When I was a young lawyer I looked up to the big time plaintiffs lawyers in awe - men like Joe Jamail and Gerry Spence were my heroes. I was very naive and misguided. There are no colorful bigger than life lawyers now like there were then. There ares still lawyers who get the huge verdicts, but they just aren’t as entertaining and colorful but they are just as devious.
One of the current big time lawyers is Mark Lanier of Houston, who has won some huge verdicts, although he seems to have trouble hanging onto them. He loves to tell juries how he is an ordained Baptist preacher and quote scripture to them. In my humble opinion, that is grounds enough to be skeptical of anything else he says.
Case in point - in the recent Fifth Circuit opinion, Depuy Orthopaedics et al., 888 F.3d 753 (2018) Lanier had a $502 million dollar judgment snatched away for his various ethically dubious actions during the trial - comparing the defendants to Saddam Hussein, for starters. Then he implied that the defendants were racists against blacks. The 5th Circuit referred to plaintiffs’ lawyers as “Lanier and crew.” That’s not phraseology you will often see from a appeals court describing a team of lawyers - sounds more like a gang of mafia thugs.
Allison Frankel wrote on Reuters.com - 5th Circuit mounts searing attack on lawyer Mark Lanier
The 5th Circuit panel – Judges Jerry Smith, Rhesa Barksdale and Stephen Higginson – reamed Lanier repeatedly and by name, accusing him of inflammatory tactics and outright deception. Lanier ran afoul of the Rules of Civil Procedure at least twice in his closing arguments, the 5th Circuit said. The appeals court said those violations, on their own, would have warranted a new trial. But that’s not all the famed trial lawyer did wrong, according to Judge Smith’s outrage-fueled opinion.
Lanier told jurors several times that two key medical witnesses for his side were unpaid, drawing a contrast with DePuy’s expert witnesses. But Lanier’s witnesses, in fact, had either received or expected to receive compensation. Lanier had “manufactured” a “false” choice for jurors between his side’s unpaid experts and the other side’s hired guns, the 5th Circuit said.
The truth was that Lanier paid his experts about $30k each.
