Frederick M. Baron, one of America’s wealthiest and most successful trial lawyers, was co-chair of the Kerry-Edwards Victory ’04 Committee. Prior to that he chaired the finance committee for the 2004 presidential campaign of Senator John Edwards (D.-North Carolina), who was chosen as running mate by the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential candidate Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Baron in 1977 co-founded the law firm Baron & Budd P.C. of Dallas, Texas. In 2000-2001 he was President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA).
Born in 1947 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and raised in Rock Island, Illinois, Fred Baron at age 15 moved with his newly-remarried mother to Smithville, Texas east of the capital Austin.He attended the University of Texas - Austin in that most leftward of that state’s cities, earning his undergraduate degree in 1968 and Juris Doctorate there in 1971. In law school his mentor was Harvard-trained torts professor W. Page Keeton, who saw lawsuits as a way to change society.
Baron also heard a campus speech by Ralph Nader, became “totally proselytized,” and moved to Washington, D.C. for six months to work for this radical consumer activist and foe of corporations who has always been beloved and bankrolled by trial lawyers.
“My whole shtick in law school was that I thought everything ought to be regulated by the government,” Baron told the Dallas Observer in 1998. “And I was one of these really left-wing guys that thought that every agency ought to control every piece of our lives.” But in legal practice, he said, he soon recognized that regulatory agencies did little to change things. He also decided that he could do very well by filing toxic tort lawsuits in the name of doing good, of advancing a Naderite leftwing agenda.
Who is this trial lawyer at the center of power in today’s Democratic Party? As described by National Review reporter Ramesh Ponnuru in an investigation titled “Robber Baron? John Edwards’ Sleazy Friend,” Fred Baron developed new areas of health-related litigation, particularly concerning asbestos, a natural mineral widely used – indeed, virtually required of private contractors by some government agencies – as fire-proofing many decades ago before the potential of at least one variety of asbestos to cause mesothelioma lung cancer was recognized.
The Baron & Budd web site asks potential asbestos victims to contact the firm and includes a five-page list of lawsuits that resulted in settlements and court judgments that add up to more than $529 million – about 40 percent of which, more than $211 million,went to the law firm. This list undoubtedly represents only a fraction of the firm’s cases, and it nowadays is common for lawyers to settle weak cases with a defendant agreement to pay a pittance to the injured parties but lavish legal fees to the plaintiff’s lawyers. Baron & Budd has been involved in nearly half of all asbestos litigation in the United States and in the process has gotten very, very rich.
“Asbestos lawsuits,” wrote Dana Joel Gattuso of the National Center for Public Policy Research, “-- the most expensive type of litigation in U.S. history, according to numbers released [in February 2004] by the RAND Corporation – are taking their toll on the U.S. economy, costing businesses a whopping $70 billion and bankrupting 66-plus companies. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates asbestos lawsuits have killed close to 60,000 jobs.”
Some 730,000 asbestos claims had been filed as of 2002, up from 21,000 in 1982 when litigation and compensation costs were a mere $1 billion. By 2000 those costs had soared to $70 billion.
Baron & Budd has also been accused, based on an inadvertently-released law firm internal 20-page memo, a guide titled “Preparing for Your Deposition,” of coaching clients on what to say and not say when questioned by opposing lawyers, e.g., to deny ever seeing a warning label on an asbestos product. This memo, as Ponnuru summarizes what was said about it by U.S. Senator Jon Kyle (R.-Arizona), “is a document coaching witnesses to lie.”
“It is important to maintain that you NEVER saw any labels on asbestos products that said WARNING or DANGER,” the memo apparently to be read by would-be witnesses said. “Do NOT say you saw more of one brand than another, or that one brand was more commonly used than another…. You NEVER want to give specific quantities or percentages of any product names….Be CONFIDENT that you saw just as much of one brand as all the others. All the manufacturers sued in your case should share the blame equally!”
This Baron & Budd internal memo could also be used, Senator Kyle suggested, to prepare witnesses who might never have worked with asbestos at all, its descriptions in the Senator’s words going “well beyond what one would think necessary to refresh the memory of someone who had actually worked with the product. Instead, the memo appears to anticipate that clients will not have any previous familiarity with the product.”
Some would-be witnesses were old, ill and attempting to remember events from 30 years or more in the past. One question raised by legal scholars and others about Baron & Budd’s memo is whether its aim was to refresh faded memories – or create and implant new ones that could produce the most lucrative court judgment. “Do we implant memories? Yeah, probably we do,” said Baron. “Is that something that is wrong? I don’t believe it is.”
“What began 25 years ago as a crusade for justice for injured workers has transformed over time,” wrote Christine Biederman and fellow reporters in the August 13, 1998 Dallas Observer. “Asbestos is no longer used commonly in the workplace, and a host of workplace reforms have been enacted. Many of the largest asbestos manufacturers are bankrupted by lawsuits, and after a quarter century, many of the seriously ill workers have died or received settlements. Yet the flood of cases continues, fueled by workers with less obvious signs of injury and a huge, profit-fueled, settlement-driven litigation industry.” Marginal clients and smaller targeted companies only marginally involved with asbestos are used to keep this money-making machine operating.
As a leading law firm in this asbestos litigation industry Baron & Budd, wrote these Texas reporters, provided its clients “with sample questions and the ‘right’ answers for their depositions, with little regard for whether the answers were true.” They “implanted memories in the minds of the firm’s clients,” and “Exaggerated the threat to some workers’ health from asbestos exposure, employing what one former Baron & Budd paralegal described as ‘whore docs’ willing to blame virtually any lung ailment and a whole host of cancers on asbestos exposure.”
Senator Kyl and Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School Professor Lester Brickman have suggested that a large fraction – perhaps as high as 80 to 90 percent – of recent asbestosis and mesothelioma claims against companies are specious. (Even Clinton-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in 1997 wrote in one opinion that “Up to half of asbestos claims are now being filed by people who have little or no physical impairment.”)“How have these claims been generated?” wrote Ponnuru. “By coaching witnesses to provide false testimony, Brickman and Kyle argue, and by faking medical tests.”
Prof. Brickman in a December 2003 Pepperdine Law Review article arguing that “asbestos litigation has become a malignant enterprise,” noted that one physician employed by trial lawyers admitted that he had no experience in diagnosing asbestosis, yet was able to identify it in the X-rays of every one of 14,000 lawyer clients involved in these lawyers’ lawsuits. Many such clients are recruited by trial lawyer ads (“Find out if YOU have MILLION-DOLLAR LUNGS” read one) seeking plaintiffs for such litigation.
Baron, wrote Ponnuru, “has said that the memo was not unethical, that it had not instructed anyone to lie, and that ‘any lawyer in the country that is worth a damn’ works the same way. He has also said, somewhat contradictorily, that the memo was used only in a few cases and was entirely the responsibility of one paralegal.”
In a separate article about the Dallas Observer investigation of Baron’s law firm and tactics, wrote its columnist Julie Lyons, “Baron did just about everything he could to interfere with the Observer's reporting and badger its sources, despite his protestations that Baron & Budd is the cleanest, most ethical shop in the country, and that he has nothing to hide.”The law firm’s tactics included “a letter demanding that the Observer immediately stop speaking to former Baron & Budd employees – despite these individuals’ rights to free speech – and threatening legal action if we didn’t.”
“Vowing that ‘someone’s going to jail,’” wrote Lyons, “Baron then subpoenaed Observer reporter Christine Biederman to appear at a deposition to answer questions about her confidential sources.” The law firm also questioned every attorney who had ever worked for the firm and every former employee interviewed or contacted by this left-of-center weekly newspaper. But this is the same kind of hardball Baron is famous for playing not only against businesses and other lawyers (“when you irritate [Baron & Budd], they have a tendency to retaliate,” one attorney told the Observer) but also against an elected judge. Many have smelled and been silenced by the “scent of intimidation” Lyons sensed in what she described as Fred Baron’s “Control Freak” behavior.
By 1998 Fred Baron was expanding beyond the courtroom and celebrity (one of his clients being Karen Silkwood, subject of a major motion picture about a radioactivity whistleblower) into politics. In 1996 he used his enormous wealth by contributing $89,000 in “soft money” to the Democratic Party and more to its candidates. In June 1998 he co-hosted a benefit for President Bill Clinton that raised $500,000, and days later President Clinton was a guest at Baron’s vacation home in Aspen, Colorado.
By then even First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother was among the trial lawyers colluding with government and billing up to $7,000 per hour in lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Such private-public collaboration had become a huge source of trial lawyer wealth and government revenue in an era where tax increases were unpopular. “With tax hikes harder to pass,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal last July 7, “Democrats have seized upon lawsuits as the best way to redistribute income.”
In the 1998 election Baron friend and fellow trial lawyer John Edwards, with huge backing from the profession, narrowly defeated an incumbent Republican to become U.S. Senator from North Carolina. “To see a guy like [Edwards] come out and say, ‘I am a trial lawyer and proud of it,’” Baron told National Journal in 1999, “has emboldened a lot of us trial lawyers to get more active in politics.”
In June 2000 Baron was elected President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, an organization that in some election cycles provided up to 40 percent of the Democratic Party’s campaign contributions. Since 1991 Baron, his wife and others linked to his law firm have donated nearly $2.5 million to Democratic candidates and committees. By one account, a wing of the new Taj Mahal headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. was almost named for Baron, who would have had no trouble gaining access in 2000 to the ear of its prospective presidential candidate, Vice President Al Gore. Baron was undoubtedly a factor in neophyte Senator John Edwards being added to Mr. Gore’s short list of potential running mates.
“I picked up my Wall Street Journal last night…and what did I learn? ‘The plaintiffs’ bar is all but running the Senate.’ Now, I really strongly disagree with that,” Baron told a June 2002 conference, “particularly the words ‘all but.’”
But by September 2002, with the Senate at last beginning to consider limits on asbestos lawsuits that would affect the 10,000 clients Baron then represented, he went ballistic. “There will be a jihad,” he warned. “We will fight them with everything we’ve got.” (On January 10, 2001 a racketeering complaint under the RICO statutes was filed against Baron & Budd lawyers, alleging that they and others had threatened a company if it persisted in supporting the later-stalled Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act. Baron denied the allegations and called them “garbage.”)
Baron did not yet own the entire Senate, just the Democratic minority. But one member who had taken his money and done his bidding was Senator John Edwards, whom Baron had begun to see as the racehorse he could ride into the Oval Office of the White House. Edwards had even gone to the mat and successfully blocked a bill that would have impeded trial lawyer lawsuits against companies when people there were injured by a terrorist attack. Edwards has defended the trial lawyer ideal of allowing all lawsuits all of the time, without limit.
Edwards had no place to go but up. Internal polling in North Carolina showed that the boyish Senator who talked like a Southerner but voted 90 percent of the time like leftwing Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Massachusetts) and Senator Hillary Clinton (D.-New York) had almost no chance of being re-elected in 2004. With heavy backing from Baron, his coterie of other wealthy trial lawyer friends, and their fleet of corporate jets owned by six law firms, including Baron’s – “Learjet Lawyer Airlines” – the Edwards 2004 presidential campaign was launched with Baron as head of its finance committee. Edwards came in second, but at the urging of both Baron and Ralph Nader was picked by winner John F. Kerry as his vice presidential running mate. Baron, who holds the keys to trial lawyer money across America, was named co-chair of Kerry-Edwards Victory ’04 Committee.
