It should suffice to make lawyers work for minimum wage. NO contingency fees or otherwise taking a piece of settlements.
I think the lawyers got $800,000 initially out of Michael's latter two phony malpractice suits. Do you suppose they would have pursued the swindle unless they got 40%? Imagine if the sharks made, oh, $5.50 an hour, Terri would probably be taking bike rides in the park today.
They got another $400,000 or so out of the same settlement money later by killing her. Now we're up to 60% of the settlement devoured by lawyers. Michael got his loss of consort award -- what was the net, $300,000? 75% of the settlement gone. I don't even want to think what part the IRS got.
The jury awarded the money to take care of Terri, and as far as possible, to give her the therapies she needed. Instead, Michael and the lawyers killed her and kept the money.
I presume this is what the whole so-called "right to die" movement is really about -- killing for profit.
Which is why, I might have added, that former prosecutor Wendy Murphy called Michael a "fraud on the court." Frankly, I think all of the lawyers who undertook the malpractice lawsuits were frauds on the court. One of them MADE UP the "malpractice," shown (much later) to be nonsense by Terri's autopsy. In the later litigation Felos, Bushnell et al. twisted or concealed the truth over and over in order to kill an innocent woman. They took huge fees from Terri's own trust fund (!) to put her to death. But then, why was the court ever involved, after Michael had shown himself to be a fraud back in 1993?
The whole think stunk more than a hog farm.