Mike Papantonio appears on STAND UP! with Pete Dominick to talk about his background as an attorney and what helped to influence his new legal thriller, Law and Disorder.

Transcription of the above video:

Dominick:
You’ve written now a novel that we’re going to talk about. Let’s lay some groundwork, give you some credibility. Who is Mike Papantonio, everybody? Big-time lawyer. What kind of law do you practice? You’re a very respected lawyer. Obviously some people probably hate you and are terrified of you, Mike. I’m one of them, by the way. I’ve always been intimidated by you. I listen to you on the radio. Luckily I’m on generally the same side of issues as you, but I’m like, I would never want to argue with that guy. What kind of lawyer are you?

Papantonio:
The cases I try, they’re not auto cases. They’re cases against DuPont, Pfizer, Merck, some of the biggest corporations in the world. It’s called complex litigation. Most of the time they end up being pharmaceutical cases or big environmental cases, and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 35 years. Everybody has their niche that they fall into. I think my politics mixes well with what I do as a lawyer, and that is you have to push back. Corporate media doesn’t push back. The government is incapable of pushing back. Sometimes the only pushback there is is a few angry lawyers that want to expose some of the things that happen in this country that corporate media would never tell us about.

Dominick:
Some people would refer to you as a guy who does mass tort, or tort law. You get these big returns when you go after, say, a pharmaceutical company. Is that pejorative? Are you proud of the type of law that you practice going after, and how much … You get some big money for your clients, I would imagine, in some of these cases.

Papantonio:
Let me give you the best example I can. First of all, this is not class action law. This is simply where you have a drug that might be killing a thousand people a year. Best example I can give you is Yaz. Yaz was a birth control pill and it was killing women by the hundreds all over America. When we found out about it, we went to the major networks and we said, “Listen, you’ve got to tell this story. If you don’t tell the story, more women are going to die.” Sure enough, they wouldn’t tell the story because one of their big advertisers was Bayer. They refused to tell the story, and in effect, during the time that they let that go, hundreds of women became crippled or died because of Yaz, which was simply birth control pill.

You ask is it rewarding. It is rewarding when you shut that down. When you say to Bayer, “Look, we’re going to be at you for the rest of our lives if we have to, but we want some changes made.” There’s nobody else, Pete, that will do that. Most of the time you have government so tied in to a corporation like Pfizer or DuPont or Dow Chemical. They’re so tied in because of money issues. These are the people that give the DNC, for example –

Dominick:
Let me ask you about that. Sorry to interrupt you, Mike. I saw this this morning in the political playbook. The main lobbying group for pharmaceutical companies is called Pharma. I read this morning, they’re going to be forking over an additional $100 million in dues as the industry gears up for a post-election battle over drug prices. The move would boost the group’s already substantial coffers, bringing its budget to more than $300 million.

Correct me if I’m wrong, pharmaceutical companies that might actually be in competition, they collude and they throw money into a pot, hiring companies that actually have lobbyists working for them in the DC-Virginia area. They go to the federal and state government and they lobby for laws and regulations that are favorable to their industry. That’s how it works with a number of industries, but specifically on Pharma, what do they do with all of this money?

Papantonio:
Most of it goes to politicians, the other part goes to the media. If you watch the nightly news, on the average, Pete, you’re going to see seven pharmaceutical advertisements. Let’s say you have a drug out there killing somebody and you call NBC. Understand, I used to actually be … I appeared on MSNBC all the time. I appeared on Fox, I appeared on MSNBC, CNN, right down the line. When I would try to tell a story, when I tried to say, “Look, this is an important story,” some cat on the 50th floor with an abacus would say, “No, we can do that because this is a big advertiser and they won’t come back.

Pharma, the organization you’re talking about, they further that, Pete. They meet with the executives at NBC or ABC. They sit down and they say, “Listen, we’d really like to give you another $20 million in the next few months. What do you think about this?” It’s the same thing they do with newspapers. Newspapers have these editorial boards. Well, Pharma will be there on any big issue meeting with the pharmaceutical board, just like they’re a politician.

What we think is, we think things are going to take care of themselves. We think there’s some silver bullet that’s going to change all that. When a pharmaceutical company does wrong or an oil and gas company fracks us out of existence, that somehow regulators are going to take care of that, that it’s built in for justice. Anything but the truth.

Dominick:
Donald Trump has always used lawsuits and legal threats to get what he has wanted. You’re a lawyer, you understand that intimately, how it works. How do you look at how Donald Trump has conducted business in terms of how he has used his high-powered, high-paid lawyers for him to get what he wants?

Papantonio:
Here’s the quick answer. Corporate America hates lawsuits. That’s what tort reform is about. That is, tell the average person they’re not permitted to go to a courtroom, but where it comes to my corporation suing your corporation, it needs to be unfettered. We need to have a welcome wagon where it comes to those kinds of lawsuits.

Donald Trump is exhibit A for that, you see. They don’t want the guy who’s blinded by a product to go to court and have a fair trial. When you’ve lost a child because of a bad medication, they don’t want that family to go to court. They do want the corporation that might have caused that injury to be able to sue another corporation for something like a merger acquisition issue.

Dominick:
What do you say to people, given your legal practice and your career, what do you say to people who say, “You know what? We need tort reform. If we have tort reform, that’ll bring down the cost of health insurance. If we have tort reform, that’ll …” I don’t know what else they say.

Papantonio:
Yeah, every day, Pete, somebody comes into our office. They thought tort reform was wonderful, they voted Republican, they thought they were conservatives. Then they’ve lost a husband or a child because of a defective product, or maybe medical malpractice. We have to tell them, “We would love to help you, but the law on that issue is so bad because it was changed during the time that you were Republican, during the time that you were conservative, during the time when you thought that the end-all was tort reform.”

Dominick:
Correct me if I’m wrong, they’re convinced by what they see in the news or they hear about as some really, really fraudulent, overwrought, faked … The hot coffee, which by the way is an amazing documentary about the hot coffee burns a lady at McDonald’s and somebody gets millions of dollars. That’s a very convincing kind of anecdote, right Mike?

Papantonio:
Right. There’s something called the reptilian mind. When you’re a trial lawyer, you have to be very aware of it. That is that the jury there is responding to what is it that is going to be best for them? There’s twelve jurors, they don’t even care about the other eleven. What is best for me? I’m going to vote in a way that’s best for me. What the other side convinced that one juror of is, “Gee whiz, if you vote to be able to give this poor woman who was not just mildly burned, horribly burned by something that was totally avoidable, then if you do that, then your Big Mac is going to be more expensive. Big Mac falafel is going to be a lot more expensive for you.”

Dominick:
Big Mac falafel. If that’s actually a new menu item at McDonald’s, I might go.