Posted on 07/07/2004 4:49:46 PM PDT by Key West Girl
Trial Lawyers Help Edwards Make His Case
Excerpt from The Buying of the President 2004 Follows the Edwards Money Trail
June 25, 2004
In 1981, John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to North Carolina, where Edwards was raised. Elizabeth took a job as an attorney at one of Raleigh's leading bankruptcy law firms, while Edwards joined a firm known for its criminal defense work, Tharrington Smith & Hargrove. He was soon asked by Wade Smith, one of the firm's founders and a former chairman of the state Democratic Party, to take on a malpractice case. Edwards turned down several settlement offers, according to The New Yorker, including one for $750,000 made just before the case went to the jury. Ultimately, Edwards won a damage award of $3.7 million for his client, his first million-dollar verdict and a record in North Carolina at the time. The following year, 1985, Edwards won a $6.5 million judgment for a 6-year-old girl who'd suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville.
Edwards went on to try no fewer than 63 major cases during the 1990s and, according to media reports, brought in more than $152 million for his clients, almost all of whom were victims of medical malpractice. He became so admired and so feared that doctors would settle cases for millions of dollars rather than face him at trial. The high-stakes victories earned Edwards and law partner David Kirby the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service. The courtroom conquests also netted Edwards an invitation to join the Inner Circle of Advocates, the exclusive, secretive club of 100 lawyers who have won multimillion-dollar verdicts.
Edwards gave up his law practice in 1998 and parlayed his fame and personal wealth—financial disclosures put his worth at between $13.7 million and $38.6 million—into a seat in the U.S. Senate. He went from relative obscurity to front-runner status against Democratic primary opponent D.G. Martin, who was well established in local politics as a former lobbyist and two-time congressional candidate. The political greenhorn won the primary and won again against his Republican rival, incumbent Senator Lauch Duncan Faircloth.
The campaign against Faircloth was financed largely through two sources: the wealth Edwards won in the courtroom (he loaned his campaign $3.2 million from personal funds) and contributions from attorneys from around the country. In fact, his deep-pocketed supporters have been drawn from the ranks of his professional brethren, America's personal injury lawyers—colleagues Edwards has willingly tapped throughout his political life for their resources, connections, and riches.
Trial lawyers, records show, have been his most generous contributors. Of Edwards' top 25 career patrons, 22 are fellow members of the plaintiffs' bar. (The remaining three are soft money mogul and movie producer Stephen Bing, Goldman Sachs Group, and Wakefield Development, a real estate developer.) In early fundraising for his White House run Edwards relied heavily on his fellow lawyers, some of whom have been generous beyond what federal election law allows.
We were trying to figure out what a secretary in Alabama earns these days when the Senator's campaign announced it would return $10,000 to employees of a Little Rock, Arkansas, law firm after one law clerk acknowledged that she expected her boss to pay her back for her $2,000 donation. Michelle D. Abu-Halmeh said that her boss, Tab Turner of Turner & Associates (SUV rollovers), "asked for people to support Edwards," and said "he would reimburse us." Mr. Turner then told reporters that he wasn't reimbursing her, because "apparently" it was illegal to do so. Apparently?
a.) The convention is not over.
b.)The November surprize has not occured.
-or-
c.)Hillary has decided to torpedo this election cycle and clear the deck for 2008.
Take your pick. It is still going to be a fun and action-packed season!
You are the master of ping. I love them!
Very interesting, and sad. None of them have any morals anymore and they call the President a liar and deceiver!!
bttt
"Lawyer talk".
LOL! Good pic ! :^D
For corporate attorneys, it is not hard to pass the hat around the firm and round up a sizeable sum. But in trial lawyers’ shops, the average clerk cannot usually ante up the funds to donate to a political campaign.
There is evidence that Edwards may have circumvented the campaign-finance law by bundling contributions from law clerks and paralegals who did not actually make the donations from their own funds.
Tab Turner, for example, the eminent Little Rock trial lawyer, donated $200,000 to Edwards’s campaign and his 527 committees. Investigators interviewed the clerks in his firm in whose names many of the donations were made. Slate magazine reported, on Aug. 29, 2003, that “one clerk who gave $2,000 to Edwards said that Turner had ‘asked for people to support Edwards’ and assured them that ‘he would reimburse us.’”
Edwards had to return $10,000 to several Turner employees and attorney Tab claimed that he did not know it was illegal to reimburse his employees for their donations.
One or two illegal contributions will not bring Edwards down, but it is easy to speculate that his donor list may be rife with such tales. The pressure on trial lawyers to come up with funds for the struggling Edwards campaign was intense, and many trial lawyers may have fallen victim to the temptation to use straw donors to make their contributions.
Here is the ATLA’s Logo …
… these are better:
And from my neck of the woods:
Edwards: "Your mouthwash just ain't cuttin' it!!"
They are both master liars and it comes naturally to look someone in the eye and lie through your teeth at the same time.
The John-John Manboy Love ASSociation is run by two trial lawyers - the FIT RIGHT IN.
Hillary and Beel are both lawyers.
Three paramedics were boasting about their respective ambulance team's response times. "With our new satellite navigation system," bragged one, "we've cut our emergency response time by ten percent." The second paramedic commented. "By using a computer model of traffic patterns, we we cut our average time by 20 percent." "That's nothing said the third paramedic. "Since our ambulance driver passed the bar exam, we've cut our emergency response time in half!"
But I did "borrow" it first. 8^D
Competitive Graphics, eh? I don't know what would make me crack one of those books.
Not a pro, but FReepmail me with question; maybe I can assist in keeping you away from those b-b-b-books.
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