Replies

Edwards began his career in 1978 defending big businesses in Nashville.

His team's first major win came in the case of a 58-year-old alcoholic whose doctor prescribed three times the recommended amount of the drug Antabuse. The patient overdosed, suffering permanent brain damage.> The judge seemed skeptical from the outset. When Edwards and a co-counsel refused a $350,000 settlement. They wound up getting a $3.7 million settlement. Soon, seven-figure awards became common: A Greenville, N.C., girl born with brain damage got $6.5 million. The widow of a Guilford County man whose X-rays showing fatal lung cancer were misplaced, and ignored, received $3.25 million. Like many personal-injury lawyers, Edwards typically took a third or more of the winnings.

client Billy Joe Johnson. His family received $2.9 million in settlements after an ambulance driver ran a stoplight, killing his wife.

The biggest complaint critics make about Edwards' legal career is that he made his millions in a profession many Americans find distasteful and even damaging to the nation's health-care system.

David Bruton, a member of former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt's cabinet and a Moore County pediatrician. Edwards sued Bruton's partner and his practice on behalf a baby born with brain damage. "He's a skilled user of a very flawed system."

"I think of a lawyer as being like a doctor," John Edwards wrote. "They both give advice and save lives."

Some of the doctors he sued complain that Edwards' approach ignored fundamental facts about their work. He often depicted cases as battles between right and wrong. But medical decisions, doctors say, are complicated and drenched in subtlety. "Every parent expects an IQ of 140 and a Harvard Law graduate," said Dr. Lorne Hall. "When something less than that happens, they feel they have a legitimate case." Edwards sued Hall, a Raleigh obstetrician, on behalf of a baby girl who developed cerebral palsy due to a lack of oxygen in the womb.

Asheville's Dr. Peter Gentling opted for early retirement soon after facing Edwards in court.

In 1992, Gentling treated a woman with a family history of breast cancer. Years earlier, he had removed a cancerous lump from the woman's left breast. A new needle aspiration showed the possibility of a malignancy in her right breast.> Gentling, in practice since 1969, removed both breasts without waiting for a biopsy. He found no cancer. An arbitrator ordered him to pay Edwards' client $850,000. "The lawyers and the insurance companies have taken over," Gentling said of his decision to retire early. "John Edwards was part of that."

Edwards joined the Inner Circle of Advocates, open to personal-injury lawyers who have completed at least 50 trials and won at least one $1 million verdict, at 37.

Edwards sometimes got so involved in his work that he seemed to neglect a few of life's basic responsibilities: He voted half the time and on many occasions failed to pay his property taxes on time. He's lost his wedding ring several times, to the point that his wife finally visited a jewelry store and bought every size nine men's band in stock.

In 1992, Edward left Tharrington Smith to start a firm specializing in personal-injury work with friend David Kirby. "John wanted to be lean and profitable," said former boss J. Harold Tharrington. The new law firm reflected that attitude: Edwards and Kirby would spend $250,000 preparing a case, hiring experts and staging mock trials. Yet they rented space on the outskirts of Raleigh rather than a skyscraper suite downtown and kept just two other lawyers and three nurses on staff. Kirby says Edwards owned two courtroom suits -- one blue, one brown -- and got antsy splurging on $150 sneakers.

By his early 40s, Edwards had built a small fortune.

"Everything he touched turned to gold."

Edwards friend oversaw estate case
Bankruptcy judge awarded fee of $1.06 million to firm in case on which Elizabeth Edwards worked

By MATTHEW EISLEY, Staff Writer

A federal bankruptcy judge in 1999 approved a million-dollar fee for the law firm where Elizabeth Anania Edwards once worked -- one month after Sen. John Edwards got President Clinton to nominate the jurist as a lifetime federal trial court judge. There's no evidence that the senator knew about the case, or that Elizabeth Edwards, who had left the firm three years earlier, was involved in it at the time.

Bankruptcy Judge Rich Leonard approved the $1.06 million fee in a case called Conner Home Sales, a liquidation bankruptcy of a mobile-home company in which Mrs. Edwards had done most of her firm's work from 1989 to 1995 as trustee of the Conner estate.

Leonard, a close personal friend of the Edwardses, says he saw no reason to recuse himself from a case that he had been handling for years without any complaint from the parties. They were Nicholls & Crampton; First Union National Bank, Conner's main creditor; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had an interest in the assets of a Conner subsidiary that financed the sales.

Leonard, who didn't get the District Court judgeship and remains a bankruptcy judge, said the suggestion that his nomination by Clinton or his friendship with the Edwardses might have influenced his fee decision was baseless.

The circumstances are unusual in part because Mrs. Edwards hadn't kept records of how she spent the time she worked on the case, later estimated at 2,850 hours over six years. That was more time than the firm's four other lawyers and a paralegal recorded spending on it.

Bankruptcy Administrator Marjorie Lynch noted that when she recommended a smaller fee of about $952,000 . The firm had requested about $1.3 million .

Mrs. Edwards said she didn't keep track of the time she worked as a part-time associate.

Leonard had been among John Edwards' best friends for more than two decades, since they worked as law clerks together for a federal judge in Raleigh. They and their teenage sons climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 1995. And Leonard had known Elizabeth Anania since they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Code of Conduct for federal judges says they should uphold the integrity of the judiciary, remain impartial, and avoid impropriety and the appearance of it.

The code does not explicitly mention handling the cases of friends. But the guide "Checklists for financial and other conflicts of interest" on the federal courts Web site says judges may be disqualified if, among other reasons, "your impartiality might reasonably be questioned on any other basis (for example, presiding over cases handled by close friends) ."