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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0110.green.html"Until he moved to the Senate, Edwards was a personal injury lawyer---the kind people most love to hate---and a very talented one. More than half his cases were medical malpractice suits. Many involved infants born with brain damage or other serious conditions that entail a lifetime of expensive medical care. Edwards also won cases against hospitals, cities, and corporations. "As a lawyer, he was the whole package," says Mike Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. "He's prepared, he's smart, and he's very personable." And he continued winning massive verdicts. In 1990, he was the youngest member inducted into The Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the nation's top 100 trial lawyers. By the mid-1990s, Edwards had become legendary. "After trials," recalls Howard Twiggs, a Raleigh lawyer and former president of ATLA, "jurors would approach Johnny and ask him for his card." It is said that insurance companies would suddenly become interested in settling when Edwards' name was added to a plaintiff's team. Edwards won a $7 million verdict for the parents of a 16-year-old who'd killed himself the day after being dismissed from a psychiatric hospital, an incredibly difficult case to win, Dayton says, because in North Carolina the plaintiff must prove that the entire burden of negligence lies with the defendant. In 1997, Edwards successfully sued a doctor for $23 million on behalf of the parents of a baby severely brain damaged by oxygen deprivation during labor.
The defining case in Edwards' legal career wrapped up that same year. In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys' behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards' closing argument, "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen," recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service.
Despite Edwards' Atticus Finch-like background, North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth set about targeting him on the basis of his profession when he campaigned for reelection in 1998, no doubt encouraged by GOP consultants such as Luntz, who'd been successfully pushing tort reform since the early 1990s. "It's almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers," Luntz wrote that year in a memorandum to Republicans running for reelection. "Make the lawyer your villain by contrasting him with the Œlittle guy,' the innocent hard-working American who he takes to the cleaners."
But Luntz had it backwards. Edwards hadn't cleaned out Mom and Pop. He'd targeted corporations like Sta-Rite and negligent hospitals that had injured small children, and he'd won the unanimous jury decisions state law requires. What's more, he responded to Faircloth's criticism by inviting the public to scrutinize his legal record. Faircloth's campaign strategists considered making a commercial featuring a doctor whom Edwards had put out of business, but thought better of it when they realized Edwards would retaliate by putting forward the little girl who'd suffered at the doctor's hands. As it was, Faircloth never delved into specifics about his opponent's record. Nor should he have, says former ATLA president Twiggs: "Johnny, in that situation, can put on the patient, can put on the jury foreman, and can absolutely destroy that tactic if it's used. It would be a unique opportunity to show who he represented and why, and to show why the jury found in his favor."
By sheer virtue of his skill as a lawyer, Edwards had been able to avoid taking the kinds of cases the public detests. During the campaign, opponents tried unsuccessfully to criticize him for turning away 35 to 40 cases for each one he accepted. But such was the demand for his service that it was impossible to accommodate everyone. Even so, a close friend and fellow attorney says that, before running for Senate, Edwards had a team of doctors and nurses privately screen his record to make sure that no case he'd brought to trial could be considered frivolous: "When they got significantly into , they decided he'd never come close to violating the standard."http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0110.green.html
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