Why is there so much material available? The law necessarily involves paperwork and documentation, but you get the feeling with the ABA that in the legal profession these days, quantity is everything. Success in law seems to be measured now by volume, and accomplishment in tonnage.

Every one of the 185 services and products, featured at EXPO 97, for sale is aimed at expanding legal practices and raising their profits, without any apparent sense of limit. This is now taken as the self-evident and proper aim of each attorney and practice.

One man at EXPO 97 advertised something called Injury Helpline. The way it works is, you buy into an 800 number they advertise in targeted TV markets around America, "targeted" meaning their ads will be aired during Rolanda and afternoon reruns of Seventies sitcoms. They will refer the injured and aggrieved to you, in exchange for which you pay a monthly fee but keep the "profits from cases, cases, cases!" Injury Helpline also sells a book called Guerrilla Marketing Attack for Attorneys. "Maximize Marketing $$$"says FreeAdvice.com, which will find you "slip and fall" accident cases, illegal-immigration cases, drunk driving cases, whatever. "You keep all the fees you generate."

Civil litigation used to be recognized as by definition an unproductive enterprise. In the grand economic scheme, it's all overhead. Now it is seen as just the opposite. Litigation is a giant industry all by itself, producing trouble, legal fees, and little else, without even much pretense any more about the purpose of it all.

Mealey Publications produces a leaflet that states, "Please send me more information on the following Mealey titles: Asbestos, Biotechnology, Breast Implants, Emerging Toxic Torts, Superfund, Tobacco," and so on. You will get this "often on the same day a story breaks," the better to get in on the deal early.

Lawyers have to be aggressive today. Lawyering needs include marketing strategy, data bases, litigation support services, client finders, jury profilers and witness screeners. "Law" as Mealey's puts it, "is business," and indeed there is even a regular publication called Mealey's Attorney Fees devoted entirely to breaking news on the fee front: Missouri Appeals Court Affirms Attorneys' Fee Award in Class Action." "Sixth Circuit Affirms Contingency Fee, Interest in $103.5 Million Case."

The whole idea of unlimited jury awards and contingency-fee litigation is almost exclusive to America. Lawyers speak of the contingency-fee principle (needed to draw "competent attorneys" to "risky" cases, thereby giving the common man "access to our courts") as if it were of hallowed lineage dating back to the Magna Carta. In Europe, to this day, it is considered a corrupting influence precisely because it inflates the cost of litigation and makes the lawyer himself a party to the suit. It clouds the judgment with thoughts of money. The answer, to paraphrase Justice Hugh O'Flaherty, is that it twists the purpose of the civil proceeding, which is not to make lawyers rich but to remedy specific wrongs and apply justice to the case at hand. Without a contingency system to drive up costs, the ordinary person probably has a greater access to counsel and courts.

There are basically ten doctrines a lawyer may invoke at settlement time to increase his fees. Variously called "upward adjustments" or "multipliers," and each "supported by a substantial body of case law," they are:

1. Risk;
2. Undesirability;
3. Novelty and Difficulty;
4. Unpopularity;
5. Complex Issues Dealing with a Difficult Adversary;
6. Delay;
7. Preclusion of Employment;
8. Superior Quality of Work;
9. Exceptional Results; and
10. Burden of Justifying Fees.
    

In other fields, this is known as bill-padding. Sometimes, it is called fraud. In the legal profession they used to call it grounds for discipline, if not disbarment. Now it is called an "upward adjustment," meaning a downward adjustment for whatever party is being fleeced in the case at hand.

During EXPO 97, one session called, "Judicial Independence," nine attorneys and judges discussed the need for a judiciary, free from the political pressures of the moment. The lights were dimmed so the participants could watch one in a series of focus groups commissioned by the ABA. The recently completely ABA/Gallup poll was briefed. It all went to show the importance of keeping the legal profession above the hurly-burly of popular pressures, and if anyone doubts this they have polls and focus groups to prove it.

Lawyer and Judicial immunity doctrines and judicial appointments evolves from the above concepts. Coupled with the aggressive marketing strategies, the ABA creates a closed, clandestine society designed to enhance lawyers profits and exclude justice from the American people.