“I’m sworn to silence,” Clay said.

The other lawyer from New Orleans was Damon Didier, one of the speakers at a session Clay had attended during his Circle of Barristers weekend. Didier was stone-faced and steely-eyed and Clay remembered wondering how this guy could ever connect with a jury. Didier, he found out soon enough, had made a mint when a river-boat packed with fraternity boys sunk into Lake Pontchartrain. Such misery.

They needed patches and medals, like war heroes.

This one here they gave me for that tanker explosion that killed twenty. I got this one for those boys who got burned on the off-shore drilling rig. This big one here was for the Skinny Ben campaign. This, the war against Big Tobacco. This, the battle against HMOs.

Since Clay had no war stories, he just listened. Tarvan would blow them away, but he could never tell it.

A butler in a Roy Rogers-style shirt informed Mr. French that dinner would be served in an hour. They moved downstairs to a game room with pool tables and big screens. A dozen or so white men were drinking and talking and some were holding pool cues. “The rest of the conspiracy,” Hernandez whispered to Clay.

Patton introduced him to the group. The names, faces, and hometowns quickly blurred. Seattle, Houston, Topeka, Boston, and others he didn’t catch. And Effingham, Illinois. They all paid homage to this “brilliant” young litigator who’d shocked them with his daring assault on Dyloft.

“I saw the ad the first night it was on,” said Bernie somebody from Boston. “Never heard of Dyloft. So I call your hot line, get a nice guy on the other end. I tell him I’ve been taking the drug, feed him the line, you know. I go to the Web site. It was brilliant. I said to myself, ‘I’ve been ambushed.’ Three days later I’m on the air with my own damned Dyloft hot line.”

They all laughed, probably because they could each tell similar stories. It had never occurred to Clay that other lawyers would call his hot line and use his Web site in order to steer away cases. But why did this surprise him?

When the admiration was finally over, French said there were a few things to discuss before dinner, which, by the way, would include a fabulous selection of Australian wines. Clay was already dizzy from the fine Cuban cigar and the first double vodka bomb. He was by far the youngest lawyer there, and he felt like a rookie in every way. Especially when it came to drinking. He was in the presence of some professionals.

Youngest lawyer. Smallest jet. No war tales. Weakest liver. Clay decided it was time to grow up.

They crowded around French, who lived for moments like this. He began, “As you know, I’ve spent a lot of time with Wicks, the in-house guy at Ackerman Labs. Bottom line is they’re going to settle, and do it quickly. They’re getting hit from every direction, and they want this to go away as soon as possible. Their stock is so low now they’re afraid of a takeover. The vultures, including us, are moving in for the kill. If they know how much Dyloft will cost them, then they can restructure some debt and maybe hang on. What they don’t want is protracted litigation on many fronts, with verdicts landing everywhere. Neither do they want to fork over tens of millions for defense.”

“Poor guys,” someone said.

“Business Week mentioned bankruptcy,” someone else said. “Have they used that threat?”

“Not yet. And I don’t expect them to. Ackerman has far too many assets. We’ve just completed the financial analysis—we’ll crunch the numbers in the morning—and our boys think that the company has between two and three billion to settle Dyloft.”

“How much insurance coverage is on the table?”

“Only three hundred million. The company has had its cosmetics division on the market for a year. They want a billion. The real value is about three -fourths of that. They could unload it for half a billion and have enough cash to satisfy our clients.”

Clay had noticed that the clients were rarely mentioned.

The vultures squeezed around French, who continued: “We need to determine two things. First, how many potential plaintiffs are out there. Second, the value of each case.”

“Let’s add ‘em up,” drawled someone from Texas. “I got a thousand.”

“I have eighteen hundred,” French said. “Carlos.”

“Two thousand,” Hernandez said as he began taking notes.

“Wes?”

“Nine hundred.”

The lawyer from Topeka had six hundred, the lowest. Two thousand was the highest until French saved the best for last. “Clay?” he said, and everyone listened intently.

“Thirty-two hundred,” Clay said, managing a grim poker face. His newly found brethren, however, were quite pleased. Or at least they appeared to be.

“Attaboy,” someone said.

Clay suspected that just under their toothy smiles and “Attaboys!” were some very envious people.

“That’s twenty-four thousand,” Carlos said, doing the quick math.

“We can safely double that, which gets close to fifty, the number Ackerman has pegged. Fifty thousand into two billion is forty thousand bucks per case. Not a bad starting place.”

Clay did some quick math of his own—$40,000 times his 3,200 cases came to something over $120 million. And one third of that, well, his brain froze and his knees went weak.

“Does the company know how many of these cases involve malignant tumors?” asked Bernie from Boston.

“No, they don’t. Their best guess is about one percent.”

“That’s five hundred cases.”

“At a minimum of a million bucks each.”

“That’s another half billion.”

“A million bucks is a joke.”

“Five million a pop in Seattle.”

“We’re talking wrongful death, here.”

Not surprisingly, each lawyer had an opinion to offer and they did so simultaneously. When French restored order, he said, “Gentlemen, let’s eat.”

Dinner was a fiasco. The dining room table was a slab of polished wood that came from one tree, one grand and majestic red maple that had stood for centuries until it was needed by wealthy America. At least forty people could eat around it at one time. There were eighteen for dinner, and wisely they had been spread out. Otherwise, someone might have thrown a punch.

In a room full of flamboyant egos, where everyone was the greatest lawyer God created, the most obnoxious windbag was Victor K. Brennan, a loud and twangy Texan from Houston. On the third or fourth wine, about halfway through the thick steaks, Brennan began complaining about such low expectations for each individual case. He had a forty-year-old client who made big bucks and now had malignant tumors, thanks to Dyloft. “I can get ten million actual and twenty million punitive from any jury in Texas,” he boasted. Most of the others agreed with this. Some even one-upped by claiming that they could get more on their home turf. French held firm with the theory that if a few got millions then the masses would get little. Brennan didn’t buy this but had trouble countering the argument. He had a vague notion that Ackerman Labs had much more cash than it was showing.

The group divided on this point, but the lines shifted so fast and the loyalties were so temporary that Clay had trouble determining where most of them stood. French challenged Brennan on his claim that punitive damages would be so easy to prove. “You got the documents, right?” Brennan asked.

“Clay has provided some documents. Ackerman doesn’t know it yet. You boys have not seen them. And maybe you won’t if you don’t stay in the class.”

The knives and forks stopped as all seventeen (Clay excluded) started yelling at once. The waiters left the room. Clay could almost see them back in the kitchen, hunkering low behind the prep tables. Brennan wanted to fight someone. Wes Saulsberry wasn’t backing down. The language deteriorated. And in the midst of the ruckus, Clay looked at the end of the table and saw Patton French sniff a wineglass, take a sip, close his eyes, and evaluate yet another new wine.