sumber : ohbulan
Personal Injury Attorney Philadelphia
Something there is that doesn't love a personal injury lawyer. ''Ambulance chaser'' racing after victims, ''parachutist'' leaping into disaster sites; these have long been the legal profession's catcalls to colleagues who seem to prey on misfortunes.
Scenes of lawyers soliciting among the bereaved at a Delta jet crash in Texas three years ago, or descending on Bhopal, India, after a chemical plant leaked poison gas four years ago buttressed the unsavory image.
But changes in the character of the law on personal injury have cast a new light on the status of personal injury lawyers. A grubby and simple-minded legal specialty has grown lucrative and sophisticated, with notable injury and product liability cases like asbestos exposure rising to the stature of social upheavals.
''To an extent, the practice of personal injury law will always connote ambulance chasing,'' said Sheila L. Birnbaum, who heads the product liability department of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York. ''But the nature of the law has changed, and with it the perception of who we are and what it is we do.'' Outlook in Another Period
Twenty years ago the mainstays of most personal injury practices were car crashes and cases in which someone slips on a sidewalk and sues. ''You worked on a large volume of small cases - maybe 50 to 100 a year - that required no real research,'' said Barton A. Haines of Philadelphia, who has practiced personal injury law for about 20 years.
Awards were low. Joseph P. Altier, senior partner in the New York firm of Altier, Wayne & Klein, said that in 1961 ''my biggest verdict was around $200,000, and that was unusual.''
However, Ms. Birnbaum noted, ''Since I began practicing 23 years ago, the kinds of cases for which people could seek and get compensation from civil law expanded, while the cases themselves became more complex and intellectually demanding -more lucrative, too.''
Increased medical information and the introduction of new technologies joined a growing consumer rights movement to form the basis for medical malpractice cases. The notion of suing for other kinds of professional incompetence soon followed. New Kinds of Damage Claims
New technologies also wrought new dangers - toxic substances that threatened people's health and products that caused injury - and the legal system responded with new kinds of damage claims. At the same time, 23 states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and the District of Columbia have adopted no-fault automobile insurance, which eliminates many small-scale suits.
''In 1960, when I started, the cases were mostly slip-and-fall and auto,'' said Robert Conason of Gair, Gair & Conason in New York. ''There was virtually no medical malpractice and mass injury. Today, they constitute 40 percent of our cases.''
The complexity of these cases contributed to the profession's allure. Lawrence S. Charfoos, senior partner of Charfoos & Christensen in Detroit, who, with David W. Christensen, is co-author of ''Personal Injury Practice: Technique and Technology,'' said that successful personal injury lawyers must be expert in fields like medicine or engineering. ''You must be able to speak the language of expert witnesses, without losing the jury,'' Mr. Charfoos explained.
According to Edward B. Joachim, senior partner in Joachim Flanzig Lisabeth & Beasley in Mineola, L.I., litigating even a simple car crash can now involve computer reconstructions of the accident and engineers' calculations of speeds, times, distances and road configuration. Cases Requiring Years
The best-known lawyers in this field now work on a few cases that require years and tens of thousands of dollars to complete. Mr. Haines said his yearly inventory hovers between 50 and 75 cases. On average, only 10 are closed each year, and only after he has worked on each for about five years and spent an average of $20,000 on expert witnesses.
Unlike most lawyers, who charge by the hour, personal injury lawyers take a percentage of a successful client's damage awards, usually about one-third. And these awards can be substantial. Mr. Haines estimated that since about 1971 he has produced 13 multimillion-dollar results.
While many business executives and doctors blame lawyers for the litigation explosion that has clogged the courts and contributed to skyrocketing insurance rates, personal injury lawyers see themselves as a force for social good. ''We keep manufacturers honest,'' Mr. Altier said. ''If we didn't hit them, hard, they wouldn't institute safety measures or product redesigns.''
By contrast, defense lawyers see themselves as tribunes for lawsuit-besieged corporations. ''The risk is high,'' said Roy L. Reardon, a partner in Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York who was one of the first lawyers with a large Wall Street firm to defend products liability cases on a regular basis. ''After all, the asbestos exposure cases brought down the Johns-Manville Corporation.'' Benefits of New Focus
By taking on product liability cases, Mr. Reardon said, Simpson Thacher discovered it was better serving existing clients and attracting new clients - as did Skadden Arps, which nine years ago invited Ms. Birnbaum to create a product liability department. That department, she says, now comprises 35 lawyers pursuing ''high-stakes'' litigation.
''Some of our enhanced status also comes from our ability to try cases and win,'' said Joseph P. Napoli, a New York trial attorney specializing in personal injury disaster litigation. ''I love confronting trial lawyers from Wall Street firms, with their pinstriped suits and doodads hanging off their shoes. We wipe the floor with them, because we're trying cases all the time.''
The endorsement of large law firms and the newness of the personal injury field have fed interest in law schools. ''Students are enticed by class actions that have social and political impact, are highly publicized and potentially lucrative,'' said Betsy Levin, the dean of the University of Colorado law school, who is executive director of the Association of American Law Schools. ''They also see that personal injury law cuts across many interests: Someone pursuing international law may see that the excitement is in incidents like Bhopal.''
Faculty members, Professor Levin said, are also ''writing about this evolving field, lecturing on it, and this lures students.''
There are now more than 30,000 members of the A.B.A.'s tort and insurance practice section, according to its chairman, Andrew C. Hecker Jr., an increase of more than 4,000 members in the last year.
But figures mean little, Mr. Hecker said, if these lawyers live down to popular expectations. ''As they compete for business, some may act like ambulance chasers,'' he said.
To prevent this, state bar associations, particularly the one in Texas, and the national organization are devising guidelines on professional conduct and intervention projects for mass disasters. ''Only by living up to the professionalism of the stars in the field,'' Mr. Hecker said, ''can we uphold a more respectable reputation.''
