After spending 50 years practicing law, Tom Morrison knew exactly what he wanted to do: Write satirical novels about lawyers. “I tried writing a spy novel once, but I knew nothing about that. And I didn’t want to write a legal thriller,” says Morrison, who writes under the name TC Morrison. “There’s a lot of fun in the legal world. I think a lot of lawsuits are funny and amusing. So I wanted to write a farce about litigation.”
And write he did.
His newest book is “Please Pass the Tort$,” the sequel to “Tort$ ‘R’ Us,” and features the zany exploits of twin brothers Patrick A. “Pap” and Prescott U. “Pup” Peters, who leave their stodgy law firms to start their own plaintiffs’ class action firm in the belief that it will be an ideal way to make more money and have more fun.
“I think a lot of lawyers tend to be stuffy and full of themselves, thinking everything they do is immensely important. Lawyers do a lot of good work, but there’s a lot of humor in what we do,” says Morrison.
“People love jokes about lawyers, and it’s because so many take themselves so seriously. So many of them are stuffy and pompous, and I thought it would be good to puncture the balloon of trial lawyers, particularly in the class action field.”
Several cases he chronicles in the book were taken from his own career, including one against the breath-freshening product BreathAsure. “We sued them for false advertising. Their whole ad campaign was totally bogus,” says Morrison. “We found an expert witness who was a premiere expert on bad breath. And he convinced the court that bad breath was in the mouth, not the stomach, as the product claimed. In the settlement, the company agreed to drop 23 of its advertising claims, including the claim, ‘It works.’”
In another escapade recounted in the book, a class action lawsuit is filed against the KGB and the Russian government for entrapping a US congressman in a so-called Honey Trap.
“I got the idea for a lot of the class action cases from articles I read in the New York Post,” notes Morrison.