Civil Actions

Edwards has the sort of up-from-the-lower-middle-class "story" that's so effective on the campaign trial. He grew up in the small North Carolina town of Robbins, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother ran a small store. Edwards has crafted his idyllic upbringing into a gently self-deprecating stump speech in which he pokes fun at himself as the "college boy" who got stuck with the worst jobs in the mill when he was home from North Carolina State. The speech is intended to extol the virtues of hard work---his own in particular---and identify with the "little guy," something at which he is uncommonly adept, all the way to his earthy choice of a college major (textile management), something he characterizes as job insurance in case he didn't get into law school. Of course, Edwards did get into law school at the University of North Carolina, where he met his wife, Elizabeth, and his future law partner, David Kirby.

Upon graduating, he moved to Tennessee to join former Republican Governor Lamar Alexander's law firm, which specialized in defending banks, insurance companies, and other corporations. In 1981, he returned to North Carolina, specifically to the politically well-connected Raleigh law firm of Wade Smith, a former Democratic Party state chairman, where he started a rapidly successful civil litigation division. He won his first multi-million dollar verdict in 1984, which he followed the next year with a $6.5 million verdict for a 6-year-old girl who'd suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital---at the time, the largest verdict in state history. Edwards left in 1993 to start his own firm with Kirby.

Until he moved to the Senate, Edwards was a personal injury lawyer---the kind people most love to hate---and a very talented one. More than half his cases were medical malpractice suits. Many involved infants born with brain damage or other serious conditions that entail a lifetime of expensive medical care. Edwards also won cases against hospitals, cities, and corporations. "As a lawyer, he was the whole package," says Mike Dayton, editor of North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. "He's prepared, he's smart, and he's very personable." And he continued winning massive verdicts. In 1990, he was the youngest member inducted into The Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the nation's top 100 trial lawyers. By the mid-1990s, Edwards had become legendary. "After trials," recalls Howard Twiggs, a Raleigh lawyer and former president of ATLA, "jurors would approach Johnny and ask him for his card." It is said that insurance companies would suddenly become interested in settling when Edwards' name was added to a plaintiff's team. Edwards won a $7 million verdict for the parents of a 16-year-old who'd killed himself the day after being dismissed from a psychiatric hospital, an incredibly difficult case to win, Dayton says, because in North Carolina the plaintiff must prove that the entire burden of negligence lies with the defendant. In 1997, Edwards successfully sued a doctor for $23 million on behalf of the parents of a baby severely brain damaged by oxygen deprivation during labor.

The defining case in Edwards' legal career wrapped up that same year. In 1993, a five-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey had been playing in a Wake County, N.C., wading pool when she became caught in an uncovered drain so forcefully that the suction pulled out most of her intestines. She survived but for the rest of her life will need to be hooked up to feeding tubes for 12 hours each night. Edwards filed suit on the Lakeys' behalf against Sta-Rite Industries, the Wisconsin corporation that manufactured the drain. Attorneys describe his handling of the case as a virtuoso example of a trial layer bringing a negligent corporation to heel. Sta-Rite offered the Lakeys $100,000 to settle the case. Edwards passed. Before trial, he discovered that 12 other children had suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains. The company raised its offer to $1.25 million. Two weeks into the trial, they upped the figure to $8.5 million. Edwards declined the offer and asked for their insurance policy limit of $22.5 million. The day before the trial resumed from Christmas break, Sta-Rite countered with $17.5 million. Again, Edwards said no. On January 10, 1997, lawyers from across the state packed the courtroom to hear Edwards' closing argument, "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen," recalls Dayton. Three days later, the jury found Sta-Rite guilty and liable for $25 million in economic damages (by state law, punitive damages could have tripled that amount). The company immediately settled for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. For their part, Edwards and Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service.

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