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RICHARD SCRUGGS IS CORPORATE America's worst legal nightmare. In the 1980s and early '90s, he made millions litigating asbestos claims and went on to national fame for beating Big Tobacco, representing the whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, subject of the movie The Insider. Scruggs' tobacco suits netted his practice an estimated $1 billion, money that bought him toys, from a $100,000 Bentley to a Falcon jet--and turned him into the dart-board face of tort reform. At 58, he works out of a small firm in Oxford, Miss., with his son Zach and two other lawyers. Scruggs...
Since June, the courtly Scruggs and a group of other trial lawyers, including ex-tobacco litigators, have filed 48 class actions against more than 400 nonprofit hospitals, including some of the largest and most prestigious health-care providers in California, Illinois, New York and Texas. They have anted up $1.5 million of their own funds to pursue the cases. More suits are being filed almost weekly, all with a similar complaint: that the hospitals are charging the uninsured grossly inflated prices, dispensing a tiny fraction of their revenues in charity care, engaging in abusive collection tactics and, in some cases...
...Burning Issue A $280 billion U.S. trial began against cigarette makers. The Justice Department claims they hid smoking's harmful effects for 50 years. Tobacco firms deny...
...Tobacco in China...
...tied by a shrinking U.S. market, the Marlboro Man is setting his sights on China. Altria Group's Philip Morris International will soon produce the world's best-selling cigarette in the world's largest tobacco market. China's more than 300 million smokers consumed 1.75 trillion cigarettes last year, but foreign sales accounted for only about 5% of these because of government restrictions. The venture with Fujian province's Longyan Cigarette Factory will make Marlboros widely available in China. But Big Tobacco's China dreams have gone up in smoke before. In 1986 R.J. Reynolds formed a $31 million...