Following my graduation from NYU Law School, I spent four years in the Air Force Judge Advocate General Corps; conducting dozens of court-martial trials, I quickly learned how to try (and sometimes how not to try) cases. I then spent 45 years with a series of three New York City law firms where I tried cases and argued appeals throughout the country for major corporations in the pharmaceutical and consumer products field.
Now, I have always loved novels and had always wanted to write one. In fact, when I was in the Air Force I wrote a “spy” novel; fortunately, the three publishers I sent it to all turned it down. So, when I was a year away from retirement, I began thinking of writing a novel about a field I actually knew something about: modern American litigation. From the start I wanted it to be a satire; I had no desire to write yet another legal thriller—they’re a dime a dozen—or a serious book about the law that no one would read.
My thoughts immediately turned to Joseph Heller. I had read Catch-22—a farce set in the Army Air Corps during World War I—on my way to Korea for my final year in the Air Force. I had been blown away by Heller’s ability to generate farce in virtually every situation and encounter, including the names of every character in the novel. My objective was to bring that level of farce to a book about the world of American litigation. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a good joke about lawyers? The New Yorker even has an entire book of lawyer cartoons!
My first book, Tort$ ‘R’ Us, introduced twin brothers Patrick A. Peters (“Pap”) and Prescott U. Peters (“Pup”), successful lawyers with prominent New York City law firms, who leave their respective practices to start up a new firm devoted to representing plaintiffs in class action cases, which they believed would be more fun and more lucrative than their prior practices. The brothers embark on a series of riotous cases representing a collection of lovable but zany clients in amusing lawsuits against bizarre (and sometimes unscrupulous) opponents in front of befuddled (and occasionally wacky) judges.
The parade of wacky clients and bizarre cases is continued in the second book, Please Pass The Tort$, and the forthcoming Send in the Tort Lawyer$. All three books satirize everyone involved in the legal system: lawyers, clients, judges, and expert witnesses. Much of the fun was creating the lovable but wacky clients the brothers represent. Characters like the gorgeous Lydia Lowlace, a Playboy centerfold who manages to become embroiled in one or more lawsuits in each book, or Pap’s wacky neighbor Mona Lott, who in Book 1 is arrested for shooting an alleged assault weapon at a pair of geese who have landed on her pond
Now, virtually all the cases–including a lawsuit to free the chimpanzees in the Bronx Zoo–are takeoffs on actual U.S. legal cases. The books use humor to show that many class action cases are an abuse of the class action system in that they involve dubious “harms” to the plaintiffs while the resulting settlements yield lots of money for the lawyers and little for members of the class. Nevertheless, the books are not a scholarly indictment of the class action system. Rather, they utilize the abuses of the system for purposes of humor, with laughs coming fast and furious in every encounter between the lawyers, their clients, and the judges presiding over the cases. For most readers, the highlights are the courtroom and deposition scenes featuring zany testimony and legal arguments never heard in any actual courtroom.
The forthcoming Send in The Tort Lawyer$ continues the saga with yet another series of wacky clients and cases, including yet another lawsuit on behalf of Lydia, whose Playboy image has now been used in a set of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) celebrating Playboy Centerfolds. This book differs from the first two in that one of the cases—involving the collapse of a well-known cryptocurrency firm—leads to a class action lawsuit that is an entirely appropriate use of that mechanism. Amusingly, the facts in the real-life cryptocurrency case were so bizarre that no embellishment was necessary to generate humor.
Most readers appear to greatly enjoy this humor. Many reviewers say they “laughed out loud” or “had tears in my eyes” when reading the books; one said he hadn’t laughed so hard since reading Portnoy’s Complaint. Perhaps the highest compliment came from the decision of The American Tort Museum to conduct a podcast about the first book in the series. This is the museum founded by Ralph Nader as a tribute to torts and tort lawyers. So perhaps even real-life tort lawyers have a sense of humor.
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The means is available for preorder before it’s September 12th release from Amazon or from your local bookstore:
