Scruggs was someone who could render all of State Farm’s actuarial calculations irrelevant, because he had the power and know-how to force it to rewrite its contracts retroactively. He had been the scourge of Fortune 500 companies for two decades, precisely because he tended to change the rules of any game he chose to play.
Scruggs’s multifront assault on the tobacco industry in the mid-1990s – encompassing numerous lawsuits, public relations campaigns, and political pressure — forced the industry to agree to pay the states $246 billion over 25 years. His fee, collected during the same period, is expected to exceed $800 million.
As many readers know by now, Scruggs’s assault on the insurance industry went catastrophically awry. In March he pleaded guilty in federal court in Oxford, Miss., to conspiring to bribe a judge there, and he is under investigation for attempted bribery of a second judge. He did not respond to written questions sent to his counsel.
While the bribery accusations have attracted most of the media attention, the story of Scruggs’s siege upon the insurance industry is more jaw-dropping still. These were lawsuits in which the law itself played only a bit part. Victory was to be secured by aggregating pressure points, of which the most valuable were press attacks, threats of legislation harmful to the target or its industry, and the instigation of paralyzing state and federal investigations of the target.
CNN
4/10/8
Magnolia Tribune
