| President's Column
September 2005 / Volume 41, Issue 9
We are the voice
It was 4:30 a.m. on a day that would turn out to be hot and muggy in Sumter, South Carolina, when I started thinking about this column.
The day before, I had watched my client (we’ll call her Alice) stare at the floor and try to control her emotions while the child neurologist explained to the jury that her baby had developed normally up to the time of birth, and then while he showed the jury the radiologic images of the baby’s brain. Lack of oxygen during labor and delivery had first caused the brain to swell, obliterating its normal structures and causing seizures. Later, as the swelling subsided, the images showed spinal fluid where brain tissue should have been—evidence of permanent damage, leaving the girl blind, mentally impaired, and with cerebral palsy.
 We were only three days into a trial that was probably going to last more than two weeks, and we were already tired. Lawyers on the road don’t exactly live like rock stars. Separation from family, living in hotel rooms, eating restaurant food, catching a meal when and if you can, and often finding little time to exercise all exact a toll on health and happiness. Throw in the tension of the trial (How will the judge rule? Will the expert hold up on cross? Can I expose the fallacy of the opposing expert’s theory in a way the jury will understand?), add the daily grind of working late into the night to prepare for the next day in court, and it’s not long before I’m thinking, What was wrong with a career in banking?
Then I remember: Without a lawyer, Alice wouldn’t be able to challenge the medical establishment that first hurt her daughter and then closed ranks to protect the doctor who did the harm. Without a lawyer, Alice wouldn’t have been able to afford to obtain the medical records, or hire an out-of-state obstetrician to review the fetal monitor strips or a neurologist to put together the puzzle of causation, nor would she have known how to find such specialists. Without a lawyer, Alice’s case and many others like it—the case brought by the father of four who suffered a stroke because his medicine was actually a poison, or by the paraplegic little girl whose only fault was to be riding in a car when it was hit by a careless driver, or by the worker whose hand was cut off in a defective press—would be crushed out of existence. Without a lawyer, Alice, her daughter, and those countless others would remain without a voice.
We live in a time when it’s easy to become discouraged. We’re assaulted daily with claims of frivolous lawsuits (although the only one anybody can seem to name, Stella Liebeck’s suit against McDonald’s, was not frivolous and happened more than a decade ago). We keep hearing about rising malpractice premiums (although the latest study by a former state insurance commissioner shows the real reason: insurance companies raising premiums 120 percent while their payouts rose less than 6 percent).
A few years ago, I went to a seminar presented by Tony Robbins (the big guy with the teeth and all the infomercials). I learned some pretty interesting and profound stuff. One thing that has stuck with me is, for lack of a better term, an incantation. It goes
Now I am the voice.
I will lead, not follow.
I will create, not destroy.
I will believe, not doubt.
I am a force for good.
I am a leader.
Defy the odds.
Set a new standard.
Step up!
In the well of the courtroom, in the thick of the fight, in the still of the night, I think of those words whenever courage fails, fatigue sets in, or doubt appears. And then I remember: I am a trial lawyer. Trial lawyers speak for the hurt and the accused. Trial lawyers stand with the weak and the disadvantaged. Trial lawyers insist that justice is not just for the powerful, the rich, and the advantaged, but for all who come to the courthouse.
In those moments of doubt and fear, I reach down and feel the feeling I first felt as a young lawyer speaking for an innocent victim. I remember the sense of both responsibility and privilege that I was entrusted with my client’s future. I remember the gratitude in my client’s eyes that came from knowing that someone was on her side.
We’ve all had that feeling. We can’t give up. We’re trial lawyers. And we are the voice.
—Kenneth M. Suggs
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Articles: "New President Hopes to Boost Trial Lawyers' Image"
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