A Litigator Reviews John Grisham’s “The Litigators”
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A few months ago I was talking with a retired lawyer with a mass tort claim that fit squarely within our firm’s criteria. Given the details he provided, there really wasn’t a lot to do pre-suit, my next steps would be to get the medical records to confirm what happened, file the complaint, and then get to work.
Being a lawyer, he unsurprisingly wanted to know the whole process “from start to finish,” so we spent a while on the phone talking about short form complaints, plaintiff’s fact sheets, the plaintiff’s steering committee, the bellwether trials, and so on. The machinery of mass torts litigation isn’t an easy thing to explain; everybody knows (or thinks they know) what a class action is, but there aren’t actually any “class actions” for drug injuries, there’s just federal multidistrict litigation (MDL) and state consolidated litigation, both of which are strange hybrids between class actions and individual suits. When we finished up and I told him that we would get to work on his case, he said “and I’ll do my part by re-reading John Grisham’s The Litigators,” and we shared a laugh.
It seems like most of the lawyers I know disdain Grisham’s novels the same way doctors disdain ER and Grey’s Anatomy, and, quite frankly I had never read one nor had an interest in reading one. Like many lawyers, I find legal fiction — whether a novel, a TV show, or movie — painful. It’s either banal or unbelievable, and even the slightest misstep in the details ruins the suspension of disbelief. Most of it looks like this to me.
Read original articleTags: Class Action, Class Actions, Multidistrict Litigation
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