A Civil Action

by Jonathan Harr

  Schlichtmann filed suit in Massachusetts Superior Court three months after the accident. Within a matter of days he and Reed began negotiating with the insurance company that held the million-dollar policy on the pilot. The case would settle, Schlichtmann believed, for a sum close to the policy limit.

  Never in the history of Reed & Mulligan had a case been put together so swiftly. Reed began to treat Schlichtmann like a son. He mentioned one morning that there were other cases in the office that needed work. “The kid is like a bulldog,” Reed told his partner, Joe Mulligan. “Once he gets hold of something, he doesn’t let go.”

  3

  Donna Robbins had been calling the office of Reed & Mulligan off and on for nearly three years, ever since Joe Mulligan had taken the malpractice case concerning Robbie’s hip. That case, a difficult one to begin with, had been rendered essentially worthless since Robbie’s death by leukemia. Mulligan felt he’d be lucky to get Donna a few thousand dollars, a “nuisance-value” settlement.

  Four months had passed since Mulligan had signed up the families in the Woburn case, and Anne Anderson had begun calling the office, too. Mulligan answered most of the calls at first. “These things take time,” he’d explain to Anne, the very same words Donna used to hear when she called about Robbie’s case. After a while Mulligan let his secretary handle most of the calls. She would tell Anne or Donna that Joe was out of the office or in a meeting. The secretary began feeling sorry for the women. After making yet another excuse, she’d walk into the office of one of the firm’s associates and say, “What are we going to do with these poor people?” But the associate was a lowly member of the firm. He could only shrug. The case wasn’t his.

  Reed & Mulligan had many personal injury cases in its files. Mulligan was fond of calling especially promising cases “gold mines.” A new case might look promising at first, but further investigation sometimes revealed a fatal flaw, and the case would die quietly in the files. Many cases in many firms across the nation expired in such a fashion.

  Mulligan still regarded Woburn as a potential “gold mine,” but he had done little work on the case. He had gone once to speak with the state environmental people, hoping they could tell him who had contaminated the wells. But they’d been “tight” (as he later put it) with information. He had also hired at minimum wage two students from Suffolk Law School, where he himself had gotten his degree, night division. He had instructed the students to collect whatever pertinent information they could find in Woburn, and he’d left them to work on their own. One of them quit after a few weeks, and the other one did little more than clip newspaper articles from the Woburn Daily Times.

  Mulligan had followed Schlichtmann’s progress on the Piper Arrow case with interest. He was impressed with Schlichtmann’s industry, and he decided to recruit the young lawyer for the Woburn case. One evening that winter, before leaving the office, he stopped at the library and invited Schlichtmann out for a drink. “I’ll be at the Littlest,” said Mulligan. “Meet me there.”

  The Littlest Bar on Province Street was Mulligan’s favorite haunt. It was not only tiny but also subterranean, down six steps from the street. By dusk on a winter evening, the Littlest was crowded with men, most of them Irish, many of them lawyers, a tight nest smelling of whiskey and tobacco. Mulligan cut a huge swath in the Littlest. He towered over the bar and his stentorian voice rose above the babble. Among some patrons at the Littlest, word had it that Reed’s hero in The Verdict, the dissolute but principled lawyer, was modeled after Mulligan. Mulligan never denied it.

  When Schlichtmann arrived at the Littlest that evening, Mulligan bought him a drink and introduced him around. He put his arm around Schlichtmann’s shoulder (he was taller by several inches than Schlichtmann, who himself stood well above an average crowd) and steered him to a stool in the corner of the bar. He began talking about the Piper Arrow case, telling Schlichtmann that he was impressed by how quickly he’d put it together. “There are other good cases in the office,” Mulligan continued. “I’ve got one in particular I’d like you to look at, a mass-disaster case, best case in the office. This one could be a real gold mine. It’ll require some hard work, but you’re just the sort of guy to develop it.” Mulligan began describing the Woburn case.

  Schlichtmann had read in The Boston Globe about the leukemia cluster, but he hadn’t known that Mulligan was involved, or that there was even a case. He felt flattered that Mulligan would ask him to work on a case of such importance and celebrity. “When can I see the file?” he asked.

  Mulligan said he’d have his secretary get it for him tomorrow. “A lot of pieces are still missing from the puzzle,” Mulligan confided. They talked about Woburn for an hour over drinks. Mulligan told Schlichtmann several times he was “delighted” to have him working on the case.

  On the conference room table the next morning Schlichtmann saw a slender manila file labeled “Woburn Cases.” The file, less than an inch thick, looked very thin for a mass-disaster case. The Piper Arrow file, by contrast, occupied almost an entire cabinet drawer. Schlichtmann opened the Woburn file and saw newspaper clippings and Mulligan’s contingency fee agreements, standard forms in which the lawyer had agreed “to do any and all necessary things in the prosecution of any claims which the client may have against”—here Mulligan had filled in the words—“any and all Defendants identified by the attorneys.”

  The only other item in the file was the report of the investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and the state department of health. Schlichtmann started reading the report. Some of it seemed promising—the fact, for instance, that it was very unlikely the cluster of childhood leukemias in east Woburn could have occurred merely by chance. But other items in the report gave Schlichtmann pause. “With few exceptions,” said the report, “investigations of leukemia clusters have failed to demonstrate significant associations or even promising leads as to environmental causes.… None of the chemicals found in Wells G and H are known to be leukemogenic, although trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene have been found to cause tumors in laboratory animals. The source of the present contaminants is unknown.”

  When he finished reading, Schlichtmann felt dismayed. A dozen questions went through his head: Whose chemicals had polluted the wells? Who had dumped these chemicals, and when had they gotten into the water supply? Had they in fact caused leukemia? The file was silent on almost every question. It was apparent that Mulligan had spent little time on the case.

  Schlichtmann took the file back to Newburyport and found himself looking at it again. He could not even pronounce the names of the chemicals in the Woburn wells, but he felt instinctively that they probably had caused the cluster of leukemias. He himself had always been vigilant about what he ate and drank. His grandfather, owner of a pharmacy and soda fountain, had once caught Schlichtmann’s father eating a handful of maraschino cherries. “Don’t ever eat those,” the grandfather had warned. “They’re full of chemicals that’ll make you sick.” Warnings of this sort had in turn been impressed on Schlichtmann at an early age. His father had always done the family’s grocery shopping. He’d read labels obsessively, long before most people gave labels any thought, and pointed out to his sons all the chemicals in canned foods. Dutiful in this respect at least, Schlichtmann never took any drug stronger than aspirin, nor had he ever smoked or drunk coffee. He rarely ate red meat and he avoided tap water, preferring instead bottled water, the more expensive the better.

  At a glance, the Woburn case did look, as Mulligan had said, quite promising—polluted drinking water had apparently caused an epidemic of leukemia. But Schlichtmann knew that such a claim would be difficult to prove. He’d have to delve into the question of what causes leukemia, a question that medical science itself had not yet resolved. And it would be expensive. The Eaton case, by comparison, had been a simple affair, and yet he’d spent fifteen thousand dollars and seven months working on it. At this point in his career, Schlichtmann had been practicing law for only three
years. He had taken only one case to trial. Woburn was too big, he told himself, too expensive, too complicated.

  Mulligan’s secretary began directing the phone calls from Anne and Donna to Schlichtmann. The message slips soon grew into a small pile. One evening that spring, Schlichtmann went out to Woburn to meet the families. It was dusk when he left the office. He drove through the Pine Street neighborhood, past the quiet orderly homes, the forsythia in full bloom. When he arrived at Anne’s house, the families were gathered in the living room, awaiting him. He introduced himself and explained that Mulligan had asked him to work on the case.

  He knew that these people wanted to hear what progress he and Mulligan had made. He explained that he had no basis yet for filing a lawsuit. That action would have to wait until the government agencies had identified the source of the contaminants in the wells. “Toxic waste dumps are surfacing all over the country,” he told the families. “The EPA doesn’t have the capacity or the leadership to investigate each one. You have to organize, you have to force them to do their job. This is a political battle now, not a legal one. We’re not ready for the legal battle yet.”

  He stayed at Anne’s house for nearly two hours, answering questions, getting a sense of his new clients. Anne’s child had died four months earlier, and she looked pale, her eyes rimmed in red as if she had been crying just moments ago. But Schlichtmann was struck by her forcefulness and the intelligence of her questions. He talked for a while with Richard and Mary Toomey, whose son Patrick had also died earlier that year. Richard, a sheet-metal worker for nearly thirty years, was a reserved man, but he had a blunt, honest face, and Schlichtmann liked him immediately. “We’re not in this for money,” Toomey told Schlichtmann. “We just want information. No one will tell us anything.”

  Schlichtmann left the meeting feeling sorry for these people. But he also felt he could do little to help them.

  4

  In the files at Reed & Mulligan, Schlichtmann found dozens of other cases, many of them gathering dust, waiting for someone to take interest. They were, he thought, like unpolished stones, like lumps of coal. Many were of such small value—the one concerning Donna Robbins’s boy, for example—that they would barely justify his labor. A few were completely worthless. But some looked as if they might contain a diamond at the core. He kept searching for the most promising ones. Soon the Woburn file was buried beneath the other cases.

  Assisting Schlichtmann was a lawyer who occupied a small cubicle next to Mulligan’s office. The lawyer’s name was Kevin Conway. He was in his mid-thirties, several years older than Schlichtmann, short and stoutly built, with a belly that was edging toward portliness. He had a manner, unpracticed and unconscious, of conveying warmth and concern. The office workers all seemed to come to Conway with their troubles. When, for instance, Mulligan’s secretary became upset by the plight of the Woburn mothers, she went to Conway.

  Conway had been at Reed & Mulligan for two years, doing piecework, getting paid by the case. The job was his third since graduating in the top half of his class at Georgetown University Law School. He had started his career working for a big company in New York, where he’d had an office with a view and made a handsome salary. But after six years there, he’d felt as if life were passing him by. He had no sense of accomplishment. He’d looked at the people around him, people who’d spent their lives working for the company, and he’d realized that if he didn’t leave soon, he might never get away.

  Conway had decided to go into practice for himself. He descended from a position of relative prestige in the legal world—from an office on the fiftieth floor of a fancy building in New York—to the lowly status of a solo practitioner, close to the legal profession’s bottommost rung. He moved into the basement of a century-old building in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. From the window of his office in Cushing Square, he had a pavement-level view of a working-class neighborhood of small shops. He knew this world well. He’d grown up near Belmont, not far from his new office, the second of nine children, the son of a schoolteacher. There had never been much money in the Conway family, but there had always been plenty of warmth and conviviality. Every Sunday afternoon the entire Conway clan would assemble in the living room with their musical instruments for a concert. The house was always a thick tangle of kids, crowded with Conways, but so inviting that many neighborhood kids gathered there, too.

  For his new office in Belmont, Conway hired a secretary, a pretty woman in her early thirties named Peggy Vecchione who had once dated Conway’s younger brother. By her own admission, Peggy could barely type and she knew nothing about legal work. But she needed a job badly. She had recently gotten divorced and had two children to support. Conway didn’t think twice about hiring her.

  Together they handled the legal problems of anyone who walked in Conway’s door. Most of these problems were simple matters—wills, minor criminal infractions, house closings. Also some divorces, though Conway did not like divorces because they saddened him and he invariably spent too much time trying to reconcile the unhappy spouses. Peggy watched one couple walk out the door, irritated by Conway’s counseling. “Don’t you understand?” the man said, his voice raised. “We want a divorce!” Peggy told Conway he must have done a good job. “At least they’re angry at you instead of each other,” she said.

  Conway came dutifully to work every day, even though there wasn’t always much to do. He’d consult with Peggy about how much to charge a client. For a will of moderate complexity, she would advise one hundred fifty dollars. “They can’t afford that,” Conway would say of an elderly couple. He would charge fifty dollars. He’d ask Peggy how long it would take her to type the will, and she’d say, anticipating many errors and retyping, “Oh, about a week?” Conway would respond, “Hmm, that long?” But he wouldn’t complain. When business was slow, he went to the arraignment courts and represented indigent defendants. For each case, he got paid seventy-five dollars by the state. He made only as much as he needed, and his needs weren’t great.

  After a few years in Belmont, Conway married a woman he’d courted since his New York days, and his needs grew slightly greater. He had known Joe Mulligan for several years, and when Mulligan invited him to come work at his firm, Conway accepted. He brought Peggy along with him. He didn’t draw a salary. He got paid only from the proceeds of cases he helped to resolve.

  He’d been at Reed & Mulligan two years, working out of a small cubicle, when Schlichtmann showed up. Peggy would never forget that day. “Kevin used to tell me, ‘There’s no passion in my life.’ He was bored with what he was doing. Then Jan burst into the office. He represented somebody in an airplane crash, a client that Barry Reed wanted. Barry didn’t have a chance against Jan. He was overpowering. Kevin was stunned by him. Kevin said, ‘Jan’s exactly like what you hope you’re going to be when you get out of law school.’ ”

  Conway had helped Schlichtmann draft the complaint in the Piper Arrow case. When Schlichtmann began digging through the files at Reed & Mulligan, Conway was his guide. Conway unearthed a case in which a three-year-old girl, vomiting and with a high fever, was examined by a doctor, treated with aspirin, and sent home. She developed fulminant meningitis and suffered brain damage as a result. Schlichtmann and Conway settled the case for $675,000. They worked together every day. In the evening they’d go downstairs to the Emperor of China restaurant on Tremont Street for dinner and then come back to the office and work some more. They took on a case in which a hospital incubator had overheated, causing brain damage in a newborn infant. They settled that case for $1.15 million. When an insurance company refused to settle a claim in which a surgical clamp had been left for nine years in the abdomen of a elderly man, Conway and Schlichtmann prepared for trial. It was an Essex County case, on the north shore of Massachusetts, not far from Schlichtmann’s old office in Newburyport. They rented a room at a cheap motel near the Essex County courthouse. They lived there for two weeks, amid piles of lawbooks, medical texts, and legal pads. On the b
ureau was a portable typewriter, on which Schlichtmann typed last-minute motions. They ate their meals at a diner next to the motel, keeping company with long-haul truck drivers. They worked until two or three o’clock in the morning, and then got up to go to court. Conway felt punchy from lack of sleep, but he also felt exhilarated. “Working with Jan,” Conway said of that time, “was the difference between being alive and being dead.” The jury awarded their client $492,000.

  Conway felt as close to Schlichtmann as a brother, although in most respects they appeared to be complete opposites. Schlichtmann was tall and slender, Conway short and stout. Schlichtmann’s shoes were always polished to a high gloss, Conway’s were always scuffed. Schlichtmann’s tailored shirts were perfectly pressed, Conway’s were taut over his substantial belly and billowed out of the back of his pants. Schlichtmann’s tie, perfectly knotted, was held in place with a gold collarpin. The knot in Conway’s tie had usually descended an inch or two by the time he arrived at work. Schlichtmann, fastidious about health and diet, watched Conway eat doughnuts for breakfast and drink “gallons” of coffee. “You treat your digestive tract like a sewer,” Schlichtmann once told him. Conway had a kind word for everyone he encountered—the receptionist, the filing clerk, the office boy—while Schlichtmann, impatient and always hurrying, often failed to observe even common civilities. Conway tried never to judge anyone harshly. “You can never know enough about why someone acts the way they do,” he would say.

  They differed in their approach to money, too. Conway lived frugally, saving to buy a house and start a family. Schlichtmann spent every penny he earned. Conway noticed that Schlichtmann usually seemed depressed when he had money in the bank. He seemed driven by a need to get rid of money as quickly as possible, and when he had spent it all, he would burrow into another case and his spirits would rise.