53 pages • 1-hour read
The King of Torts
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Chapters 9-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, illness, and substance use.
Chapter 9 Summary
Clay walks through DC, reflecting on the implications of the secret Tarvan drug trials and how Pace’s offer could benefit his relationship with Rebecca. He meets with Pace again at a café, where Pace reveals that about 100 patients received the drug. He gives Clay a Monday deadline to accept a confidential deal. They tour a leased office space on Connecticut Avenue, where Pace outlines the plan: Clay must resign from the OPD, start his own firm, and secretly represent all victims’ families in prearranged settlements. Disillusioned with his role at the OPD, Clay considers which colleagues to recruit to his new law firm.
Over dinner, Pace details the settlements and hints at a larger future case involving a drug called Dyloft. Clay decides to visit his father in the Bahamas for advice before the deadline.
Chapter 10 Summary
Clay flies to Great Abaco Island to see his father, Jarrett, a disgraced former trial lawyer living as a charter captain. He finds Jarrett on his boat at the marina, and they go to a bar where Jarrett drinks heavily with other expatriates.
The next morning, a storm cancels a planned fishing trip. Jarrett joins a poker game on another yacht, leaving Clay alone for the day. Clay realizes that he will get no guidance from his father and must make the decision on his own.
Chapter 11 Summary
On Monday, Clay meets Pace in a DC hotel suite. The number of Tarvan-linked murder victims has now risen to seven. Clay negotiates harder terms: $5 million for each victim’s family and a $15-million fee for himself. After signing a confidentiality agreement, they open the firm’s bank accounts. Clay resigns from the OPD by email and recruits his former paralegal, Rodney Albritton, to join him.
At the new Connecticut Avenue office, now named the Law Offices of J. Clay Carter II, Clay selects expensive furnishings. After Pace confirms the initial $5-million wire transfer, Clay walks to the Lincoln Memorial to absorb the reality of his new fortune. He calls his roommate, Jonah, to arrange a celebratory dinner.
Chapter 12 Summary
A few days later, the new firm is staffed by former OPD colleagues: Miss Glick as secretary, Paulette as a paralegal, and Rodney as chief paralegal, with Jonah assisting. Rodney approaches Adelfa Pumphrey, Pumpkin’s mother, at her workplace. He explains that a drug caused her son’s death and that a multi-million-dollar settlement is available if she signs with Clay.
Adelfa comes to the firm’s offices, where Paulette builds rapport with her before Clay outlines the $5-million offer. Stunned, Adelfa signs the papers. Paulette drives her home, comforting her and discussing how the money will change her life.
Chapter 13 Summary
Several days after the firm’s launch, Clay drives his new Porsche to Georgetown to look at a townhouse. He thinks about buying his father a new boat and maps out trips to finalize the Tarvan settlements.
Clay travels to West Virginia to persuade the grieving parents of another Tarvan victim to accept a $5-million settlement. Pace’s researchers find no traceable family for the third victim, a sex worker named Bandy, making a settlement for her death impossible. Clay returns to DC to finalize the remaining cases.
Chapter 14 Summary
After the final Tarvan settlement, Clay celebrates with his staff. He announces that he will take everyone on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, France. The next day, Pace confirms the final wire transfer of Clay’s $15-million fee.
Pace introduces the next project: a mass tort against Ackerman Labs over Dyloft, an arthritis drug that causes bladder tumors, though all identified tumors thus far have been benign. Pace’s client ultimately wants to diminish the value of Ackerman’s stock and put them at risk of bankruptcy. Pace outlines a strategy to recruit thousands of clients with TV ads and force a global settlement, which he promises will earn Clay $33 million in fees. Max urges Clay to attend the Circle of Barristers conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, to learn the business from leaders in the field. Clay flies in and observes a culture of excess among the lawyers.
Chapter 15 Summary
During the conference, Clay attends sessions, including one on litigation against an obesity drug called Skinny Ben. He listens to a keynote speech from Patton French, a mass-tort lawyer who boasts about his enormous fees and lavish lifestyle, including ownership of a new Gulfstream jet, which costs $45 million. Repelled by the lawyer’s arrogance, Clay leaves to clear his head.
He sits in Jackson Square, calculates his net worth, and decides to run the Dyloft case efficiently before stepping away from the field. The next morning, Paulette faxes a wedding announcement to his hotel: Rebecca is marrying a wealthy lawyer named Jason Myers IV. Clay reacts with anger and hurt, throwing a glass against the wall.
Chapter 16 Summary
Clay briefs his staff on the Dyloft plan, outlining a class-action lawsuit, a $2-million TV ad campaign, and a streamlined intake process. He promises Paulette, Rodney, and Jonah 10% each of the firm’s final fee.
That night, Clay makes his first cold call to Ted Worley, a 70-year-old who has taken Dyloft. Clay explains the risks and persuades Worley to get tested. When the test shows abnormal cells, Clay visits Worley’s home and signs him as the firm’s first Dyloft plaintiff. By the end of the week, the team signs nine more clients who similarly test positive.
Chapters 9-16 Analysis
These chapters chronicle Clay’s moral and professional metamorphosis, framing his acceptance of Pace’s offer as a rapid, cascading series of compromises. The ease with which Clay settles into his ready-made firm suggests that his new identity is not an authentic creation but a role he is hired to play, driving the theme of The Negative Impact of Ambition on Personal Identity. Similarly, Clay’s journey to the Bahamas to seek counsel from his father further underscores his isolation and the collapse of any external ethical guidance. Because Jarrett fails to step up as a mentor to Clay’s conscience, Pace becomes Clay’s only real source of guidance, teaching him to obey his personal ambition as a compass to professional satisfaction.
The Tarvan settlement illustrates The Ambiguity of Justice in the American Legal System, recasting the legal process as a private, transactional marketplace. The entire arrangement is predicated on confidentiality and secret deals. Pace’s client remains a nameless entity, ensuring that justice is detached from culpability. By agreeing to the deal, Clay actively participates in burying the truth, a direct betrayal of the public interest he once served. The ethical conflict is acute; he must abandon his court-appointed client, Tequila Watson, to represent Pumpkin’s family, a maneuver that Pace dismisses as merely “sticky.” By reframing a profound ethical breach as a minor inconvenience, Pace demonstrates how the mass-tort system prioritizes financial resolution over moral clarity. Consequently, Adelfa Pumphrey is advised to take a life-changing sum of money and escape her old life, reinforcing the idea that the payment is intended to achieve silence, rather than societal retribution.
The Corrupting Influence of Wealth is also a prominent theme in this section, showing how money functions as a tool for personal alienation. Clay transforms himself through the rapid acquisition of luxury goods that serve as markers of his new status. The Porsche Carrera and the Georgetown townhouse are the cornerstones of his new persona, one starkly different from the public defender who ate in Farragut Square. This new life immediately begins to isolate him, especially as he distances himself from Rebecca and Jarrett. The conference for the Circle of Barristers in New Orleans provides foreshadowing for the ultimate consequence of the path Clay is on. The event is depicted as an ode to materialism, where lawyers are more interested in private jets than legal principles. Patton French, in particular, functions as a caricature of unchecked avarice. The Gulfstream jet, a recurring object of desire at the conference, represents a level of wealth so extreme that it detaches its owner from society. Clay is initially repelled by this vulgarity, yet the promise of a massive fee from the Dyloft case proves too powerful to resist. This reveals the insidious logic of corruption: One rationalizes insidious means by focusing on the overwhelming scale of the reward to soothe the conscience.
With the introduction of the Dyloft case, the narrative expands its dissection of mass-tort litigation, portraying it as a cynical business model that commodifies human suffering on an industrial scale. Pace’s strategy is not about legal argument but about market manipulation; the lawsuit’s primary goal is to damage the stock of Ackerman Labs, with victim compensation as a secondary outcome. The television ads are designed to create “fifteen seconds of terror” (126), and cold patient calls rely heavily on emotional manipulation while omitting the benign nature of the tumors at the center of Clay’s lawsuit. When Clay reaches out to Ted Worley, he similarly manufactures a sense of urgency and fear to undermine Worley’s trust in his own doctor. The internal conflict is palpable as he asks himself, “What kind of lawyer had he become?” only to rationalize his actions with the blunt answer, “A rich one” (147). This moment captures the arc of Clay’s transformation, using financial pragmatism to silence his ethical code.
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