Word: jamail
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...trial lawyers in the U.S. are living large. Texas tort king Joe Jamail is widely known as the world's richest lawyer, with a net worth of $1.2 billion. When Frederick Furth, a top San Francisco trial lawyer, isn't litigating antitrust cases, he is engaging his passion for wine at his 1,200-acre Chalk Hill vineyard in Sonoma County, Calif. Wayne Reaud (pronounced Ree-oh) has used his hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from asbestos and other "toxic tort" litigation to buy the local newspaper and a chunk of downtown real estate in his hometown...
...play is a vital one. The ability to sue for injuries is a basic American right, they say, one that supporters of tort reform are scheming to take away. "[Tort reform] is no more than a code to close the courthouse down to poor and middle-class people," says Jamail. "You don't see these corporations being tentative or bashful about running to the courthouse against each other or against individuals who don't pay their bills...
Most of these lawyers grew up working class or as outsiders. Scruggs and most members of his tobacco and HMO litigation teams were born in the small-town South. Jamail is the son of Lebanese immigrants. Levin is the son of a Jewish pawnbroker. Angelos, a child of Greek immigrants, put himself through law school working in his family's tavern. Most started out small. Reaud began by representing workers in the East Texas petrochemical industry who had smashed their fingers and toes at work. In Levin's first case, he won a $50,000 verdict against an insurance company...
...something changed in the '70s: the awards began to get a lot larger. In 1978 Jamail brought a case against Remington for defects in a gun that injured a man in a hunting accident. The $6.8 million settlement landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Furth won his clients $70 million in 1973 on an antitrust price-fixing case against gypsum-wallboard manufacturers (and got a $4.3 million...