“What has happened is that the legislatures ... have failed,” boasted trial lawyer John Coale to the New York Times. “Congress is not doing its job [and] lawyers are taking up the slack.”
     While Mr. Coale was referring, in this instance, to the legal war against the tobacco industry, the quote is much more symbolic of how the trial bar views its role in society. With an unlimited amount of money, well-heeled judicial and political allies, an adoring press and an endless stream of industries to wage war on, the nation’s new “litigation elite” sees itself as “rescuing the process of lawmaking from the lawmakers,” according
to Walter K. Olson in The Rule of Lawyers.