Don Barrett hailed from Lexington, Miss., and he liked to think of himself as a small town lawyer-"slow thinking and slow talking, as he put it He was a stocky man, relaxed and unpretentious. He spoke frequently in Southern aphorisms, such as the one he used to describe his ongoing, quix:otic legal battles with the tobacco industry: "If you're going to fight the snake, kill the snake." In the plaintiffs' bar-the section of American lawyerdom that represents victims of airline crashes and sues big corporations when they sell faulty products-some of Barrett's dose friends were unabashedly rich, tlying between trials and settlement conferences in private jets. Barrett, however. was decidedly not rich. His basic problem was that he hadn't killed the snake. Since 1988, he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying three smokers' cases against the tobacco industry. But he had not won a single dollar in damages. His failures sometimes threatened him with insolvency.