Book: The Litigators
John Grisham
Hachette
385 pages
Rs350
One fine day, David Zinc, 31, a highly-paid attorney at a firm that employs thousands of lawyers all over the world, decides that he doesn’t want to work in a sweatshop of a law firm where he hasn’t seen the light of day in five years. He runs away — literally — from his 93rd floor Chicago office, and into a bar round the corner. Drunk after spending the entire day hiding away in the bar, he gets into a cab, notices an ad for a ‘boutique’ firm called Finley & Figg, lands up at their office and demands a job.
Oscar Finley, 62, and his junior partner Wally Figg, 45, street lawyers and ambulance chasers, don’t know what to make of David, but when the young lawyer shows up the next morning, sober and serious about a job, they reluctantly give him the storage area to use as an office.
Figg, always on the lookout for a new scam that he could file a class-action lawsuit for, stumbles across a popular cholesterol drug called Krayoxx, manufactured by a giant pharma firm Varrick Labs. Rumour has it that the drug induces heart attacks and strokes. Figg gets together eight ‘death cases’ and hurriedly files a suit in a federal court. Varrick Labs hires a hardcore woman lawyer from David’s ex-firm to defend them.
Simultaneously, multiple lawsuits against Krayoxx are filed in different states in the US. The Krayoxx lawyers decide to form an alliance of sorts, with one major firm footing the costs of research and claiming a large piece of the returns. Finley and Figg now start making plans for the millions they will earn when — not if — they win the case against Varrick.
David, meanwhile, finds the case of a five-year-old in coma with lead poisoning. The firm, swamped with paperwork and fees for the Krayoxx litigation, refuses to fund David’s lead poisoning tests. So he digs into his savings, hires an expert and prepares a case against a toy manufacturer on his own. Only problem is, he doesn’t know the name of the manufacturer.
When the Krayoxx research comes through, the lawyers realise that the drug may not be as dangerous as they had claimed. The mass tort specialists back away from the case, leaving three inexperienced and broke street lawyers to face a jury trial with no expert witnesses to support them.
In classic Grisham style, The Litigators is an action-packed legal thriller. What’s different is the setting: Unlike his other works set in New York or Washington, this book is set in Chicago, and has a climax that justifies even the somewhat predictable and boring bits of the tale.
As the plot unravels, what stands out prominently is Grisham’s commentary on lawyers’ greed. They talk in millions, spend millions, they even own jets and private golf courses. But even as they scheme about millions, the plaintiffs of such lawsuits get a raw deal, with scheming lawyers stabbing them in the back, making deals with the big bad pharmaceutical firm, and filing motions on their clients’ behalf without ever consulting them. The clients continue to live in the squalor of their low-cost apartments, dreaming of the millions their lawyer ‘promised’ them.
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