A review of 'The Litigators' by John Grisham
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 16th. July 2017. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/RCOEK6NDB7XVS?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srphttps://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R108KE7S84ZXWH?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
David Zinc, a disillusioned associate attorney at a blue chip Chicago law firm, has a breakdown and, by means of a convoluted drunken escapade, ends up as the new associate of a two-man law firm in one of the more down-at-heel districts of the Windy City. His new colleagues are Oscar, a former police officer-turned-lawyer; Wally, an experienced and unscrupulous attorney; and Rochelle, their long-suffering legal secretary. The novel is mostly taken up with the firm's pursuit of a dubious civil claim against a large pharmaceutical company.
Neither Wally nor David have any experience in civil trials of any kind, let alone mass tort claims, while Oscar has only a small amount of trial experience from many years ago. Nevertheless, Wally surges ahead to sign-up as many victims as he can of a supposedly bad drug and then issues the claim with little or no preparatory work or investigation of his own into the drug itself.
Wally and Oscar are not bad men fundamentally, they are not 'Mr Vholes'-type characters. Their callousness towards the interests of their own clients is the result of a mixture of disillusionment, desperation and incompetence rather than deep-seated maliciousness. The firm does not abide by ethical standards in attracting work and pays out cash fees for claims and regularly attends hospitals, and even the scenes of accidents, to persuade accident victims to sign up and allow the firm to represent them in their injury claims; but this happens because Wally and Oscar do not know any other way and perhaps are not sufficiently bright or talented enough to find work within the confines of the ethical standards set down for lawyers. Wally and Oscar are ordinary men who face ordinary challenges, frustrations and problems, and they react and cope in much the way that ordinary men might. They are constantly squeezed for money by their spouses and girlfriends; they are always short of cash and cannot pay their bills on time; they feel a sense of entitlement and bitterness after several decades each in the practice of law without conspicuous reward; they resent their clients and the seedy problems they have to deal with for cheap fees; and so on. The life they have is not the life that they envisioned when they first set out to become lawyers. In particular, the first character's name, 'Wally', is I suppose meant to evoke an Everyman quality, the essential ordinariness and innocence of a street-level grafter who might bend the rules, even snap them sometimes, but is decent enough deep down. 'Oscar' etymologically derives from 'friend' and Oscar the character has remained loyal to Wally for decades, despite their ups and downs together.
David's problems are the mirror image of Wally and Oscar's. He is a junior big firm lawyer who is loaded down with the pressures and expectations of that role. He, too, has come to realise that the life he envisioned and expected as a lawyer does not reflect the realities of the job. In reality, the life of a junior corporate lawyer is likely to be one of boredom and drudgery carrying out unrewarding work. Corporate law involves extreme specialisation: David's work is bond underwriting, which is essentially paper-shuffling and probably doesn't seem very much like the practice of law that he trained for.
I enjoyed reading The Litigators. Lots of themes come out of it that are peculiar to the legal profession: indeed, only a lawyer could have written this novel, and some of the depiction is painfully realistic - among the literary tropes common to legal fiction (and actually quite true-to-life, as most people who actually work in the law will recognise), we see lawyers getting carried away with prospects of large settlement, and as here, overlooking duller cases that might be more profitable in the long run if the firm were better-run; and, we have the legal secretary as the repository of sanity and sense.
The author also considers the ethics involved in actively seeking out work, though I am not sure Grisham's portrayal of these lawyers as amoral ambulance chasers is all that realistic. Here is an example of Grisham's inimitable hyperbole on the thorny subject:
[quote]"Oscar was also at the window, casually looking at the intersection in the distance, hoping for a glimpse of the ambulance. It was a habit too hard to break, not that he really wanted to stop. He, along with Wally and now Rochelle and perhaps thousands of lawyers in the city, couldn't suppress a rush of adrenaline at the sound of an approaching ambulance. And the sight of one flying down the street always made him smile."[unquote]
We have come to expect in Grisham novels a jaundiced and exaggerated depiction of lawyers as Dickensian villains, but there comes a point when the ambulance-chasing caricature wears a bit thin, and the lawyerphobic portmanteau has only a tentative basis in reality anyway. On the other hand, I think some Grisham caricatures still have mileage. His depiction of the American mass tort system is, I suspect, not at all realistic, but it remains entertaining and has the potential to throw up some amusing characters. However, the mass tort guru in this novel, a Florida lawyer called Jerry Alisandros, seemed a bit wooden to me. Grisham is clearly basing his characters on real lawyers he has known, but I have not seen a character in popular fiction as strong as Patton French. It's a shame that French did not make an appearance here and entertain Wally on his Lear and luxury yacht.
Unfortunately, I can't give this five stars. The reason is the ending. The first three-quarters of this novel are as good as anything Grisham has written, but the ending is a huge let-down. It could have been exciting and gripping, but instead it reverts to formula and is tepid, predictable and boring sludge. Why is Grisham such a timid writer? It's very frustrating because I think The Litigators could have been a Grisham classic, ranking alongside The Firm, The Runaway Jury and The King of Torts. The writing is of a high standard, and shows much improvement; the characters are sympathetic; the plot has promise. This does not quite reach its full potential, but it's tantalisingly close. Although the quality of his writing has improved in recent years, Grisham seems unable to transcend the formula that brought him his initial successes. This conservatism is, perhaps, understandable: the 'dentist waiting room readership' is what has earned Grisham his millions. It means that Grisham continues to write mediocre novels on the strength of his name - and why abandon a winning formula? It's just a shame he can't take a risk now and then and be a bit more imaginative with his plot development.
Neither Wally nor David have any experience in civil trials of any kind, let alone mass tort claims, while Oscar has only a small amount of trial experience from many years ago. Nevertheless, Wally surges ahead to sign-up as many victims as he can of a supposedly bad drug and then issues the claim with little or no preparatory work or investigation of his own into the drug itself.
Wally and Oscar are not bad men fundamentally, they are not 'Mr Vholes'-type characters. Their callousness towards the interests of their own clients is the result of a mixture of disillusionment, desperation and incompetence rather than deep-seated maliciousness. The firm does not abide by ethical standards in attracting work and pays out cash fees for claims and regularly attends hospitals, and even the scenes of accidents, to persuade accident victims to sign up and allow the firm to represent them in their injury claims; but this happens because Wally and Oscar do not know any other way and perhaps are not sufficiently bright or talented enough to find work within the confines of the ethical standards set down for lawyers. Wally and Oscar are ordinary men who face ordinary challenges, frustrations and problems, and they react and cope in much the way that ordinary men might. They are constantly squeezed for money by their spouses and girlfriends; they are always short of cash and cannot pay their bills on time; they feel a sense of entitlement and bitterness after several decades each in the practice of law without conspicuous reward; they resent their clients and the seedy problems they have to deal with for cheap fees; and so on. The life they have is not the life that they envisioned when they first set out to become lawyers. In particular, the first character's name, 'Wally', is I suppose meant to evoke an Everyman quality, the essential ordinariness and innocence of a street-level grafter who might bend the rules, even snap them sometimes, but is decent enough deep down. 'Oscar' etymologically derives from 'friend' and Oscar the character has remained loyal to Wally for decades, despite their ups and downs together.
David's problems are the mirror image of Wally and Oscar's. He is a junior big firm lawyer who is loaded down with the pressures and expectations of that role. He, too, has come to realise that the life he envisioned and expected as a lawyer does not reflect the realities of the job. In reality, the life of a junior corporate lawyer is likely to be one of boredom and drudgery carrying out unrewarding work. Corporate law involves extreme specialisation: David's work is bond underwriting, which is essentially paper-shuffling and probably doesn't seem very much like the practice of law that he trained for.
I enjoyed reading The Litigators. Lots of themes come out of it that are peculiar to the legal profession: indeed, only a lawyer could have written this novel, and some of the depiction is painfully realistic - among the literary tropes common to legal fiction (and actually quite true-to-life, as most people who actually work in the law will recognise), we see lawyers getting carried away with prospects of large settlement, and as here, overlooking duller cases that might be more profitable in the long run if the firm were better-run; and, we have the legal secretary as the repository of sanity and sense.
The author also considers the ethics involved in actively seeking out work, though I am not sure Grisham's portrayal of these lawyers as amoral ambulance chasers is all that realistic. Here is an example of Grisham's inimitable hyperbole on the thorny subject:
[quote]"Oscar was also at the window, casually looking at the intersection in the distance, hoping for a glimpse of the ambulance. It was a habit too hard to break, not that he really wanted to stop. He, along with Wally and now Rochelle and perhaps thousands of lawyers in the city, couldn't suppress a rush of adrenaline at the sound of an approaching ambulance. And the sight of one flying down the street always made him smile."[unquote]
We have come to expect in Grisham novels a jaundiced and exaggerated depiction of lawyers as Dickensian villains, but there comes a point when the ambulance-chasing caricature wears a bit thin, and the lawyerphobic portmanteau has only a tentative basis in reality anyway. On the other hand, I think some Grisham caricatures still have mileage. His depiction of the American mass tort system is, I suspect, not at all realistic, but it remains entertaining and has the potential to throw up some amusing characters. However, the mass tort guru in this novel, a Florida lawyer called Jerry Alisandros, seemed a bit wooden to me. Grisham is clearly basing his characters on real lawyers he has known, but I have not seen a character in popular fiction as strong as Patton French. It's a shame that French did not make an appearance here and entertain Wally on his Lear and luxury yacht.
Unfortunately, I can't give this five stars. The reason is the ending. The first three-quarters of this novel are as good as anything Grisham has written, but the ending is a huge let-down. It could have been exciting and gripping, but instead it reverts to formula and is tepid, predictable and boring sludge. Why is Grisham such a timid writer? It's very frustrating because I think The Litigators could have been a Grisham classic, ranking alongside The Firm, The Runaway Jury and The King of Torts. The writing is of a high standard, and shows much improvement; the characters are sympathetic; the plot has promise. This does not quite reach its full potential, but it's tantalisingly close. Although the quality of his writing has improved in recent years, Grisham seems unable to transcend the formula that brought him his initial successes. This conservatism is, perhaps, understandable: the 'dentist waiting room readership' is what has earned Grisham his millions. It means that Grisham continues to write mediocre novels on the strength of his name - and why abandon a winning formula? It's just a shame he can't take a risk now and then and be a bit more imaginative with his plot development.
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