A Day in the Life of Danielle George: No Chaser

It's a sweltering summer morning. High on a hill in the Bronx, inside a massive granite and limestone sculpture that has stood for 60 years and through which some of the most wretched and unhappy and desperate and hopeful members of society pass every day, a tiny, dark-haired young woman named Danielle George sits on a wooden bench. She is wearing a tailored brown suit, a short-sleeved white cotton blouse and slight heels with open toes. She is waiting for a man whose mother entered a hospital a few months earlier to have what the doctors called a "benign mass" removed from her abdomen. Today the woman is in a "persistent vegetative state." These are antiseptic words, the coded and precisely ugly language that tells us what happened to the woman and who she is. What happened was, she went into the hospital for a routine operation and things went wrong. Horribly wrong.

Who she is — well, that's an existential and philosophical question that haunts the pretty young lawyer. It's the kind of question that used to fill her with a rage and sorrow that she carried home with her every night when she first chose this profession. She is still angry, still sad about the needless pain she encounters every day, but now she focuses her energy on easing that pain, on making the people and the institutions that caused the pain pay.

When the young man approaches her wooden bench, George stands, shakes his hand, shakes his wife's hand, speaks to them in gentle tones. She explains that the purpose of the hearing today is to persuade a judge to grant the man legal guardianship of his mother. This is so he can make any medical decisions regarding her care, so he can manage any financial issues, and — this last point is the most critical regarding George's professional raison d'être — so there will be a plaintiff who can sue the people who harmed his mother. George tells the man and his wife that the judge might ask some questions that all the man needs to do is tell the truth, and that everything will be okay.

The hallway is hot. People walk by, pulling off their jackets, blotting their faces with Kleenex. The man is sweating, too, and his wife reaches over and pats his forehead dry with a handkerchief.

He says he's been going over questions and answers in his mind since the night before, wondering what he would do if his mother's condition worsened, whether he would make the right decision.

"No one's going to ask you anything like that," George says, smiling, reassuring. "Absolutely no one is going to judge you today."

The wife nods. "That's what I've been telling him," she says and pats his brow again. The man looks like he's going to cry.

"Okay," George says. "This will be fine. It's a little bit cooler in the courtroom. Ready? Take a deep breath now. Okay, let's go."

The day before the hearing, George sits in her 45th floor office on Fifth Avenue, at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Firm, one of the preeminent personal injury law firms in the city, the first firm in the United States to win an award of more than one million dollars in a personal injury case. (It was in 1963, and the case involved head and spinal injuries suffered by a 13-year-old boy when a store sign fell on him in Manhattan.) George, who is 36, has worked as an associate at Fuchsberg for three years. Her desk is covered with overflowing stacks of papers ("But I know my way through it"), and books and files hide her walls.

The firm's common areas are nice but not plush. Offices are small, but they have views. Some of the attorneys have flowers and plants, and assistants water them. These are not the linoleum-floored, tobacco-stained personal injury offices that dwell in the popular imagination, the firms that rent space above an off-track betting parlor near a bucket-of-blood bar. Neither are they the work spaces of a white-shoe firm.

George wears a black tailored suit, a striped button-down shirt, and toeless strappy heels. With slight variations — nylons and closed-toe shoes when she's in trial, skirt and T-shirt on some Fridays ("never jeans or sneakers") — this is her uniform. Piercing brown eyes, an aquiline nose and a full lower lip make her seem a somewhat prettier version of Saturday Night Live comedian Tina Fey. She speaks rapidly, a bit urgently, whether discussing cases in progress, her career trajectory, the "propaganda" being disseminated about tort reform ("We call it 'court deform' "), or the pressing societal need for medical malpractice lawyers.

"I have enormous respect for physicians," she says. "No one knows better than I do that there's incredible medical care going on in the city. But there are also hospitals in New York — you'd be better off bleeding on the street than going into them."

Today George will work on structuring a settlement for the children of a man who died as a result of a misplaced feeding tube. He had been experiencing digestive problems, and nurses who should have inserted the feeding tube into his digestive system instead put it into his trachea. He died when his lungs filled with the liquid feeding material.

George will also review depositions and schedule a couple more in a case involving a teenage boy who suffered brain damage. The boy had been seeing a psychiatrist for ADD, and the doctor had prescribed an antidepressant that sometimes causes heart problems. Following protocol, the psychiatrist ordered electrocardiograms for the boy as a precaution, but both the psychiatrist and the cardiologist ignored the abnormal results. The boy had a heart attack, his heart stopped and he had to be resuscitated, and he was in a coma that lasted several days.

"Now he's had speech deficits, tremors, seizures, a reduction in his IQ — several tests have been done, and he's just got a lot of problems," says George. "And they're saying that once you reach a certain plateau, you're never going to get much better. He's got reading and writing and problem-solving deficits. He's going to be starting in a special college-type situation. Five kids in a class. The psychiatrist and the cardiologist both missed the EKG results."

She will also review her notes on a case she has just filed:

"A little girl. A 10-year-old little girl with headaches, lots of nausea, who was vomiting, drinking excessive fluids to the point where the drinking itself was a serious problem. Her pediatrician ruled out the most obvious things, like diabetes, immediately. Then he wanted to send her to a shrink. Basically, there was meandering for a year and a half. Eventually what happened was, she went to an eye doctor because she was having vision problems, and the eye doctor suspected a brain tumor, said she should get an MRI. Her mother took her back to the pediatrician, and according to my client he said, 'If the eye doctor wants you to get an MRI, let him order it, because I'm not going to.' She had a brain tumor. For years she had been suffering symptoms that indicated she had a brain tumor. And because of those years of meandering, the tumor was allowed to grow, and it was pressing on the girl's pituitary gland, which controls things like sexual and reproductive functions. She had surgery to remove the tumor, but damage has been done. At the least, she'll probably be on hormone-replacement therapy for the rest of her life. Every doctor I've spoken to has said, 'The pediatrician missed this by a mile.' "

She draws a long, deep breath, lets it out slowly, and says, "In the beginning my outrage was just visceral. Often [my clients] were unsophisticated and didn't even know they had access to their medical records. And they'd been profoundly damaged. Now my feeling is more, Okay, now what do we do? How do we fix this?"

The Jacob D. Fuchsberg law firm has 12 lawyers, 80 years of experience, and a track record that has garnered it a coveted listing in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers, which includes only those law firms and lawyers that have been designated as the best in their field and that have earned the highest rating in the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory.

What the firm does is as far from the common perception of personal injury lawyers as its 45th floor offices are from the "Have you been hurt in an accident?" ads in New York City subway cars. When it comes to most people's views of personal injury lawyers, though, it doesn't matter where their offices are, or how vehemently they claim to be fighting the good fight.

"To most lawyers, plaintiffs' lawyers are scum — especially personal injury lawyers," says a litigator at a large Manhattan law firm that represents corporate defendants. "If you know one personally and you like him, then you make an exception. David Boies was at Cravath, and now he's a plaintiffs' lawyer, and people think highly of him. But personal injury lawyers, by reputation, make everyone else look bad."

"Some of my best friends are personal injury attorneys," says Jeff Leen, a former investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, who is the assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post and who has shared in five Pulitzer Prizes as reporter or editor. "But it's not an accident that John Edwards is getting grief in his run for president because of his P.I. background. And it's not an accident that the term ambulance chaser has stuck around all these years. When I was in Miami, I knew a drug lawyer who was considered beyond the pale by many, and he switched restaurants when he saw too many P.I. lawyers coming around."

"There are two views," says Steve Herz, who got his law degree from Vanderbilt in 1991 and is now president of a media management company that represents TV personalities. "One is that personal injury lawyers are bottom-feeders. The other is that they are the poor man's key to the courthouse. Why the first view? Because some of them prey upon a system that will reward people whose injuries may be speculative at best, but who will be compensated by deep-pocketed defendants who want to minimize their exposure and risk."

George has heard all the talk about — she hates this term — ambulance chasers. And she has thought hard about it.

"There are myths in my field like in any other, I suppose. One is that suing has become a favorite American pastime. The facts are exactly the opposite. According to a report from the Rand Institute for Civil Justice, only 10 percent of injured Americans even file a claim for compensation. Only two percent file lawsuits. The public is constantly assaulted by insurance industry lobbying efforts to make plaintiff trial lawyers look like pariahs. But society benefits in countless ways as a result of the civil justice system in this country: It prevents future injuries by removing dangerous products and practices from the marketplace, and encourages safety innovations. It educates the public on risks associated with some products and services, and provides authoritative judicial forums where the responsibility of the perpetrators of trauma and disease can be established. I hope my work, in part, leads to better medical care, especially for the poor."

As for other lawyers' perceptions of personal injury law: "Pecking order is certainly a matter of perception. I'm just trying to be the best lawyer I can be, so I don't really think in terms of a pecking order. It is certainly on a higher level than the guy who waits in traffic court to pick up a client for a DWI ticket. Within personal injury work, though, there can be a kind of subtle pecking order, and it really just has to do with the complexity of the cases one deals with. Generally, the products liability, complicated construction-site accidents and medical malpractice cases are much more complex than a simple trip-and-fall, fractured-wrist case. But it depends on the individual. A lawyer who is respected earns it by being thorough, prepared, and courteous to his or her adversaries, no matter how big or small the case is."

Danielle George is the youngest of four daughters. Growing up on Staten Island, she spent many an evening at the dinner table debating with her father, who was an undertaker. They would argue reproductive rights, the intents of the framers of the Constitution, the exact nature of King Lear's tragic flaw.

"My father has a brilliant mind, and he's very well read," George says. "I would read the paper all the time and be outraged at all the injustice I saw. So my position tended to be a more liberal position than his. I think that's natural between a father and a daughter, especially a daughter who is flexing her intellectual muscles, or wings, or whatever."

She enrolled in New York University, concentrating on Shakespeare (for her 18th birthday, her father bought her a subscription to the New York Shakespeare festival) and Japanese literature, and planned for a career as a literature professor.

"But then," she says, "I realized I didn't want to live in a small, closed world. It seemed like the university was its own world. I wanted to live in the real world."

That epiphany led her to New York Law School, which, in turn, led to a summer clerkship for the administrative judge on Staten Island. After her second year, she took a job with the City of New York, working on cases that the city was prosecuting. When she graduated and passed the bar in New York and New Jersey, she looked for a job in public-interest law. "I wanted to do civil rights work, to right wrongs, to be making a difference on a broad scale," George says. She searched for more than nine months. "And then, you know, you gotta pay the bills, and student loans start coming in. You gotta pay the bills." So she took a job with a Staten Island firm that specialized in personal injury cases.

"They gave me a lot of responsibility. They were very smart, very ethical; they didn't cut corners. Their motto was, 'No case is worth losing your license over.' I got to do a lot. They'd send me to court on five, six, 10 conferences on the same morning."

She stayed there five years and became expert at personal injury cases; General negligence, accidents, slip-and-fall cases — all those she handled. "I'd use my youth as a tool, play dumb. 'I'm sorry,' I'd say to the elevator engineer. 'Please pardon my ignorance, would you explain how that works?' "

After a few years, though, she wanted to do something more exciting. "I knew the issues would get kind of old."

Detail and conflict appealed to George, and she liked the idea of representing people who desperately needed representing. She never considered a career as a criminal prosecutor or a defense attorney, in part because of a trial she once attended. "I saw the defendant beat up his lawyer in front of the jury, then ask for a mistrial. That pretty much shut the door on criminal law for me."

She considered a government job, "but the pay was awful." George even considered the FBI. "That was during my Jodie Foster phase. I thought, 'That could be really interesting. I could do that. I could run around in the mud and catch criminals.' But then I found out I'd have to carry a gun, and that was the end of that."

Then, in 1997, George traveled to India on her honeymoon. Between romantic dinners and sightseeing, she witnessed poverty and injustice she had never imagined. She saw women who walked 10 miles every day for drinking water. When George and her husband returned home, she began a novel, writing for an hour before work and an hour at night for the next 18 months. The subject was, as she describes it, "a Western woman witnessing injustice on such a massive scale." The novel was fun, and cathartic to write, but for George, literature wasn't a career. She reviewed what she liked about her work and what she didn't like. She thought of one case in particular, a man who had fallen and broken his hip. The defendant's insurance company claimed that his hip had been weakened by avascular necrosis, and that because the condition was a pre-existing one, it didn't have to pay.

"I realized how much I liked that, trying to figure out the medicine," she says. So even though she loved her firm on Staten Island, she started "applying and applying and applying" to firms that specialized in medical malpractice. A partner at a Manhattan firm "was very interested in my extracurricular stuff, my travels, my writing, the literature background," and she was hired. When the firm broke up in 2000 and the partner who had hired her landed at Fuchsberg, so did George.

And now the teenager who wanted to make a big difference in the world is the greedy villain, as portrayed by doctors and politicians who are trying to cap jury awards and otherwise bring "tort reform" to a system they say is hurting the vast majority of Americans. And she seems very happy with her position.

"If your leg gets cut off, is it okay with you if the doctor says, 'Oh, sorry?' This is our legal system. It's a system that puts kids through college if a father is not around, that makes restitution if someone is injured. It's a system whose purpose is to make people whole. My job is to speak truth to power. Just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you're more immune from individual responsibility. That's the most Republican way I can phrase it. I feel like the presence of this firm prompts defensive medicine" — when a doctor provides certain care or orders certain tests with the purpose of avoiding future allegations of negligence — "and I'll take defensive medicine any day of the week."

She declines to say how much money she makes, but she offers no apologies for her salary. "Let's just say I feel like I'm doing good as well as doing well."

George says she is always working on 35 to 50 cases. She thinks they're all good cases, all winnable, not least because she and her firm accept only 10 percent of potential clients. Many of its clients are referred by other firms — another factor that separates Fuchsberg from the subway advertisers. (The firm handles about 200 serious medical malpractice cases at a time, most of which last two to three years. Fuchsberg also has employment discrimination/civil rights and general negligence practice areas.)

Though it's difficult to gauge exactly how many medical malpractice cases are being brought to trial nationwide, a 2002 study by the Americans for Insurance Reform contests the widely held belief that juries are awarding defendants more money. "Not only has there been no 'explosion' in medical malpractice payouts at any time during the last 30 years," according to the study, "but payments (in constant dollars) have been extremely stable and virtually flat since the mid-1980s."

When she takes a case, George must find a doctor to review its particulars. In New York State, it's impossible to file a medical malpractice lawsuit unless a doctor is willing to testify on the record that the doctor being accused of malpractice "deviated from the accepted standards of care." Bad judgment alone is not enough to bring a suit, much less to win one.

She sometimes works from nine to nine, except for the one night a week she teaches Legal Research Writing and Litigation through the paralegal studies program at NYU. (George asks her students to prepare a case based on a hypothetical incident in which a woman is injured by an exploding toilet and then goes to a hospital "where she's malpracticed on.")

Teaching suits her, the precocious idealist who challenged her father about reproductive rights over dessert. She counts as her heroes Alan Dershowitz; the radical civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, whose clients included the Chicago Seven and leaders of the American Indian Movement; and the first-amendment champion and journalist Nat Hentoff. "They all represent people who are on the outs."

When a photographer tries to take George's picture in front of a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, an officer tells them to leave. "Ever hear of 9/11?" he asks, scowling. She smiles sweetly, muttering as she walks away, "Yes, we were here." A visitor asks her if it was truly a law that no photographs were allowed on federal property. "Oh, I'm sure it's somewhere in the Patriot Act," she says. "Along with the part that says I can't wear orange toenail polish on Wednesdays."

George is competitive and passionate, but she tries not to be nasty. That's based on strategy as much as disposition. "There are a thousand battles you face. And you don't see those on Court TV or Ally McBeal. That's when being an advocate for your client comes in. You decide which battles to fight and which to let go. Some attorneys will make a big stink over the location of the depositions. But the whole thing is to do the right thing for your client. If you make an enemy of your adversary, how is that helping?"

She loves her work and wishes all lawyers loved theirs. "When I bump into an attorney in court that I know from my law school days and they ask what I'm doing, they're just glad that I'm happy with my work and find it fulfilling and interesting. A lot of people I talk with are disenchanted with the type of law they are doing — be it real estate, commercial litigation, or personal injury, on either side — but they stay with it for whatever reason, which must be incredibly difficult. We spend a huge amount of time and energy at our work, and it is so important to be committed to it. I think that when you have that commitment, it shows to everyone you come into contact with, be they clients, judges, or other lawyers."

George says that if there are personal injury lawyers out there who actually are ambulance chasers — and she's never met one — who haunt emergency rooms and hire hospital personnel to recruit injured people as potential clients, they're unethical, behave illegally, and give ammunition to those politicians who are out to cap jury awards and make it more difficult to sue. She blames insurance companies for pushing that agenda. Mention the problem, and she delivers one of her trademark, off-the-cuff soliloquies: "The insurance companies have lost a ton of money in the stock market over the past three years, just like everybody else, but instead of saying, 'We invested badly,' they say, 'Oh, gee, we can't pay our CEO 16 zillion dollars; let's blame the patient.' See, the myth is that malpractice lawsuits have caused doctors' insurance rates to go up. The real blame goes to insurers who price gouge policyholders to make up for investment losses following years of price wars, bad investments, and an accounting practice that made malpractice insurance seem more profitable in the early 1990s than it really was. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported on this in a June 24, 2002 article, which mentioned a drop in investment income for insurers, compounded by severe under pricing in prior years. The Journal cited an insurance executive saying that these problems are self-inflicted and not due to jury awards. Not to mention the huge salaries going to CEOs of insurance carriers, et cetera. Okay, enough on that."

George is not unsympathetic toward doctors. "I see so many doctors putting people back together again. I have a good friend who's a doctor, and I can't get together for a bagel with her without hearing about this frivolous lawsuit or that frivolous lawsuit and how bad those are for everybody. I agree. I say that those should be thrown out and the people who bring them should be punished. But the fact is, most people don't even know they can get their medical records, much less realize they have legal recourse. There's a lot of propaganda out there. Unfortunately, the bad cases — the frivolous lawsuits — make it harder for everyone."

The guardianship hearing goes smoothly. The comatose woman's son is not called to testify. The judge has read the report, and he announces mournfully, "I don't think I need to say anything about her limitations and her lack of ability to understand and appreciate them."

He asks her son if he has given away her household items yet.

"Your honor," the son says, "I don't want to give anything away at this point out of respect for my mother."

George bites her lip.

"I understand," the judge says. "But there might soon come a time when you will want to balance the hope you have for your mother to recover — and there is hope, but I must tell you, there is a very, very slim chance of that happening — against the needs of some poor homeless person who could use some of those items."

The son nods. After a few more formalities, the judge says, "I can't think of anything else to say." He grants guardianship to the son.

On the way out, George touches the man's arm. "It's just a tragic situation," she says, "and you did a great job. I saw the tears, and you really held it together in there." The son is almost crying now.

"The most important thing is, take care of your mother. If anyone gives you a hard time, let them win some small battles. Don't sweat the small stuff. Just take care of your mother. I'll keep you posted about what's happening." She gives the man's wife a business card. "Call whenever you want. What will happen now is, I'll get the court order, and then I'll type up what's called a commission. These things take time. And then, after the commission is filed and signed, we'll start our lawsuit."

It's still sweltering when George takes the subway from the Bronx back to Manhattan. In the afternoon she'll work on the settlement for the children of the man who died because of the misplaced feeding tube. She'll review the notes on the little girl whose pituitary gland was damaged by an undiagnosed brain tumor. She'll read reports on the progress of the boy whose heart attack caused brain damage. She'll grade papers at lunch.

Today, she will do good. And she'll do well.

Tomorrow will be even better.

"Oh, yeah," she says. "One of my favorite things is going to happen tomorrow. A client is coming to pick up her money