AT THE New York Yankees baseball stadium, the umpiring decisions have a sponsor: Court TV. In a culture where legal rights and wrongs have so central a place, it is not surprising that a vice-presidential candidate in this November’s election, John Edwards, of the Democratic Party, was a successful trial lawyer whose recently published autobiography Four Trials (written with John Auchard; Simon & Schuster) focuses on the lessons that he learnt from his experiences in the courtroom.
Edwards practised law for 20 years until he was elected to the US Senate in 1998. The four cases he describes involved appalling negligence that blighted the lives of victims in North Carolina: the man permanently disabled because of the blunders by a doctor and the local hospital; the baby born with cerebral palsy because of medical malpractice; the couple killed by a reckless truck driver; and the five-year-old girl whose intestines were sucked out by a faulty drain in a swimming pool.
In each of these cases, Edwards the advocate triumphed, persuading the jury to award substantial compensation to the plaintiffs. Although past failure is not a characteristic on which a campaign manager would want a candidate to dwell, analysis of at least one losing trial would have made for a more balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the legal system. Without going into detail, Senator Edwards says that he learnt a great deal from the cases he lost: “I had learned how my work had to keep getting better, how I needed to know more and understand more.” But not, it appears, that sometimes a client does not have a good cause of action. Nor is there any discussion of cases he won for undeserving clients.
The book says nothing of interest about the complex problems of policy posed by personal injuries litigation. Senator Edwards criticises the state legislature’s restrictions on punitive damages, but does not consider whether the existence of such broad powers for the jury pressurises defendants into settling weak claims. There is no mention of one of the most interesting and controversial features of such litigation: what was his firm’s contingency fee and how much did they earn from the multimillion-dollar verdicts?
Senator Edwards is much more interesting on the process of preparing and arguing cases, and the pressures involved in representing a person whose life has been destroyed. He recalls the anxiety when waiting for the verdict, thinking of “the things you might have said better and all the things you might have done differently”. He suffered from clients who discover their “inner lawyer” and bombard their attorneys with suggestions. And he recollects the sadness of the client, whose husband had been killed by a doctor’s negligence, asking after the successful conclusion of the trial: “What next?”
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Edwards was plainly a very skilful and successful lawyer to whom juries paid attention, but his style will not be to the taste of all readers. Advocates should not try telling the Central London County Court that the claimant “speaks to you through me. Right now I feel her, I feel her presence; she’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.” Edwards recalls the appallingly bad advocacy of counsel for a hospital cross-examining the quadriplegic plaintiff by accusing him of once cheating on his golf score.
We all have our peculiarities but few of us advocates are so well prepared, or balanced, that we spend the night before each trial having a family dinner in the same restaurant discussing what would happen the next day (“the finest times I have known”). Senator Edwards’s law firm was unusual in the range of services provided to clients: when the plumbing at a client’s house did not work, “she called our office for advice — and we were happy to send a lawyer out there to help her”. At Blackstone Chambers, we would send a plumber, or refer her to the Yellow Pages.
There is a great deal of cornball hokum, as in Senator Edwards’s panegyric to the jury, his experiences of which led him to “understand how smart and decent all kinds of regular American people are and will surely continue to be”. Especially if they vote Democrat in November. But even the most cynical lawyer will be moved by his account of how, after the death of his son, he channelled his anger into the representation of another victim of injustice. Edwards “had the great privilege to be Valerie’s voice when she needed me. And the great fortune to be her voice when I needed her.”
Most of us tell our tales from the courtroom in the vain hope that we may interest or amuse our friends. Four Trials has the more serious objective of promoting a political campaign. However it affects the floating voter, or the hanging chad, the book is a worthwhile account of what it means to be an advocate.
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The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford