Fighting Against Tobacco Companies
SUMMARY
Tobacco cases can be extremely complex. A personal injury lawyer must understand each individual's specific situation, and also take into account the broader context of what the tobacco industry was doing.
Despite current awareness of smoking dangers, the industry's past misdirection caused significant harm. Therefore, this broader perspective is vital in each case.
Rest assured that my experience successfully fighting against tobacco companies has prepared me for the most complex cases, and to fight against large corporations.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
One of the things that comes to mind only because I dealt with so many of these types of cases are the tobacco cases that I handle. The reason why I go to that particular type of case is because when you're talking about a client that is no longer living and that has died as a result of of COPD heart disease or some other type of cancer that is caused by smoking, you have to make sure that you understand the bigger picture of what's going on. Because most people will simply say, well, the person that you are fighting for is no longer living. And doesn't everybody know that smoking is dangerous? Well, that may be true that a lot of people nowadays know that smoking is dangerous, but that's not always been the case.
In regards to the tobacco cases, you have to go back decades to look and to figure out what the tobacco industry was doing in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s in terms of not telling people about the dangers of smoking, how addictive smoking is. And so you need to be able to look at the big picture to understand, well, it's not just about, did this one particular person know or not know that smoking was dangerous? You have to look at the bigger picture as to, well, what was the tobacco industry telling the American public? Well, the tobacco industry, for decades and decades and decades, was telling the American public that they didn't know that nicotine was addictive, and that they didn't know that smoking causes cancer, that smoking causes COPD and a whole host of other diseases. But the fact of the matter is, the industry did know that, and they have that in their own records.
They have that in their own documents. And so when I was handling the tobacco cases, I needed to make sure I looked at the bigger picture. I needed to look at the history of the tobacco industry and the history of what they've been doing for decades and decades and decades. And so it was important to understand the bigger picture. And then once you understand the bigger picture, then you try to apply that picture to the specifics of your particular client.
As I mentioned earlier, in the tobacco cases, the people that I'm fighting for, I'm really fighting for the families because the smoker has long been dead, the smoker is deceased. And so I'm fighting for the family members who truly believe that they suffered harm because their family member is no longer able to have dinner with them, celebrate Christmas with them, celebrate Thanksgiving with them, attend weddings. That member of the family is no longer with us because of what an industry did and did not do in many instances. And so it's really important to apply the bigger picture to the specifics of a case.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Many personal injury lawyers, including myself, will give a free initial consultation so you can determine if I am someone you feel comfortable sharing sensitive information with, and working with for at least several months to as long as a few years.