Those of you who are interested in the Scruggs bribery allegations have probably already seen this via David Rossmiller’s blogging. However, if you haven’t, Fortune’s Legal Pad blog has a post up that speculates on why the Scruggses might have been so boneheaded (if the allegations are true) as to engage in a little bribery:
The plaintiff in the suit is John G. Jones, 52, or, more accurately, his law firm: Jones, Funderberg, Sessums, Peterson & Lee of Jackson, Mississippi. A career plaintiffs lawyer, Jones’s firm was formerly a member of the Scruggs Katrina Group (SKG), a consortium of five law firms suing insurers over their handling of Hurricane Katrina claims. Scruggs, 62, is one of the nation’s most prominent plaintiffs lawyers, having made a fortune in asbestos and tobacco litigation.
Jones suggests that Scruggs’s possible motive for the bribe — assuming, of course, that Scruggs in fact had any involvement in one — may have been to hide from public view a suit that threatened to expose the allegedly shabby way Scruggs treats his business associates. “It isn’t what Clarence Darrow would’ve done,” asserts Jones.[...]
In March 2007, Jones sued Scruggs and the other SKG partners. He specifically chose to bring the case in Oxford, where Scruggs lives and works, rather than in Jackson, where Jones does, in order to shame Scruggs, he says. (Oxford is about 160 miles north of Jackson.)
“I wanted a jury to hear it in Dickie’s backyard,” Jones says. “I wanted to ‘out’ this a little bit. I’d known he’d done this repeatedly to other lawyers, he and Barrett. They got them to do the work, but when the money came in, they’d just low-ball ‘em.”
I think it’s almost obvious that hell hath no fury like a p-o’ed attorney (or a trial lawyer who smells a lot of money), especially if you’ve watched the Scruggs’ war on State Farm in the wake of Katrina.
If the allegations all around are true, then it would seem that the Scruggses may have been blind to the lesson they were so successfully teaching those previously unacquainted with the concept.
P.S., en extra-special hat-tip goes to David Rosmiller for sharing a particularly colorful description
of Jones v. Scruggs:
[T]his alleged bribery by Dickie Scruggs and others came in what my source calls a “cracker ass attorney fee dispute,” not in the real Katrina insurance litigation with insurers.