Word: levins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hotel receptionists and pharmacy clerks who refused to speak English. I scoffed at the idiots who spent an hour waiting to get into the Louvre when the alternative entrance is a few feet--I mean meters--away. I had mastered the difference between pain de campagne and pain au Levin. How much more French could...
Plaintiffs' lawyers retort that they are the only force in public life today that can be counted on to stand up for everyday Americans. "We're the last bastion," says Pensacola, Fla., trial lawyer Fred Levin, a key player in his state's tobacco litigation. "We're the last fighters available for the little guy." They say they've been on the right side of the big issues for decades, from getting air bags in cars to limiting tobacco companies' advertising to minors to forcing gun companies to install trigger locks...
Despite the luxe, most of them are populists at heart. Reaud has a photograph in his office lobby of one of his heroes, firebrand United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. Levin says one of his formative experiences was being part of the first racially integrated class at the University of Florida Law School. Furth, whose father was a union steelworker, is a fervent New Dealer who drives a Rolls-Royce with the license plate ROBEY ST. to remind him of his humble beginnings on the far South Side of Chicago...
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...
...were ever going to win." Scruggs put almost all his financial assets at the time--about $3 million--into the case. "Some of us get paid amounts that are hard to justify," he admits, but so, he says, do many other professions today, from prizefighters to Internet entrepreneurs. Levin concedes his firm's $300 million take was "totally obscene" and says he's giving much of it to charity...