Below is a list of some of America's highest paid attorneys. Salary information is based on year 2007. Pay attention to the law schools they attended. None of them attended a top-ten law school!
- Gerald Hosier: Approximate Salary $40MM (DePaul University Law School Graduate)
| Hosier was a patent lawyer from Las Vegas would become the top-earning attorney in the country. Hosier, now 60, began his career doing pro bono criminal defense work. Since the early Nineties his central client was the late Jerome Lemelson, an inventor with hundreds of patents, among which included the bar-code scanner technology. Last year Hosier recovered $140 million in settlements from such companies as Texas Instruments and Pfizer through patent infringement suits. He owns a collection of airplanes, which he flies himself, including a Czechoslovakian fighter jet. |
- Fred Baron: Aproximate Salary $21MM (University of Texas Law School Graduate)
| The 53-year-old founded Baron & Budd in 1977 and made a fortune in asbestos cases. His wife Lisa Blue and partner Russell Budd led the Dallas firm in recovering an estimated $150 million in asbestos claims in 2000, of which the firms cut was a whopping $45 million. Baron prefers to handle other toxic tort cases, he is president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, whose political action committee gave $3.6 million to Democrats last year to fight tort reform. As further assurance against tort reform, Baron and his firm gave an additional $700,000. |
- Joseph Jamail Jr.: Aproximate Salary $20MM (University of Texas Law School Graduate)
| Jamail collected $345 million in fees from the now infamous Texaco-Pennzoil case of 1987. This put him on the Forbes' list of the 400 wealthiest Americans with a recent net worth of $1.2 billion. Jamail, 75, keeps runs a lean firm with just six lawyers, and likes to settle cases. Last year's biggest victory: a $155 million judgment for a small Dallas-based oil company for an alleged fraud. |
- Willie E. Gary: Approximate Salary $12MM (North Carolina Central Univ Law School Graduate)
| A self-proclaimed "giant killer" is best known for a $500 million jury verdict against a funeral home operator in 1995. Last year Gary, 53, based in Stuart, Fla., won a $240 million case against Disney, alleging the company stole an idea for a sports theme park. A son of a migrant worker changed sides last year, defending Big Sugar against charges it underpaid migrant workers. Now he's representing plaintiffs in racial discrimination cases against big names like Coke, Kodak and Microsoft. |
- Philip H. Corboy: Approximate Salary $11MM (Loyola University Law School Graduate)
| Corboy's firm recovered $154 million in settlements in greater Chicago last year, including $5.2 million for the family of a woman killed in a plane crash and $3.5 million for an infant who suffered brain damage at a local hospital. Corboy, 76, has no plans to retire and continues to go strong. |
- Richard Scruggs: Approximate Salary $30MM (University of Mississippi Law School Graduate)
| Scruggs pleaad guilty to attempted bribery of a judge earlier this year and is expected to go to prison and loose his law license. The 54 year old Scruggs is a former Navy pilot who works out of Pascagoula, Miss., and made an early fortune with asbestos suits and was one of the first to start the tobacco litigation in the mid-1990s when he joined with Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore. These suits resulted in a $246 billion nationwide settlement. In the process he developed a new form of legal activism, attempting to change public policy using teams of lawyers aligned with government. "Companies know if they settle piecemeal, every lawyer subsequent to the first is going to want more than the last guy got," he says. Next on his hit-list are the HMOs. |
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- John O'Quinn: Approximate Salary $16MM (University of Houston Law School Graduate)
| One of the Big Five Texas tobacco lawyers, O'Quinn, 59, earned at least $40 million in the mid-Nineties with breast-implant litigation, forcing Dow Corning to file for bankruptcy. Last year his tobacco fees were pocket change in comparison with his big wins, which include $18 million for an oil refinery burn victim and a reported $9 million for a woman who claimed fen-phen caused heart damage. His total gross earnings in 2000 were $60 million. |
- John Eddie Williams Jr.: Approximate Salary $16MM (Baylor University Law School Graduate)
| Another member of the team of Texas tobacco lawyers, Williams, 46, also represented the family of a man killed in a Phillips Petroleum plant explosion and last year won a $117 million verdict. Aside from his firm's annual take of the tobacco fees (19% of Texas' $3.3 billion fee award), Williams recovered more than $150 million in asbestos litigation last year. |
- Joseph F. Rice: Approximate Salaray $15MM (University of South Carolina Law School Graduate)
- Michael V. Ciresi: Approximate Salary $14MM (University of Minnesota Law School Graduate)
| Ciresi is a intellectual property lawyers that heads a 230-lawyer Minneapolis firm, with clients like Honeywell and Unocal. But he's best known for winning the state's $6.1 billion tobacco settlement, with legal fees of $558 million. |
- Walter Umphrey: Approximate Salary $12MM (Baylor University Law School Graduate)
| Umphrey, 64, heads of a 54-lawyer Texas-based firm with offices in Washington, Nashville, Houston and Beaumont. He led the a team of lawyes in the tobacco litigation in Texas. His work representing 450,000 oil and paper union workers has netted him another $20 million in non-tobacco fees last year. Big wins include a $45 million settlement for a Seattle refinery explosion and $10 million for a mill explosion in northern Louisiana. |
- Wayne Reaud: Approximate Salary $12MM (Texas Tech University Law School Graduate)
| Reaud, 53, was making $26 million in the mid-Nineties when he gave up his law firm and made plans to move to Mexico to do missionary work with his wife. Then the Beaumont, Tex. plaintiff attorney got a calling of a different kind. He joined the five-member team of local counsel in the state's fight against tobacco. Three years later Texas won $17.4 billion, including $3.3 billion in legal fees. Rather than return to religion, the victory got him back into being a lawyer. |
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