John Jones: Scruggs obsessed with public image, wanted to avoid public view of lawsuit that would 'out' him in his

This is a great, great post by Roger Parloff at the Legal Pad blog at Fortune/CNN.com. It's an interview with John Jones of Jones, Funderberg, the firm that sued the Scruggs Katrina Group over division of $26.5 million in attorney fees. In that case, of course, Dickie Scruggs and others allegedly tried to bribe the judge to transfer the case to binding arbitration, after the SKG had earlier rejected Jones' demand for arbitration before he sued. The question has always been, if Scruggs actually did this, why would he care about compelling arbitration enough to risk a bribe? Parloff's interview has some answers, from Jones' perspective. Accordingly, if prosecutors hope to persuade a jury that Scruggs did play a role in the bribe, they’ll have to take a stab at that difficu