File and run (Plame's lawyer

As a PI, I worked with lots of them and I actually COULD say nice things about them. Not all of them mind you and not even a majority of them. But there is a need for tort lawyers in society, within reason, and there is a big difference between those who work auto v. auto cases and those who handle legal and med mal or other more complicated cases. Like anything else, they aren't all the same.

Being a trial lawyer is no guaranteed payday, as you probably know. So I'll just state publicly the fact that most of the public doesn't ever hear. You actually have to be a good lawyer in order to surivive being a trial lawyer because your livelihood depends, almost entirely, on winning cases or reaching quick and decisive settlements for your clients.

Only a few are media whores who specialize in promoting themselves and making victims of everybody in society and then basically under-serving their clients with quicky settlements in large volume to pay for the non-stop TV ads. A great trial lawyer has to analyze cases for liability, client credibility, financial worth and probability of a successful outcome. And if he screws up any of those points, he ends up chewing up his credit line and unable to finance the case(s) which really are big paydays and then has to suck it up and refer the good cases out to a more capitalized firm with lawyers who can close cases and the lawyer ends up settling for 25% of his normal commission.

Or worse, the lawyer could end up becoming an ambulance chaser and referring out ALL of his lucrative cases because he so mismanaged his practice that he can't afford to pay for experts, trial costs or discovery for the one case he stumbles upon which actually IS a wrongful death of a 45 yr old plastic surgeon with three pre-school kids and a $8M a year practice and the wife who gave up going to law school so that she could put her husband through medical school but still manages time to be a deacon at his local Methodist church where she helps counsel pregnant teens in between cooking food for the local homeless shelter. Or something like that. (And if you are a real trial lawyer, you've probably already started adding up economic damages on this story and thinking about which jurors you are going to want to get in the box before you even waited to find out how the surgeon got killed ....)

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