It must have been the tequila — and the first wave of my morning hangover — slowly starting to crack my brain awake around 6:30 a.m.
Or maybe it was the rum? Now that I think about it, it was probably both: the tequila and the rum.
I roll over. To my left on the bed, a book, Inhuman Trafficking, lies open just a few pages into Chapter 1. My eyes wince; I remember something about a predatory guy in a car with a frozen slushy drink — but that’s all I can recall.
It’s obvious I didn’t make it far in my nightly reading after the opening party with open bar last night.
Out the sliding glass door of my room at the Cosmopolitan, I catch the first edge of dawn breaking over the Las Vegas Strip, a bruised pink and gold morning sky. I gather myself, and soon enough I’m making my way on the unexpectedly long, meandering walk toward the Bellagio, where MTMP — Mass Torts Made Perfect — awaits.
This would be my second MTMP conference in as many years. The first was in April 2022, barely two months after I’d joined CloudLex as VP of Marketing. But to explain why I am writing this article, why MTMP feels different, and why its founder, Mike “Pap” Papantonio, commands my attention, you’d have to go a little further back. Back to 2016.
Back to my first real job in legal tech: Content Marketing Manager at MyCase. I left the world of glossy magazine ads at Sotheby’s International Realty for the world of generic legal case management software. I wrote blog posts and Facebook ad copy, dabbled in graphic design, shot and edited corporate videos, and spent hard-earned hours writing e-books and case studies that ChatGPT can now accomplish in seconds.
So by the time April 2022 rolled around, in addition to co-producing a mediocre Netflix movie, I had spent over five years marketing software to lawyers and had been to my share of conferences: ABA TechShow, the New Orleans Solo & Small Firm Conference, a family law conference in San Diego, a legal-something conference in New York.
No disrespect to any of those events and the many other conferences out there — but MTMP was different. Not only a spectacle fit for Las Vegas, but a production that entertains as much as it educates (and on a scale I hadn’t seen before).
And it was there, during the 9 a.m. keynote at my first MTMP in April 2022, when Pap walked onstage and at one point lit into some of his favorite subjects I had honestly not really heard about: young lawyers taking defense paychecks right out of law school, corporations exploiting consumers for decades, and the simple, stubborn truth that the only real counterpunch for accountability happens in a courtroom.
The energy there — at MTMP — fueled by Pap and dozens of other trial lawyers who I saw take the stage over the next two days in the generously fed, air-conditioned Wynn ballrooms, sparked something inside me.
Here, I’d stumbled into an arena of trial lawyers talking strategy, trading tactics, speaking from the trenches. No talk about increasing billable hours. Nothing from a company spokeswoman talking about a new payments integration “to get paid faster,” or how workflow automations can shave off hours in your day (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
After years of producing generic e-books and legal webinars on increasing productivity and attending conference sessions on harnessing technology — MTMP felt inspiring. It resonated. And it set me on what’s now close to a four-year journey of finding myself deeply connected to the work personal injury lawyers do for their clients and our society.
This reality I came to see after joining CloudLex was far different from the caricature the general public — myself included — had been told. Personal injury lawyers, so often dismissed as “ambulance chasers” selling “lawsuit lottery tickets,” were in truth advocates fighting uphill battles for people whose lives had been shattered.
That twisted and misunderstood narrative was exactly why, in the spring of 2023, the team at CloudLex made a commitment to create The Trial Lawyer’s Journal. My hope was that by putting together a beautiful print journal — sparing no expense on paper or design or print quality — filled with unique stories rooted in the intricate world of trial law, it would resonate with the personal injury lawyers I wanted to connect with. There would be no full-page law firm ads or an entire magazine filled with company propaganda. This wasn’t pay-to-play. There are already too many publications out there exactly like that.
To go deeper, to continue the conversations, and to share more stories, in 2024 we launched the Celebrating Justice podcast with a simple idea: create a “procedural”-type podcast where each guest is asked the same questions about their career as a trial lawyer and the cases that matter most. I recorded over 30 interviews with plaintiff trial lawyers in all stages of their careers in Season One and 26 episodes in Season Two. As someone who previously proclaimed I would never start a podcast because “Everyone and their mom has a podcast,” Celebrating Justice ended up validating my connection and appreciation for trial lawyers — the burden they carry and the battles they fight.
A quick conversation followed; Pap is a busy man and has a line of people following in tow. He flipped through, nodded at the print quality, and as we arrived at the Levin Papantonio booth, he then handed me off to Scott, executive producer at Pap’s Ring of Fire production company. I passed along my info, hoping the discussed potential interview for TLJ Vol. III would materialize. Pap signed a copy of his new legal thriller, The Middleman, just like the copy I had of his other novel, Inhuman Trafficking,
I got a few years prior. Knowing my time was up, I waved thanks and good-bye.
Weeks later, the email reply came. Then the meeting calendar confirmation link. Finally, after years of circling, and dozens of interviews with other trial lawyers, I logged on to interview the man behind MTMP. The screen blinked to life, and there he was — Mike “Pap” Papantonio — framed by his signature blue looping green screen backdrop, akin to Mr. Wonderful on CNBC or Fox News.
The time had finally come to get behind the stories and to ask him….
Mike Papantonio: I think you end up in this business for a lot of different reasons. I’ve interviewed people and they say, “Well, I was moved by To Kill a Mockingbird” — and I certainly was. That was one factor. But a lot of us take with us all of our history, don’t we? When we choose to do what we want to do for a living, that history has a big influence on it.
And so I think it’s significant that my history is that I was raised by eight different families growing up all over central Florida, and they were primarily blue-collar workers. These weren’t wealthy families. These were people that were living paycheck to paycheck — and sometimes were kind enough to take me into their family. I’ve always had that notion that I wanted to help the underdog, and these people — from a scale of cultural evaluation — they would be considered definitely the underdog.
The other factor that led me here is I was a journalism major at the University of Florida. I was going to be a foreign correspondent — which was my goal ultimately. I knew what I wanted to do. All my friends at that point were covering Nicaragua or Sana’a — it was a revolution taking place, and that’s where everybody wanted to go. And about the last year of my school, somebody said to me, “I think you ought to think about being an attorney. I want you to meet Perry Nichols.” Perry Nichols was regarded as the very best — very best — trial lawyer of his time. There were about three names kicking around during his time, but he was a spectacular trial lawyer who had really mastered the art of cross-examination. And so I said, “Okay, yeah, I’ll meet him. I’d love to see what he has to say.”
And so I went to his house in Arcadia, Florida. It was a cinder block house out in the middle of nowhere. He raised Angus cattle — he was into the Angus cattle business. So I go into his house and I start kind of inartfully… I don’t really even know what to say to this man. I mean, I’ve got this Goliath of a trial lawyer sitting in front of me, and I’m halfway thinking about wanting to be a lawyer. So I said, “What is it that sets you apart from other lawyers?”
And in the back of him, he had books — there were Steinbeck and Conrad and Kafka — some of the greatest writers of the time. He said, “Son, those are books I’ve read a couple times.” And what he was saying to me is: there’s nothing magical about what we think of when we think of an idea. All these ideas have been out there. It’s our job to understand those ideas, bring more space and more impact to those ideas, and then deliver them as a trial lawyer.
So I walked away from there thinking, “Wow.” I had to really think about it. So I concluded: I can always be a journalist. I can write. But let me get my law degree.
And ultimately, the real irony, 45 years later I got the Perry Nichols Award in Florida, which is the highest award you can get as a trial lawyer in the state of Florida. It’s kind of funny how things went full circle. So there’s a lot of things that have an impact on you. But if I’m to distill what it is: you are a product of how you’re raised. And when you’re raised around people as decent as the people I was raised around, you say, “Well, that’s the side of the ‘v’ that I want to be on.”
TLJ: Going back to some of your early mentors, when you think back to the lessons they passed on to you and taught you, what are some of those really important gems that you think younger lawyers nowadays are not being taught or shown?
MP: I think it surfaced with Fred Levin. I used to talk to Fred all the time about the direction of the law firm. This law firm is 71 years old, and Fred, very early on, brought me on as a name partner because I was getting good results. And I think the thing we used to talk about is: “What holds lawyers back? What is it that lawyers can’t overcome?” And if I drill down on it, it’s a simple word — rejection.
They’re fearful of rejection. They’re fearful of moving outside of their safe space. Most of them grew up as president of their class and homecoming queen, or president of their fraternity — whatever. They were always in that position where they had this sense of self-importance, right?
And all of a sudden, you ask them, “You know what, Mary? You know what, Joe? I’m going to ask you to do something that’s risky. Okay? First of all, it’s risky. Second of all, you might fail. And thirdly, your failure may make you really unhappy for a long time — and people are going to notice you fail.”
It’s that fear of rejection that keeps lawyers from doing. What they need to do is grow — to grow. They buy into everything that’s been handed down to ’em, generation after generation. They go to a law firm, and the law firm says, “Hey, we do 1,800 car crashes a year. Bobby, you’ve got to do a hundred of them.”
What kind of life is that? It’s not much different, to me, from those awful people on the other side of the ‘v’ that come out of law school and say, “I’m going to go to work for a defense firm, and my big day is going to be when I have prevented a thousand people from recovering after the defendant company that I represent has killed them and maimed them. That’s a big day for me.”
And those people are terrified of rejection too. Those are people who might’ve graduated at the top of their class. They may be editors of the law review, but they come out like veal. I call them veal because they graduate from law school and they’re put into this isolated, tiny office, and all day they sit doing memos and briefs. They’re really smart people, but they simply have no imagination. They have no creativity.
They have no sense of a bigger world out there. And so they’re relegated to that for their entire life. They never really accomplish anything — but they are terrified of rejection.
TLJ: This year marked the 25th anniversary of MTMP. I don’t know if it was five of you sitting in a dark room 25 years ago saying, “Let’s get this thing together in Vegas and do it twice a year,” but did you ever imagine MTMP would be where it’s at and the influence and education that you’ve given so many people?
MP: I don’t think anybody believed that MTMP was even a good idea. I remember bringing it to my partners and they said:
PARTNER #1: “Let me get this right. You want to go to Vegas and you want to put all of your competitors — the people who want your business — on a stage, talking about how great they are and their great ideas and how they’re going to change the world?”
PARTNER #2: “Those are your competitors, Pap. Remember?”
PARTNER #3: “And you want to put them on stage?”
PAP: “Yeah, that’s right.”
PARTNER #4: “And you want to spend a million dollars a year — by the time it’s over — doing that? That the firm has to pay?”
PARTNER #5: “That’s after all the costs are paid, Pap.”
PAP: “Yeah, that’s what I want to do.”
MP: The only person that really kind of understood it was Fred Levin. Fred was a single-event lawyer. He never did any mass torts. People don’t know that but he was a single-event lawyer and had some of the biggest verdicts in America. I mean, they were huge verdicts. I think for four years he had two of the largest verdicts in the country.
But he understood that in order to sustain growth in our firm — growth in the practice — we had to do something unusual. And MTMP was the unusual thing.
And oddly enough, the first time we showed up in Vegas, the place was packed. Because the idea was to get people thinking about something different than what they do when they go to their office and are thinking about it every day. Every day it’s the same routine, but for four or five days, they go to Vegas and they think about possibilities that they’ve never even considered — possibilities that can make them mammoths in the practice of law.
If they’ll simply overcome that fear of rejection, if they’ll be teachable, and if they’ll be willing to say to some of the guys that have been doing this for 20 years, “I don’t know how to do it. I want your help. I’m glad to pay you some percentage of a case until I can learn how to do it.” And then they’re on their own.
TLJ: At MTMP, you talked about ultra-processed foods and this new type 2 diabetes that didn’t exist. Kids growing up in the eighties didn’t have it. And I found it interesting that you trace it back to big tobacco companies — who ultimately got their hand slapped for tobacco — and then pivoted into the food corporations and ultimately created that problem.
MP: Yeah, it’s the same people. The same people who killed hundreds of thousands of people with tobacco now are killing thousands and thousands of kids through their food. They’ve moved over to the food industry because it’s more profitable.
TLJ: And they took their dyes and flavors and all of that stuff they weren’t allowed to put into nicotine and started putting it into food.
MP: That’s correct. It’s addictive — not only the flavors. There are addictive chemicals in the food to where it’s an addiction problem. If you tell a little 8-year-old that he can’t have his Cap’n Crunch anymore for the rest of his life, the kid goes into hysteria — because he’s addicted to damn Cap’n Crunch. And the other reason they were able to make that pivot is nobody in the tobacco years was thrown in prison. You had the 12 dwarfs standing up in front of Congress:
Q: “Sir, is there any connection between the product that you make and cancer?”
A: “Oh, absolutely not. I’ve studied it. I signed. There’s no connection at all.”
Those guys knew exactly what they were doing. They were perjuring themselves in front of Congress. And the Department of Justice is so dysfunctional. They’re so useless. Used to be. Now, I don’t know what we’re going to get now. But they used to be — generation after generation — so useless they wouldn’t prosecute these people.
And you don’t change that conduct until you put people like that in prison, until MBA schools are talking and saying, “Lemme’ tell you the story of Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe did this, and he got thrown in prison.” Now, in MBA school, they say, “Uncle Joe did this, and he made a big profit, and he got slapped on the hand, and then he moved to the next ugly project and did it again.”
We have a useless Department of Justice. And most of them are career prosecutors — they’re not even trial lawyers. Most of the time, they’ve come through some bizarre background, and they’re put in these positions of being prosecutors. Hell, they’ve never been to trial. So until you prosecute these people, you don’t change that conduct that you described.
Day one: they’re selling tobacco that kills people.
Day two: they’re selling food that kills people.
And we let them go again.
As a matter of fact, when I launched the opioid case, I only knew the edges of it. But I knew there were going to be great documents. And the Department of Justice — for this single time that I can identify — had a real prosecutor in Colorado. He was uncovering this incredible story about the criminality of the opioid industry — how they were nothing short of just pure drug pushers.
And so he wanted to prosecute, and the Department of Justice — Eric Holder, who was Obama’s Attorney General — said, “No, we’re not going to do that.” Well, you know why he said that? Because he’d come up his entire career defending these white-collar thugs. And so he says, “No, we’re not going to prosecute.” But this one lawyer out in Colorado said, “What? Really? I’ve got all this stuff.”
So we take all that “stuff” and we build the case that he was trying to build — and we settle with the opioid industry for $75 billion. And we’re still at it, by the way. It’s still continuing.
TLJ: You talk about how “fact is always stranger than fantasy” in the practice of law, and you weave that into your stories to not only entertain, but educate people. Your latest novel, The Middleman, touches on PBMs, or pharmacy benefit managers.
MP: Let me give you an equation. This Trial Lawyers Journal that you do — these are the kinds of stories corporate media will never talk about. The things you talk about here: they won’t hear these lawyers’ stories. They don’t give a damn that lawyers are keeping America safe in so many ways. Now, here’s my analogy: my books step into that same role because corporate media is dead. There is no such thing as investigative journalism in corporate media. It is a useless thing. So this book tells that story about the PBMs — and how they’re raping the American public, how it’s a wholly corrupt gangster organization. It’s purely a gangster organization.
TLJ: As you set up with your characters.
MP: Yeah. My character is a real gangster. He’s like the Irish gangster. Irish gangster — why do I do that? Because it’s a reflection of what the PBM industry is. They take kickbacks. The kickback is based on whether or not the drug that’s being pushed — by Pfizer, or Merck, or Bayer, whoever — is actually even going to be sold in a drugstore. The kickback is: we’ve put this thing together and nobody even knows what the hell it is. They don’t serve any purpose, and they actually extort the manufacturers of these drugs. So this has gone on for decades in the U.S.
And people have to make a decision — whether they can eat that night or whether they have to cut their pill in half. Are they going to be able to take their pill? They can’t afford both. They can’t afford rent and the pills they have to take to stay alive. Now, can you imagine? That’s our culture. And so that’s what this book is. It’s a fictional story. The murders aren’t true, and the Irish mobster isn’t true.
The mobsters over here — they’re not Irish. They dress up in Armani suits. They have Rolex watches. They drive Bentleys. They’re a different kind of mobster. They don’t look like a typical Italian mobster out in New York. They have MBAs. They’re educated at Harvard and Yale. And they’re killing us. And this book talks about that.
TLJ: Has your writing process evolved over the years?
MP: I was trained to be a writer. Lawyers should have the responsibility to write. They should have the responsibility to tell their story. My first book, Law & Disorder, was a good book. I don’t think it was my best. It was like an introduction book. I had to invent Deke, and I had to invent the characters — Gina Romano and Carol — and all the characters that resurface time and time again. But I think the writing — it’s like anything else. You get better as you go, right? You get better as you practice law. You get better as you write.
TLJ: Writing is rewriting.
MP: Yeah. The trick to writing is writing and rewriting. And I think these books — the reason I think they do so well — is they’re true stories that people can read, and it’s a good thriller. I don’t think I’ve written one that’s not a page-turner. I mean, you want to see what’s happening. What’s going to happen to Deke? What’s going to happen to Michael? What’s going to happen to Gina Romano?
You always want to know what’s going to happen, and so they keep you turning the page. But at the same time, as you’re turning the page, you don’t even realize it — but you’re learning the true story of PBMs. You’re learning the true story of the terrorism case — where banks were washing money for terrorists and getting away with it.
And again, the DOJ let them go. If you don’t know that story, and you read it, you’re going to say, “My God, I wonder if this is true?” And then you do a Google, and you find out — yep, it’s true that HSBC admitted that they had washed money for terrorists and cartel drug cartels. And Eric Holder let them go with no punishment. Let’s say this: they were hit for a billion dollars; they had made a hundred billion dollars. And Eric Holder acts like, Oh, this is a huge victory for the Department of Justice. It’s bullshit. Not even a tip to the dealer.
TLJ: Do you have any dreams of getting Deke on the big screen?
MP: Well, there’s talk about it right now. There are two screenplays out right now about it. As a matter of fact, the next book that comes out — Paris Hilton sent me a note. She says, “Mike, can I put this in your new book?” Because she loved the book, and it’s a hell of an endorsement.
You know why I wrote that book? Because of her talk. Now understand, I’ve had Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Sting, Fogerty, Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert — I could go on forever with the people I’ve interviewed.
Paris is the only person in that whole group that’s gotten two standing ovations. She was so powerful in her story. So I walked away from there and I said, “Damn, I need to write a book about this.” And so I did — and it’s called A Death in Arcadia, and it comes out the first of the year. She is just, if you were there —
TLJ: I was there.
MP: Because you see it as, “Oh, Paris Hilton is at this Vegas conference with a bunch of lawyers. What’s she doing there?” But then actually, if you sat and listened to her story — my God, it was incredible. It was incredible.
TLJ: Where do you fall in the non-lawyer conversation? Obviously there’s been a lot of talk about Arizona and allowing these non-lawyers to come in — or KPMG, the big accounting firm — to set up shop as a law firm.
MP: First of all, that decision in Arizona was no gift from the Supreme Court. That’s one of the most awful supreme courts in the country. They were doing that to spite the trial lawyers in Arizona who had given big money to the Democrats. And so these Republican types come in and say, “Oh, well, we’re going to take your business away. We’re going to let everybody do it.”
So, that’s the origin of that. Everybody thought, “Oh man, these guys are so progressive.” They’re not progressive. They’re regressive. They didn’t mean to help these lawyers. They meant to cause them harm. And I think it has the capacity to do that in the long run, but it needs to evolve. People will figure out how to move into that space, and the people who think they’re coming in big time — if they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re going to get killed. They’re going to get killed. And until they get killed that first time and try to resurrect themselves, they’re not going to understand. This is not something just anybody can do.
Some of them have to go out of business — and they will. They’re already going out of it. I think there have been 10 major bankruptcies since Wall Street got involved and said, “Hey, we’re here to help you. Here’s our money.” And I love to see these Wall Street types lose their money. I mean, it is just — how clear can the message be when you have to go back to shareholders who say, “Wait, let me get this right. You gave $150 million to a three-person firm that has three paralegals, that has 10 people on staff who have never been to trial, and they’ve got 20,000 cases — and you’ve given them $150 million?”
They’re going to somehow pull out of that. They’re in a tailspin. These are people who call me all the time: “Hey, I’ve got all these cases.” And I say, “Sorry, bud, I can’t take those cases. I don’t know how much water’s under the bridge. I don’t know what you’ve done to commit malpractice already.” I can’t take those cases.
TLJ: For me, it goes back to this kind of commercialization of everything — including law. For example, after I got back from MTMP, I was reading around and discovered that Mars Inc., the food corporation, owns about 15% of the vet clinics in the United States.
MP: Yeah. Again, let me go back to Princeton MBA school or Harvard MBA school. Lemme’ tell you where this started.
It started when we used to have doctors run hospitals — way before your time, Chad. But there was a time — it is ancient history — when doctors used to own their own hospitals. You’d have 10 or 15 doctors that owned the local hospital in the small town, and they made decisions about how care was put out there and what care should be, and they made all the decisions about healthcare.
Then you had Wall Street say, “My God, we can move in here and make a killing — because nobody’s going to regulate us. Nobody’s going to stop us from charging a $4,000 increase for a routine that’s done at a hospital. Nobody’s going to stop us, and we can get all this money from the insurance companies.”
So all the doctor-owned hospitals were bought up and put into these major hospital corporations, right? And Wall Street said, “Well, we’re not done. Let’s move into dentistry. Let’s move into the veterinary business. Let’s move into the optometrist business. Let’s move into all these different things.” And so, where a kid used to come out of school for optometry, they’d hang their shingle. They’d hang up a license that said, “I’m your local optometrist.”
Well, not anymore.
Now, they don’t even hang anything up. They just go to work for the corporation — because the corporation says, “We’re going to pay you some amount of money that you can pay your student loans back.” And they’re trapped for the rest of their career. They’re slaves. They’re never going to bust through that glass ceiling that the corporation has set for them.
They are veal.
••••
It’s impossible to read The Middleman without noticing just how much of Michael “Pap” Papantonio is Nicholas “Deke” Deketomis. But what surprised me most wasn’t the autobiographical threads — I expected those — it was the structure.
Pap takes a nonlinear approach, pulling us in and out of timelines, revealing characters at different stages in the story. At first, you might think this is Deke’s “Hero’s Journey,” but by the end of Act I (at least that’s what I call it as a former/wanna-be screenwriter), it’s clear the story really belongs to Amy — the pharma heiress turned reluctant whistleblower, caught between love, fear, and a conscience.
But ultimately, after finishing and marinating in it for a few days, The Middleman felt less like fiction and more like a mirror of what happens at my local pharmacy counter.
For the past few years, every time I walk into my local chain pharmacy to pick up my “meds” — call it Lisinopril or Alprazolam or whatever drug of choice you’d like — I feel a small taste of the frustration that underpins this book.
My generic prescription of choice happens to be the brand [fill in the blank], but whenever I request it, the pharmacist raises an eyebrow, sighs, and tells me it’ll require approval from his manager, or the distributor, or the manager of the distributor. Whatever.
This usually leads to days of delays before they can even fill a prescription that has already been approved by my doctor. This happened for years, until recently the pharmacy changed their “name” and logo (even though both are part of the same large grocery chain). After this change, suddenly, the generic drug manufacturer of my choice could be easily obtained.
A few weeks ago, after finishing The Middleman, I casually mentioned “PBMs” to my eyebrow-raising pharmacist. He shook his head and said, “Oh, those PBMs are bad. They’re putting a lot of the independent pharmacies out of business. The ‘Mom-and-Pop Shops.’”
After swiping my HSA card, I signed my name on the little digital tablet, took my bag of meds, and said to myself:
“I’ll have to ask Pap about that.”
Mike Papantonio is an American trial lawyer, author and senior partner at Levin Papantonio.
