Trial lawyer, national media personality and novelist Mike Papantonio on this edition of
Conversations.
Mike Papantonios courtroom prowess has made him one of the nations preeminent trial lawyers.
His winning verdicts reach well into the millions.
Papantonio has earned a reputation for taking on tough and complicated cases against defendants
with abundant resources.
Many of those adversaries have found out the hard way Papantonios passion, determination
and legal flair is ha rd to combat.
In 2015 Mike Papantonio joined an elite group, he was inducted into the National Trial Lawyers
Hall of Fame.
Outside the courtroom his is known for astute political commentary.
He created Ring of Fire Networks, a multimedia platform which includes a national radio show.
His analysis is often heard on cable news outlets like MSNBC and Fox News.
Papantonio has authored several books, his latest a novel entitled Law and Disorder,
a suspenseful story that draws on Papantonios extensive legal career.
We welcome Mike Papantonio to this edition of Conversations.
Thank you for joining us.
Good to be here Jeff.
Tell me about the book.
For years I've handled cases that have had a lot of political overlays to them.
Whether it is a case against a pharmaceutical company, a case against Wall Street, whatever
it may be they've always had those kind of political intrigued sides to them.
I had enough people say you know you ought to write that sometimes and rather than writing
a non-fiction I thought it was best to put it into fiction.
My goal really has been Jeff, to somebody can pick up the book and they can read a chapter
and be entertained, but at the same time they come away from just being entertained they
learn something.
That's what these books, there's three of them that are in line here and this is the
first of them, and the whole idea is to kind of tell the back stories about the practice
of law and some of the politics and cultural and social issues that all tie into that.
Hopefully you can read it on the beach, walk away and say it was a good story but I learned
something.
What would the average person be most surprised about the back end of what goes on in the
law field?
I think probably they'd be most shocked at the pharmaceutical aspect of that particular
book.
The pharmaceutical story, what happens when a drug goes on the market, what happens when
a person actually takes a drug that they believe that the FDA had overseen and the FDA had
given approval on.
The stories it's not the type of thing that corporate media typically can tell, they have
advertisers whether it's whatever the pharmaceutical company is, they have advertisers that do
business with that pharmaceutical company.
Those back stories are rarely told, they'll see the headlines where maybe Merck of Pfizer
or one of the big pharmaceutical companies is hit for a big verdict, but they really
don't know why, they don't understand what took place.
Who is it that destroyed documents?
Who is it that tampered with the clinical data?
How did they sell it to the media?
Why did the media ignore it?
How did the FDA ignore it?
How did they make their way through an FDA bureaucracy in such a way that basically they
get everything they want when they want it?
Those aren't the kinds of things that people hear about, but that's one part of the story.
I don't think you'll find a book that explains that, certainly not in a fiction.
Grisham, I've always thought Grisham is very good at telling a story, but at the same time
he's telling the story you walk away and say gee, I didn't know that that's how judges
were appointed.
I didn't know that a judge had that much authority to do X, Y or Z.
I didn't know how you remove a judge from the bench.
Those types of things Grisham would always pack into his novels and that always captured
my interest because although he was an attorney he really didn't try cases, he wasn't a trial
lawyer.
These series of books take on the aspect of what does it really look like at ground zero.
It's one thing to describe a courtroom scene but it's another thing to take a courtroom
scene that actually took place and you go my gosh that can't be real and it is real.
There's courtroom scenes in this particular book and you'll go surely that didn't happen
and they really did happen.
Tell me about the characters in here, the main character Deke right?
Yes Nicholas Deketomis he's an attorney that handles basically big products cases all over
the country.
His goal in every one of the cases is to be able to get to trial and obviously get a result
for the claimant.
Most of the time what he's trying to do is if there's a product out there and it ought
to be off the market his goal is to get it off the market.
He's operating on all four cylinders in the right way, he wants to accomplish the right
thing for the right reason and he does well doing that.
He's a composite character in the sense that I looked around the country and I said I've
worked with really some of the finest trial lawyers in the country and I've borrowed a
little bit here and borrowed a little bit there.
I've put the barnacles on them when they needed barnacles, and so certainly he's not a whitewashed
character.
You don't end it say oh my gosh, this guy's perfect, he's far from it.
As the books continue you learn that each one of the characters in there kind of have
a little darker side than what you might think when you read it initially.
I was going to ask you how much of Mike Papantonio is in Deke?
Well I think it's impossible to write a book like that without drawing on your personal
experience.
I mean the old adage is write what you know about and certainly you know yourself and
you certainly know the topics well.
It's impossible for me to say that there are no part of that that's there.
I obviously used this area heavily.
I think anybody reading it is going to say ... I changed the names, I gave the characters
different names, I changed the areas, gave them different names.
At the end of it, the reading, they're going to know what it's about.
I think every author does that somewhat.
If you take a look at Baldacci or Grisham, any of the thriller writers they always start
off with the thing that they know.
It may be their home town, it may be some experience they had in some aspect of law
and so that's what this is.
There's certainly a little bit of me there but I didn't intend to say Deketomis is my
Papantonio, that's not my intent.
I'm always curious how novelists, I'm always curious about their process, what was your
process of putting this together?
I think anybody that writes fiction will tell you that the most difficult thing, and it
shouldn't be difficult, but the most difficult thing in the narrative, the conversations.
How do you go back in there and you and I are talking right now and how do we capture
what's happening here cleanly, quickly, in a way that actually means something?
What is interesting and unique about that conversation.
The story lines in these books are fairly easy because they really happened, but you
take what really happened and you put the fiction aspect, you add the intrigue to it,
you add the thriller aspect of it, you add the aspect of my gosh I hope this works out
for the character.
You take all of those things but the real trick to me is trying to take that character
and say how would they talk, how would they interact with their children, how would that
character interact with his wife, how would these two lawyers interact?
It sounds like it's fairly easy because all you do is say well people talk this way but
when you're writing a book and space is an issue, brevity's an issue in getting the idea
across quickly is an issue.
Those narratives are very important.
How long did it take you to massage this character into the person you wanted him to be?
I think every author ends up getting really angry with the editor because when I finished
that I would say to the editor, "Well I kind of like this part, why did you take it out?"
These are professionals, they understand because you want them to turn the page.
You don't want to get bogged down on the nuances to where they say ... Michener excelled at
taking a pineapple and he would say well what's the story of the pineapple?
Michener could tell you every aspect of the pineapple, but that wasn't intrigue.
These types of thriller novels, the reason I think I was so upset about what was cut
is those were parts of the stories I really liked but you have to.
At the end of all of it you have to have some trust in good editors and that's what I did
here.
Who's your favorite author?
Well I think the classic author would be Steinbeck.
I remember one time before I went to law school there was a great lawyer by the name of Perry
Nichols, he was an attorney down in Arcadia, Florida, one of the places I lived growing
up.
He had a cattle ranch down there and I was getting ready to move into journalism, I was
going to be a journalist and hopefully do foreign correspondence.
I think everybody at University of Florida in the journalism program wanted to do that
when they were coming through.
Somebody said to me, "You know Mike, you really ought to think about going to law school."
I said, "I really don't have any interest but I'll go talk to this person you want me
to talk to."
Perry Nichols was, at the time, Melvin Bell like quality, I mean he was truly the Clarence
Darrow of his time.
He was a wonderful lawyer.
His home was out of Miami, Florida but he gravitated and ended up kind of settling up
around north Florida.
I went to meet him and kind of in an artful way I said, "Mr. Nichols what do you think
made you such an important lawyer?"
I didn't know that I really wanted to hear the answer but the answer was spectacular.
He was in a wheelchair sitting in front of this wall and the wall was full of books.
On there was Steinbeck, Kafka, Conrad, Hemingway, all of the great novelists, and he said, "Well
to answer your question," he said, "first of all it started with me reading all those
books up there."
What he was trying to say is there's really no new ideas.
For a trial attorney not to have a real big, big background and a lot of interstitial information
about other ideas, other concepts I think is a big mistake and that's what Perry Nichols
was trying to tell me.
My reading coming up were those people, they were Kafka, Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck,
on and on that you would say are kind of the classic writers, not classical writers but
well known writers that moved me.
Was he the turning point in your life that made you say I want to be an attorney?
He had a big impact on it Jeff, a big impact.
There were other issues, again I think I was really committed more to journalism.
I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird and there's no way that a young person comes out
of reading To Kill a Mockingbird to say you know I'd like to do something like that, I'd
like to end my life and career in a way that it has some substantial impact on somebody
or something.
Well you've certainly had a big impact and I know a lot of the cases that you've worked
on have been geared towards environmental issues.
Yes they have been.
What I've always tried to do is I've tried to take on a big environmental case every
few years.
They're just so overwhelming that you can only do so many and the results I've had have
been good there's no question.
You can't get those kinds of results by taking on too many, they have to be the kind of case
where you say my gosh, if I don't solve this the latent aspects of damage to people is
going to be huge.
I'm involved with a project like that up in Ohio right now against DuPont where they poisoned
the drinking water of 70,000 people.
They poisoned it with something called C8 and they knew when they did it, they'd been
doing it for 50 years they've been dumping millions of pounds of this into the Ohio River
and it ended up in people's drinking water.
They knew when they were doing it that the product caused cancer.
In the last two cases I've tried up there have been horrible cancer cases.
That's the type of thing that I walk away and I say well are we going to accomplish
anything by this?
It's not just can we clean up the stream, it is can we save lives?
Can we let people know that this stuff is in the environment for five million years,
this C8, that it's in your human body for 25 years.
This is the kind of stuff that I believe does have an impact, but in reality if you're going
to have a life, when you have a child, when you have a family that's such an important
priority and you have to say well I can't do them all well, I'll pick them carefully.
What is it about these big companies or anyone once they realize that they're doing something
that is causing a great deal of harm, why don't they stop, why does it continue on,
when do the cover ups come on?
There's a quick answer to it.
First of all you're talking to somebody who believes that capitalism is the best system
in the world.
If you look all over the world capitalism works when its regulated, where there's common
goals, let's do well for everybody, let's do well by doing some good.
It used to be 25, 30 years ago a CEO would move through a company and that CEO might
be there for 20 years.
They might begin their career there and end their career in the large company.
Then what ended up happening in MBA school was what we call quick profits big risk and
those are my terms, I don't know they teach those terms in MBA school.
Here's what it is, you're moving through in three years.
You're going to go to a company like DuPont, you're going to be there for three, five at
the max and what you're going to do is you're going to maximize that 10K at the end of every
quarter, you're going to say did I raise that 10K even one-eighth of one penny?
Because if I did I'm going to make more money.
The whole system is built around that, the way that we pay CEOs is built around that
way.
The compensation issue has changed all that.
We don't really have a CEO that says, "You know I've been here for 20 years, I want to
end my career by not passing something on to the next CEO that has the potential to
do horrible damage to people."
That I think is one of the biggest things and then I think probably the next biggest
thing is that you don't have media really asking the tough questions.
You've got somewhat of a corporate media now and corporate media is driven by how many
advertising dollars do they sell.
Because of that they don't go and ask the tough questions and the CEOs know they can
get away with it.
The investigative journalism's not what it used to be.
No, there are no more Ed Morrows.
There are no more Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley.
We've moved to, again just like the quick profits big risk same thing with corporate
media, exactly the same thing.
I want to come back to media in just a moment because you're involved in that as well, but
before I do so what case are you most proud of?
I would say probably it just happened to be a local case around here, it was a case against
a company used to be called Conoco.
For so many years Conoco and it's predecessor and everybody in charge of the decision making
had really polluted bio tar and some areas around.
There was never a time when anybody really looked to find out how bad it was, to find
out really what was actually going on.
I think I vested my first effort into an environmental case there knowing that I was taking myself
away from other cases such as pharmaceutical cases and security cases, those types of things
that I do.
I was most proud of that because we got a good result and we got something done that
was meaningful, and it meant that people were at least aware that for 40 some years bad
government had allowed this to take its own life.
There was a lot of reasons I was proud of that, I don't know that that is the single
most important but that was an important case to me.
There's been many single cases where I've handled cases for individuals and you just
love these people, you work with them for years, you invest everything you can as far
as your effort with them and they do the same to you.
You feel like family and when you get a good result, the jury comes back and finds for
your client it is a big deal.
It's a big deal because it validates your efforts there.
You've had six to 12 people hearing your story and say yes, you should have been here, what
you're saying here is right and what has happened here just needs to be corrected.
You're known for mass torts and as I understand it you were instrumental in bringing the whole
mass torts line of business so to speak for lack of a better term to your law firm, to
Levin Papantonio Law Firm.
First of all what are mass torts and what makes you so good at it?
Mass torts, people always confuse mass torts with class actions and they're not even close
to the same thing.
A mass tort is simply, it's a description of a case where it may be one pharmaceutical
case, it may be one drug that has been put on the market and the FDA hasn't done their
job, and because of the FDA not doing their job sometimes it's so dysfunctional that they
let these things get through.
It ends up effecting not just two or three people, it ends effecting thousands of people.
I mean I could go on forever about the cases, the best description of a mass tort case probably
would be the YAZ case.
YAZ was a birth control pill and it was put out there in competition with 50 to 60 other
birth control pills, but the problem Jeff was is they couldn't make enough money just
selling a birth control pill.
If it was just a birth control pill it really didn't mean that much because there were so
many competitors, everybody was selling birth control.
What they did is they figured out a way to market it to appeal to young women, to say
if you take this birth control pill you're going to be slimmer, you're not going to have
acne, you're going to be able to fight weight problems if you take this pill.
In fact they never had tested any of that to know that it was actually true.
It was a pill it had a six time higher risk of causing a DVT or a stroke than the other
competitors.
That pill was out on the market for years and there were lawyers that kept saying you
know Mr. Media, ABC, CBS, you ought to go cover this story, this is important, my daughter's
taking this, this is what happened to her, my wife took it, this is what happened.
That's how a mass tort case develops.
I'm typically hired and our firm is hired to handle cases for other lawyers throughout
the country.
You may have a lawyer who is an advertiser, 1-800 drug whatever it is.
They're more of a marketer and I don't mean that in an awful way, I just mean that's what
they focus on.
You've got people that just market, they're right around here in this town and so and
so and so and so.
How many cases have you tried?
We end up going and actually trying cases for those people.
The point is you just have to be able to do it all in mass torts.
You have to understand I have to educate people, but once they're in my office I got to be
able to say I can take your case and I can try it in California if I have to, I can try
it in New York or Chicago, wherever.
Right and it's an expensive, complicated scenario.
Yes absolutely, a typical mass tort will cost a law firm, I mean if they're the ones actually
doing all the work will cost anywhere from $6 to $18 million, somewhere in that area.
Let's switch over to media.
You have a pretty strong media background.
You've been doing it for what, close to two decades now.
Right at two decades yes.
Tell me about Ring of Fire.
Ring of Fire was an idea that really sprung up out of ... Bobby Kennedy and I have been
friends for a very long time and we were actually asked to do a show on something that used
to be called Air America.
It was an attempt by progressives, I mean it was Janeane Garofalo, Chuck D, Al Franken,
Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead and so were all in there and we were asked do some programming
for this entity called Air America, so that's where we started.
Then Air America it didn't hold together.
First of all the finances of it didn't hold together, but what came out of it was brilliant
because everybody went their own way and they did their own thing and that was critical.
You have another television project you're working on right?
Yes I do, right now RT International it's an international network.
If you go to RT International, to any country in the world you're going to see RT International.
They're making a move into the United States and they've asked me to do a program called
America's Lawyer where we interview lawyers who have these huge cases from all over the
country.
They tell the back stories, they name names, they say this judge did this, this legislator
did this, this FDA person did this and here was the net result of it.
I'm going to start that in October and it runs out of Washington, DC but we're going
to do it right here in Pensacola.
They've built a studio here and it's going to run right here, and it'll show in every
English speaking country in the world, that was just part of the arrangement.
I'm excited about doing it.
I'm a little bit tired of doing politics, I've started off doing politics all the way
back to Fox News where I was the only progressive or liberal on a panel and it would be me against
three other people and they'd yell at me for about four minutes and I tried not to yell
back but I found I had to just to be heard.
I did that a couple of years and then I did a little bit of CNN, not real regular.
MSNBC ended up doing pretty regularly, and so Ed Schultz who's been a friend for so long
I guess I did his show more often than anything else.
By the way he's on the RT Network along with Larry King, so it's a good lineup on RT Networks.
Larry King, him, Thom Hartmann, it's just a wonderful lineup of people.
I have just a very short period of time left here.
Must have been quite an accomplishment for you to be inducted into the Trial Lawyers
Hall of Fame, that's a pretty big deal huh?
It was a big deal.
There's only I think in the state maybe there's five of us, something like that.
Fred Levin of course, my partner was also in the hall of fame so it's a very big honor,
I can tell you that.
Got about a minute and a half left, what's next for Mike Papantonio, more books?
That's what I enjoy doing now and I think my family likes me doing that.
They'd rather have me at home writing a book than they would traveling around the country
trying a case.
I'm going to probably be trying cases but I'm going to be focusing a little bit on telling
these stories, both through the media as I've done for years and through these books.
Hopefully people will appreciate that there's a lot of truth, there's a lot of truth to
what happens in these books.
The only thing that's not true in that one is the murder scene.
If there's one thing you would like for people to kind of remember you by or when they think
of Mike Papantonio what would you like for them to think about just quick?
I tell young lawyers if you can't stand in a room of 1,000 people where everybody disagrees
with you and still maintain your position if you think you're right then you should
not be a trial lawyer, it just is not suited for you.
You got to be able to handle rejection, handle disagreement.
Great, Mike Papantonio what a pleasure to talk with you, thank you so much.
Well thank you Jeff I appreciate it.
The name of the book Law and Disorder, Mike Papantonio.
It's a legal thriller, it's a novel, first one in a series, worth a read for sure.
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