“You know about my work, and you know that I care about that work, as do my fellow lawyers.” He pronounced the first syllable of “lawyer” to rhyme with “raw.”
“Our job is to fight on behalf”—and Evelyn could finish the sentence in her head, from the countless times she’d heard her father say it at awards dinners, at parties, to people he had just met—“of people who are too poor or disempowered to have a voice. We’ve been doing that the best way we know how.”
“Is this about my job?” Evelyn said. “Listen, I know—these people do have a voice, I’m not saying they don’t. They’re really not as bad as you think. They’re—well, Mom knows. They can be really nice. It’s not sales, anyway. It’s membership, which is a different thing. Membership is more coming in at their level. And it was just four hundred and fifty dollars, which, I know it’s not great, but it’s—”
“Honey, honey,” Dale interrupted. He looked at Barbara, but Barbara didn’t turn. “It’s not about your job. It’s about my job. When you fight for people, you make life harder for the people in charge, and guess what, the people in charge then try to go after you. The Republicans are out to show plaintiffs’ lawyers how much power they have, and the government found someone who’s telling them that we’ve done some illegal things, that we’ve made some illegal, ah, illegal offers.
“Now, you have sat in the courtroom as I’ve argued case after case. You have listened to the witnesses, the expert witnesses. You have listened to the judge. You know how the whole process goes. Why did I bring up expert witnesses? Well, we need those witnesses—often doctors—to explain to the jury the effects that some of the drugs can have on our clients.”
“Right,” said Evelyn, wary.
“Do you remember the Oney case, Peg Oney out of Cresheim? Remember her, the Wallen Pharma case?”
“Yes,” Evelyn said. She had been in middle school then, and she and Barbara had traveled to Pennsylvania to watch her father give opening arguments in the case. The lawsuit was over Wallen knowing but not disclosing side effects for one of its drugs. The case was complicated, full of chemistry and drug-development procedures, but her father made it simple. He had started by describing how Peg lost feeling in her fingertips as a result of taking the drug. “Now, fingertips mightn’t seem like much,” he said in his thick Carolina accent. “It’s not a leg. Not an arm. Not even a hand. But when Peg holds her hand in front of a candle, she doesn’t feel warmth. When she goes to pat her dog Scout, she can’t feel his fur. When she touches her one-year-old baby’s cheek, she doesn’t feel his soft skin. Fingertips are just the tips, but fingertips are also the world.” He had made every juror feel just what it was like to be Peg, and then he left the podium, walking close enough to the jury box that the jurors in front could touch him. “Right here, in this courtroom, you people of Pennsylvania get to say today to this huge conglomerate, ‘We’ve had enough. You don’t get to take our senses from us. You don’t get to tell us we can’t feel warmth, we can’t pat our dog, we can’t touch our baby. We’ve been misled enough, we’ve been fooled enough, we’ve been lied to enough. It stops here. It stops today.’” It took jurors fewer than three hours to award Peg Oney an enormous sum.
“Peg’s injuries, the effect on her body, were complicated,” Dale was saying now as he neatened his stack of papers. “To hold Wallen responsible, we had to have experts tracing exactly what Wallen had tested, exactly what they knew, exactly what the effects were on Peg and the other plaintiffs. You’ve got to have good experts and we searched high and low for the right ones, a doctor and a chemist, who offered very compelling trial testimony. The award in that case, Evie, was significant for the Oneys. Very significant.”