at Georgetown Law School) in the interests of the public good, abandon everything on the improbable word of an unknown stranger and suddenly launch himself on a whirlwind of shady deals and ethical violations? Why would a "fireman" like Pace risk disclosure by involving unknown lawyers and particularly obscure criminal lawyers who, of all people, know better than most the costs of shady deals? And what corporation - no matter how deranged - would risk this sort of open manipulation of the civil-justice system? Far from helping to insulate the company, such tactics would enormously magnify the problem and expose those involved to serious criminal charges.
Class-action litigation in the United States is certainly long overdue for reform, and Grisham's portrayal of self-righteous and hypocritical leaders of the mass-tort bar, with their expensive Colorado ranches, Gulfstream jets and sports cars, may be apt and well-deserved. But Grisham offers little beyond parody. He offers no credible examination of the issues raised by the explosion of class suits, nor even a hint of how we might as a society properly balance the need for compensation in large-scale litigation against the danger of windfall attorneys' fees that dwarf the recovery for the clients.
Of course, neither Grisham nor his fans will likely pause long to consider any of this a flaw in the book. To the contrary, Grisham sells suspense, not thoughtful plot development, social commentary or even interesting character sketches.
And on this level, "The King of Torts" delivers with a vengeance. If only out of morbid curiosity, the reader is dragged through the sordid tale to its all-too-predictable conclusion. Ill-gotten gains evaporate with a change in fortunes. The FBI begins to investigate. And Carter learns what he knew all along: that some things are too good to be true.
