Cowboy Attorney Gerry Spence mows down corporate giants
He failed his first bar exam. When he walks into the courtroom, he sports snakeskin cowboy boots, a knee-length beaver coat and a ten-gallon Stetson. His outside interests have included selling bull semen. During one trial, he kept an intriguing box on the table in front of him. The contents: the embalmed leg his plaintiff had lost in the accident at issue. He won some $300,000 in damages.
Gerry Spence, 52, of Jackson, Wyo., is part cowboy, part actor and all lawyer. Says one of Spence's victims: "He's so good that he shouldn't be permitted in a courtroom." He has not lost a case before a jury in twelve years, even though he regularly takes on the polished lawyers who represent powerful corporations. The multimillion-dollar losers include the Kerr-McGee energy conglomerate, for allowing Employee Karen Silkwood to be contaminated with plutonium; Squibb, for marketing an inadequately tested pregnancy-detection drug (Gestest) that apparently caused birth defects; and, most recently, Penthouse magazine, for a 1979 article that libeled a former Miss Wyoming, Kimerli Pring. The jury awarded her $26.5 million last month, a record if it survives court challenges by the magazine. Next month in Salt Lake City, Spence shoots for his biggest haul yet—$110 million—when he squares off against Utah officials on behalf of the widow and children of a man shot by Utah police.
The primary factor in Spence's prodigious success rate appears to be his way with juries. A commanding 6 ft. 2 in. and 225 lbs., he is in constant motion in the courtroom, sometimes edging up to the jury railing to make a point in the deep, reassuring baritone that almost led him into a singing career, or to confess disarmingly: "I'm a little anxious about whether I can represent my client—I just wanted to share that with you." Says a former partner, Robert Rose, now chief justice of Wyoming's supreme court: "He comes off as so real that jurors trust him. They have to decide which side to be on, and if he wants to be your friend, you can barely resist him." Spence likes to illustrate his arguments with graphic props, such as an old milking stool whose legs he removes, one by one, to show how his opponent's case collapses without certain supports. He also favors folksy sayings like "You've got to get the hogs out of the spring if you want to get the water cleared up."
In the Penthouse trial, Spence used a typical strategy: portraying his client as a simple, small victim of big malign forces. To the six Cheyenne jurors, he characterized Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, 50, as an arrogant, unprincipled New Yorker, "the gentleman sitting over there in the velvet pants." When Guccione suggested that only people with the intelligence of a "flatworm" would think the disputed article was nonfiction, Spence, a University of Wyoming law graduate, began to refer to himself and fellow state residents as mere flatworms. He also listed 15 similarities between Pring and the protagonist of the article, which described how a baton-twirling Miss Wyoming used her sexual prowess to try to win the Miss America Pageant.