Plaintiff's Counsel

The handsome, gregarious "King of Torts" smiled benignly at the one-legged skeleton beside him and happily explained the secrets of his success. "The ingredients of a trial lawyer," said Melvin M. (for Mouron) Belli in San Francisco last week, "are imagination and initiative. You need a feeling for the plaintiff, the desire to do him some good and to stick with him through thick and thin, and the guts to do just that when everyone is criticizing you." Belli paused thoughtfully, added: "And a little law will help."

California's thrice-married, twice-divorced Melvin Belli (rhymes with dwell I), 51, knows exactly what he is talking about. He is the recognized if not the revered leader in the most phenomenal field of U.S. law: personal injury. In the last ten years, average jury awards in personal-injury suits have soared by a spectacular 266%. His worst enemies admit, indeed insist, that flamboyant Melvin Belli, who has won more than 100 cases in the past decade with awards exceeding $100,000. is the lawyer most responsible.

A Grisly Package. Belli's most noteworthy contribution to tort-trials is in his use of "demonstrative evidence," i.e., visual aids. He will take his skeleton, named "Elmer," into the courtroom and show the jury by experts' testimony exactly where plaintiff broke a bone, then stalk to his portable blackboard to draw diagrams of the accident scene. Often he chalks figures to justify the damages he is demanding--so much per hour for pain, so much for medical bills, so much in lost wages, etc., etc.--occasionally makes a deliberate mistake in addition, so as to let an alert juryman or a judge correct his arithmetic.

Lawyer Belli's methods sometimes exceed traditional limits. In one celebrated case, in which he acted for a woman who had lost one leg, Belli brought a grotesque, leg-shaped package into the courtroom. It was wrapped in butcher's paper, tied with twine. Throughout the trial, the jury stared in horrified fascination at the package. Finally, near the end of the trial, Showman Belli slowly and deliberately opened the package--and handed the contents to a startled juror. It was an artificial leg, of the sort the plaintiff would have to wear for the rest of her life. The jury returned an award of $100,000.

$30,000 per Tear. Next only to insurancemen, Melvin Belli (University of California Law School '33) dislikes doctors most. He maintains that in malpractice suits the medical profession is a "conspiracy of silence"; few physicians, he declares, will risk testifying against a fellow doctor, for fear either of reprisal by medical associations or of loss of their own malpractice insurance. He got a measure of revenge in a 1949 case in which he appeared for an aging woman who charged that a specialist had promised to give her "the breasts of a virgin." The doctor, complained the plaintiff, had mutilated her instead. The judge permitted the plaintiff to disrobe to the waist before the jury in the judge's chambers. "She stood there," says Belli, "the tears dripping down. I figured later it was worth $30,000 a tear."

Tortsman Belli's case book reads like a diary of disaster. He has won (pending appeal) $147,300 so far for victims of the defective polio vaccine distributed by California's Cutter Laboratories in 1955. He has won $220,000 so far for relatives of victims of the nation's worst air crash--the collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon on June 30, 1956. Coming up in Louisiana is a $450,000 Belli case against two cigarette manufacturers; it was filed on behalf of a woman whose husband died of lung cancer. From such a practice, Melvin Belli, taking a flat 33 1/3% out of the awards 'to his clients, earns about $250,000 a year, more than enough to maintain his garish mode of life in a Telegraph Hill apartment. There is closeted Melvin Belli's striking wardrobe, including spats, Homburg, London-tailored suits with button-down cuffs, boots with two-inch heels, Alaskan parkas and Spanish vests. There also, worked into the colorful tile of the Belli bathroom, is the lawyeresque Latin, Res Ipsa Loquitur (The thing speaks for itself), which will nicely do as Melvin Belli's motto.

"Shyster or Savant." Most legal observers agree that for many years personal injuries were not adequately compensated in the courts. Many of those same observers now believe that Belli has led the trend too far in the opposite direction. Moreover, they shrink from Belli's techniques. "I believe we must do something for those who have been injured," says a high-court judge, "but I am not sure Belli is the man to do it. I don't like what Belli is doing to the law." Belli himself says flatly, and without fear of contradiction: "I am regarded as either the shyster or savant. There is no middle road for me." But perhaps there should be, at least in his field of the law, based as it is upon fair compensation for suffering.

*At law, a civil wrong independent of a contract.

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