There's something peculiar about the huge pay-off for lawyers handling the tobacco case. In recent years, ordinary people have learned a lot about how the law works and how exorbitant the costs can be. That's not totally fair. All law firms work long hours, take hundreds of depositions and assemble hundreds of thousands of documents to prepare for trials that never take place.
Most cases settle before they go to trial.
It saves a lot of extraneous speechifying. And in the case of the multi-state agreement to end the lawsuits against the tobacco companies, the settlement was humongous. That should be simple enough. After all, in order to protect the public interest, the agreement was prepared by two of our state's most prominent attorneys, Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican, and Atty. Gen. James Doyle, a Democrat.