by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
For Woody Wilner, practicing law is not a spectator sport.
Inside the courtroom, the Spohrer, Wilner, Maxwell and Matthews partner counts on his personal experience as much as legal expertise. Luckily for his clients, Wilner’s experience is a vast resource to draw from.
There might be plenty of lawyers who have professional experience in their legal fields. Spohrer Wilner’s offices are crowded with pilots who handle aircraft litigation.
But how many attorneys can list “professional water skier” on their resume?
Wilner can. He performed at Cypress Gardens before heading off to college at Yale. There aren’t too many water skiers that make their way to the Ivy League, but Wilner’s unique path through life was only beginning. A list of his professional and extracurricular activities reads like a decathlon as envisioned by Leonardo DaVinci: cave diving, carpentry, kayaking, software design, hiking, physics...
Oh, yeah, and the law.
Listening to Wilner recount his experiences on land, sea and air, it’s easy to forget that he’s the lawyer credited with helping hang liability on big tobacco.
His successful prosecution of longtime smoker Grady Carter’s suit against Brown and Williamson marked a new era of accountability for cigarette manufacturers. Using internal industry documents, Wilner successfully argued that big tobacco knew its product was dangerous and knew it was addictive. When a Jacksonville jury awarded Carter $750,000 in 1996, the impact reverberated throughout the industry. An hour later, tobacco giant Philip Morris had bled about $12 billion in value from its stock.
“That changed everything,” said Wilner. “Up to that point, the tobacco companies had argued that smoking was just a bad habit that anyone could quit. Now it was out in the open that nicotine is addictive and the scientists inside of the companies knew it. It was part of their marketing strategy.”
Wilner doesn’t look the part of the lawyer that finally beat big tobacco. His appearance is more mad scientist than slick lawyer.
He pads around his Ortega home in a half-tucked-in shirt and still wearing bed head from the night before. The house is a combination of National Geographic Explorer and Sanford and Son. Blown up pictures of the Alps lie on the living room floor, an unmanned scuba tank sits by the pool.
He built a series of floating docks from which to launch his recreational armada. A kayak sits ready to launch on one, an odd bicycle-pedal-powered contraption is based on another. He points out with a little pride that his docks survived the lashing delivered by last year’s hurricanes.
He chose the house tucked about 200 yards into the woods because, “I wanted a place where I couldn’t be seen from the road.” It’s safe to say that big tobacco never saw him coming.
It wasn’t just the fact that Brown and Williamson lost to a lawyer from a then-little-known firm that stunned the industry. It was the location of the defeat.
“That really shook them,” said Wilner. “Who would have thought that it would have come from Jacksonville?
“They thought Jacksonville was an advantage for them, because it’s so conservative. But just because people are conservative doesn’t mean they’re going to tolerate people lying to them.”
Wilner didn’t carry any first-hand experience with smoking into that case. But he credits decades of research into pulmonary medicine as part of his prosecution of a series of asbestos cases with giving him a head start when looking into smoking’s health effects.
Wilner’s out-of-the office experience paid off again in his successful prosecution of a suit against the Federal Aviation Administration in a 2001 plane crash.
Wilner was trying to make the case that the failure of air traffic controllers to give a weather update to pilot Donald Weidner led to a crash that killed Weidner, a Jacksonville attorney and three passengers.
Wilner, an instrument-rated pilot with more than 3,000 hours of flight time, was reviewing Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office photos of the crash when he noticed that the plane’s altimeter was set incorrectly.
The altimeter’s setting wasn’t adjusted for the latest barometric pressure readings that should have been communicated by the update. It wasn’t, and Wilner was able to use a blow-up shot of the instrument to argue that the update hadn’t been given. Wilner said he would never have noticed the discrepancy except for all the hours he spent in similar planes.
“It wasn’t any great intellectual leap. I was just familiar with the plane,” said Wilner.
That’s why he encourages the attorneys at Spohrer Wilner “not just to be spectators.” It’s a lesson he learned early in life from his mother Peggy.
Even now, at age 94, Peggy’s adventurous spirit still leaves Wilner shaking his head. One of the few female pilots in the air in the 1930s, she flew in air races with Amelia Earhart and still carries a pilot’s license.
Sometimes Wilner worries his mom is pushing herself too far. Like when she traveled to Belize at age 80 to do field work in pursuit of her master’s degree in archeology.
“She just tells me she’d rather wear out than rust out,” said Wilner.
Nine years after his landmark win against Brown and Williamson, there’s no rust on Wilner. He’s carefully eying pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck and their problems with blockbuster drug Vioxx.
The Food and Drug Administration released a warning Thursday that pain relievers like Vioxx could damage the heart. The warning could lead to warning labels on the pills, but Wilner said it’s too little, too late.
Wilner has identified hundreds of Vioxx users who also suffered from heart trouble and has begun researching a possible link. His initial findings won’t be encouraging for Merck.
Wilner sees a strong parallel between Merck and the tobacco companies. Both put profits ahead of their responsibility to their customers, he said.
“Merck was in big trouble financially and they needed a blockbuster. They were ignoring their own medical studies until even their own doctors started to stand up and say ‘Wait a minute,” said Wilner.
“I predict Merck is going to take a huge beating and rightfully so. They’re going to pay out a lot of money and their CEO and directors are going to be run off.”
Critics have argued that Wilner’s suits are anti-business, but he views punitive damages as the perfect complement to the capitalist system.
“Work hard and do it honest and you’ve made your money. But I’m afraid that much of corporate America cares about profits and not much else,” said Wilner. “This kind of prosecution hits them where they don’t want to be hit; in their financial bottom line.”