Courtroom Cowboy

 The Master of Facts

Pennsylvania Law WeeklyThe Master of Facts

By William P. Murphy

As one graduate of the “Beasley School of Law” who never attended Temple University at all, I have my own clear recollections of my onetime employer, the late James E. Beasley Sr. When I began reading “Courtroom Cowboy,” Ralph Cipriano’s new biography of the late personal injury lawyer icon, I naturally brought my own perspective on the subject.

Although Beasley spent much of his off-time flying vintage war planes, he probably tried more railroad than aviation cases. Maybe that’s why I picture him more in railroad terms, say, maybe as a silver diesel Super Chief hurtling along a straight-away. The point is, you didn’t want to be staring down the business end of his train if you could avoid it, but it was sure something to see when it got rolling.

When I was a law clerk to the late Judge Edward R. Becker in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, I remember that, practically out of the blue, he once praised a lawyer by the name of Beasley. That was the first I heard of him. Later a national icon in his own right, Becker volunteered that he had never seen any lawyer do a better job of mastering the facts of a case than Beasley. That early foreshadowing stuck in my mind. Becker was as savvy and learned a jurist as there ever was and he was not impressed easily. I had no idea then that the law teaching career I had mapped out for myself would eventually intersect with that master of facts and then make a sharp turn.

I learned early after I began to work for the Beasley firm that he was not a one-dimensional skills lawyer, but had a profound respect for the serious study of law. Facts may seem almighty in the courtroom, but it is the law that makes them work and he knew it. Some of the associates in his firm (there were no partners) brought solid academic credentials. Beasley was not explained by any simple reference to his trial skills or to the big-figure verdicts he regularly won. I could tell that the force that drove was something separate.

I did not have to look far in “Courtroom Cowboy” to find documentation of the deeper workings beneath the glare of the headlines. Ralph Cipriano did his homework and provides a penetrating view of his subject. He captures Beasley’s determination to push and change the law for the sake of the people he represented. He conveys the different brand of advocacy that Beasley pioneered and that actually helped to terra-form the tort law environment to make justice possible for everyone, including those like him who grew up without advantage. Cipriano exposes, too, a sometimes bristly interplay between Beasley and his family, some jurists and even some of his own employees. That, plus revelations about those early years that wound their way to a rather late-starting law career, held many surprises for me, but yet connected with the dots of what I personally knew.

Cipriano makes early reference to the inspired and legendary closing speech Beasley gave in his famous 1984 Cessna case, in which he used a telephone imaginatively and hauntingly as a visual aid in a death case against an airplane manufacturer.

In chapter after chapter of selected cases and courtroom dramas, “Courtroom Cowboy” weaves together the case, the lawyer and the man.

The chapter devoted to the second trial of the nationally noted libel case, Sprague v. Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, epitomizes Beasley’s uncanny ability on cross-examination. Sifting through Beasley’s 17-day cross-examination of a newspaper editor, the author distills the Beasley gift for harvesting a uniquely critical fact that he, but not the witness, knows will inevitably prove the case. In that instance, it was an assertion by the witness on day two that an investigation involving attorneys for the newspaper had supposedly been finished before the presses rolled. The next 15 days must have been gravy. As the book remarkably reports, the presiding trial judge, Charles P. Mirarchi Jr., himself acknowledged that Beasley “squeezed the juice out of every paragraph” of the newspaper stories in suit and “didn’t repeat himself.” Try that yourself sometime.

Showing his own consistent good grasp of legal strategy, Cipriano cross-references that devastating crossexamination with a lesson Beasley learned from a prior unsuccessful libel case: Call the defendant newspaper’s top honcho as on cross during plaintiff’s own case-in-chief.

That Sprague retrial in 1990, of course, produced a $34 million jury verdict. It was eventually reduced to $24 million by the Superior Court. The case thereafter settled for an undisclosed amount. What a price to pay for the Inquirer’s successful appeal from a $4.5 million verdict in 1983.

The series of cases that Cipriano holds up to close view range from notable medical malpractice and products cases, which were Beasley’s mainstay, to his firm’s creative pursuit through legal process of the ultra-notorious Osama Bin Ladin. With an eclectic span of court dramas and an easy style, “Courtroom Cowboy” develops all sides of the Beasley persona and, in my opinion, outdoes even Louis Nizer’s classic, “My Life in Court.”

Although one reviewer has complained that Cipriano might not have been completely objective because he himself had been a client of Beasley, I disagree with the criticism. I believe that circumstance, which is addressed in the book, widened the writer’s insight and gave him a stronger voice. Most people who encountered Beasley professionally would acknowledge his charisma, anyway. It doesn’t trouble me that the author had a dose of it. It’s a part of the story.

Moreover, you’ll see when you read the book that Cipriano did not spare harsh judgments or embarrassing and uncomfortable circumstances when they arose. Don’t get me wrong: “Courtroom Cowboy” is no James Boswell on Dr. Sam Johnson. It’s much more interesting.

Although we still ride commuter rails and spot a Conrail diesel now and then, the day of the railroad has mostly passed. So has the day of Beasley. Before there were railroads there were canals. Before canals there were wagon trails and passes and gaps. Things are always moving. From the stories told in the “Courtroom Cowboy” and reading between the lines, I surmise that he might have had an inkling of this, too, before his death in 2004 at the age of 78. No one can be sure.

Instead of being a model anymore, his firm’s pyramidal structure is not so suited to the circumstances of today. And the partnership model will never be completely suitable either, because it tends to weed out those personalities whose sheer independence seems part of the DNA of the best personal injury advocates.The customary huge verdicts that Beasley introduced to our legal culture were virtually unheard of when he first embarked on his professional journey. The present economy might not even be able to sustain the continued growth of that model now, especially because it depends upon the insurance industry. That bubble might burst as so many others have recently.

The central struggle for justice now may also have shifted somewhat to other areas, more political and economic, such as preserving the power of a strong judiciary, keeping those courtroom doors open and avoiding the contraction of labor rights. Others will have to find new ways to defend the hard-won gains of that master of facts whose story is so ably told in “Courtroom Cowboy.” Maybe the book will serve as an inspiration.

William P. Murphy is a civil trial and appeals lawyer in Philadelphia. He formerly served as editor-in-chief of the Law Weekly, as a full-time law teacher of constitutional law and federal practice, and as law clerk to Judges Edward R. Becker, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Chief Justice Samuel J. Roberts.

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