Word: tobacco
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These days some of Scruggs' best friends have M.D. after their names. Scruggs is the lawyer who, more than any other, was responsible for the $246 billion settlement agreed to by tobacco companies in 1998 to defray the medical costs of smokers who fall ill. And he arrived in Connecticut with a message those managed care-weary doctors were eager to hear: HMOs are next on his target list. "They are second-guessing doctors' medical decisions with accountants and bean counters," he told the crowd indignantly...
...Tobacco and their attorneys get called a lot of things, but stupid - or suicidal - is rarely one of them. How, then, to explain the tactics industry lawyers used during and after their latest legal battle, tactics that incensed the very jurors charged with setting a price tag on tobacco's defeat...
...Philip Morris attorney Dan Webb's plea to jurors not to punish them with a large award, and his claim that the $145 billion award was "a death warrant": "He ignored the death warrant on the millions of lives of people [the tobacco industry] lied about," jury foreman Leighton Finegan said. "For them - Big Tobacco - this trial was about money. For us, it was about people's lives... We still feel they're arrogant...
...After two previous losing verdicts with the same jury - in July 1999, the jury found that the industry made a deadly product, and in April, they ordered the industry to pay $12.7 million in compensatory damages to three smokers representing the class in this suit - Big Tobacco surely knew what was coming. They also knew, the third time through, who they were really arguing for, and it wasn't the jury. It was the judge, who can reduce the verdict unilaterally; the appeals court, which is the huge award's next stop; and Wall Street. Wondering why tobacco stocks actually...
...expected to do his part in whittling down the amount. And the appeals process - whether it's the two-year trip to the Florida Supreme Court envisioned by most experts, or the 75-year flood of individual trials that Webb was crowing about - ought to do the rest. The tobacco lawyers' shrill and relentless hubris might just have resulted in an award that's more like a balloon than a bill, overinflated and ready to burst...