I Saw the Dark Side of Tort Law. It’s Way More Shocking Than You’d Expect.

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The following essay is excerpted from The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory, published by Atria/One Signal Publishers on Tuesday.

In the fall of 2015, a horde of lawyers from across the country descended on Las Vegas and beelined for the Bellagio Resort and Casino. They weren’t in town to hear Britney Spears, immerse themselves in the Strip’s glitz and glamour, or answer the siren call of the blackjack tables. But they did harbor gamblers’ get-rich goals.

The draw: a conference called “Mass Torts Made Perfect,” held in the hotel’s grand ballroom, tucked well behind its famous musical water fountain. It was the nation’s largest gathering of attorneys who represent groups of people injured—or killed—by exposure to products like opioids or asbestos.

The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory

By Elizabeth Burch. Atria/One Signal Publishers.

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Some of the attorneys, the insiders, were already rich beyond imagining. Others, like the Elvis impersonators roaming the streets, were wannabes, eager to tap into the mass tort gold mine.

A mass tort is personal-injury litigation on steroids. It’s not just one fender-bender victim with whiplash out for a few thousand bucks. Nor is it a class action over $3 ATM fees that alerts consumers via junk mail. It’s hundreds, thousands, and sometimes more than 100,000 people suing over life-changing physical harm from asbestos-laced baby powder, from NFL concussions, from pacemakers, hip implants, and other medical products.

Ordinarily, plaintiffs expect to file a lawsuit and have a suit-and-tie lawyer usher them through to trial, where they can tell the jury how corporate wrongdoing wrecked their health. But in mass torts, a panel of seven judges decides which federal judge will handle all federal lawsuits with similar facts. Then injured plaintiffs from Alaska to Maine find their cases shipped off to a single judge somewhere in the United States through a process known as multidistrict litigation. With thousands of cases mushed into a scrum, trials disappear and individuals become numbers on a spreadsheet.

At the center of these mass tort cases are real people seeking justice from large corporations. None of those people was in Las Vegas. This gathering was for their lawyers, who paid $1,495 each to attend. This event was about money and power.

Outside the Bellagio’s grand ballroom, three men registered for the conference. They’d jetted in on separate planes, lest one go down. Nine seasoned “spokesmodels” in electric-blue dresses sashayed around them in the hallway like roving disco balls.

“Come party with us tonight,” the women said, handing out embossed invitations to........

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