The King of Torts

Nora, wide awake, said, "A hundred thousand dollars!"

"Yes ma’am." Like a surgeon before a routine operation, Oscar had learned to lowball his chances of success. Keep their expectations low, that way the shock of the attorneys’ fees wouldn’t be so great.

Nora was thinking about a new double-wide trailer and a new satellite dish. MaryBeth was thinking about a truckload of Ultra Slim-Fast. The paperwork was completed and Oscar thanked them for coming.

"When do we get the money?" MaryBeth asked.

"We?" asked Nora.

"Within sixty days," Oscar said, leading them out the side door.

Unfortunately, the next seventeen had insufficient aortic damage and Oscar was looking for a drink. But he hit paydirt with number nineteen, a young man who jolted the scales at five hundred fifteen pounds. His echocardiogram was beautiful – 40 percent insufficiency. He’d taken Skinny Bens for two years. Because he was twenty-six years old, and, statistically at least, he would live for thirty-one more years with a bad heart, his case was worth at least $500,000.

Late in the afternoon there was an ugly incident. A hefty young lady became incensed when Dr. Livan informed her that her heart was fine. No damage whatsoever. But she’d heard around town that Nora Tackett was getting $100,000, heard it over at the beauty shop in fact, and, though she weighed less than Nora, she too had taken the pills and was entitled to the same settlement. "I really need the money," she insisted.

"Sorry," Dr. Livan kept saying.

Oscar was called for. The young lady became loud and vulgar, and to get her out of the motel he promised to have their cardiologist review her echocardiogram anyway. "We’ll do a second workup and have the Washington doctors review it," he said, as if he knew what he was talking about. This settled her enough to move her along.

What am I doing here? Oscar kept asking himself. He doubted if anyone in Larkin had ever attended Yale, but he was frightened nonetheless. He’d be ruined if word got out. The money, just think of the money, he repeated over and over.

They tested forty-one Skinny Ben users in Larkin. Three made the cut. Oscar signed them up and left town with the bright prospect of about $200,000 in attorneys’ fees. Not a bad outing. He raced away in his BMW and drove straight to D.C. His next foray into the heartland would be a similar secret trip into West Virginia. He had a dozen planned for the next month.

Just make the money. It’s a racket. It has nothing to do with being a lawyer. Find ’em, sign ’em, settle ’em, take the money and run.

Chapter Thirty

On May 1, Rex Crittle left the accounting firm where he’d worked for eighteen years and moved upstairs to become the business manager of JCC. With the offer of a huge increase in salary and benefits, he simply couldn’t say no. The law firm was wildly successful, but in the chaos it was growing so fast its business seemed out of control. Clay gave him broad authority and parked him in an office across the hall from his.

While Crittle certainly appreciated his own large salary, he was skeptical of everyone’s around him. In his opinion, which he kept to himself for the time being, most of the employees were overpaid. The firm now had fourteen lawyers, all making at least $200,000 a year; twenty-one paralegals at $75,000 each; twenty-six secretaries at $50,000 each, with the exception of Miss Glick who earned $60,000; a dozen or so clerks of different varieties, each earning on the average $20,000; and four office gofers at $15,000 each. A total of seventy-seven, not including Crittle and Clay. Adding in the cost of benefits, the total annual payroll was $8.4 million, and growing almost weekly.

Rent was $72,000 a month. Office expenses – computers, phones, utilities, the list was quite long – were running about $40,000 a month. The Gulfstream, which was the biggest waste of all and the one asset Clay could not live without, was costing the firm $300,000 in monthly mortgage payments and another $30,000 for pilots, maintenance, and hangar fees. The charter revenue Clay was expecting had yet to show up on the books. One reason was that he really didn’t want anyone else using his airplane.

According to figures that Crittle monitored daily, the firm was burning around $1.3 million a month in overhead – $15.6 million a year, give or take. Certainly enough to terrify any accountant, but after the shock of the Dyloft settlement and the enormous fees that had flooded in, he was not in a position to complain. Not yet, anyway. He now met with Clay at least three times a week, and any questionable expenditure was met with the usual, "You gotta spend it to make it."

And spending they were. If the overhead made Crittle squirm, the advertising and testing gave him ulcers. For Maxatil, the firm had spent $6.2 million in the first four months on newspaper, radio, television, and online advertising. This, he had complained about. "Full speed ahead," had been Clay’s response. "I want twenty-five thousand cases!" The tally was somewhere around eighteen thousand, and virtually impossible to monitor because it changed by the hour.

According to one online industry newsletter Crittle peeked at every day, the reason the Carter firm in D.C. was getting so many Maxatil cases was that few other lawyers were aggressively pursuing them. But he kept this gossip to himself.

"Maxatil will be a bigger payday than Dyloft," Clay said repeatedly around the office, to fire up the troops. And he seemed to truly believe it.

Skinny Ben was costing the firm much less, but the expenses were piling up and the fees were not. As of May 1, they had spent $600,000 on advertising and about that much on medical tests. The firm had 150 clients, and Oscar Mulrooney had floated a memo claiming that each case was worth, on the average, $180,000. At 30 percent, Mulrooney was projecting fees of about $9 million within the next "few months."

The fact that a branch of the firm was about to produce such results had everyone excited, but the waiting had become worrisome. Not one dime had been collected from the Skinny Ben class-action settlement, a scheme that was supposed to be automatic. Hundreds of lawyers were involved in it, and, not surprisingly, major disagreements had arisen. Crittle didn’t understand the legal intricacies, but he was educating himself. He was fluent in overhead and fee shortages.

The day after Crittle moved in, Rodney moved out, though the two events were not related. Rodney was simply cashing in his chips and moving to the suburbs, to a very nice home on a very safe street, with a church on one end, a school on the other, a park around the corner. He planned to become a full-time coach for his four kids. Employment might come later, and it might not. He’d forgotten about law school. With $10 million in the bank, before taxes, he had no real plans, just a determination to be a father and a husband, and a miser. He and Clay sneaked away to a deli down the street, just hours before he left the office for good, and said their good-byes. They had worked together for six years – five at OPD, the last one at the new firm.

"Don’t spend it all, Clay," he warned his friend.

"I can’t. There’s too much of it."

"Don’t be foolish."

The truth was, the firm no longer needed someone like Rodney. The Yale boys and the other lawyers were polite and deferential, mainly because of his friendship with Clay, but he was only a paralegal. And Rodney no longer needed the firm. He wanted to hide his money and protect it. He was secretly appalled at the way Clay was blowing through such a fortune. You pay a price for waste.

With Jonah on a sailboat and Paulette still hiding in London and apparently not coming home, the original gang was now gone. Sad, but Clay was too busy to be nostalgic.