Ex-justice goes back before high court

Former Montana Supreme Court Justice and current trial attorney Terry Trieweiler seems equally sincere and sarcastic when he says his career can be summed up by a popular country song.

Seated comfortably inside a small office on Wisconsin Avenue, he recites the words of a Toby Keith song he believes places his life in perspective.

“I ain’t as good as I once was,” the 62-year-old says, cracking a slight smile. “But I’m as good once as I ever was.”

It’s difficult to qualify life relative to song, but Trieweiler’s resurgence as a trial lawyer feared, loved and respected in courtrooms seems like a story of a man’s talents remaining sharp through transition.

The Montana Trial Lawyers Association recently named him the state’s Trial Lawyer of the Year. To an outsider, it seems a minor footnote for a man who has spent more than 35 years practicing law with a commensurate number of accolades to his credit.

It means something to Trieweiler, though.

After a moment of thought, he recalls that 40 years ago he was named most outstanding oral advocate while pursuing a degree at Drake University School of Law.

“To go full circle 40 years later makes me feel good for the reason that I think I’ve been able to sustain a high level of work,” Trieweiler says.

He’s not talking about just any work. Trieweiler said his passion — and the source of his sense of professional accomplishment — has come largely from his work as a trial attorney.

That’s not to say he hasn’t had other jobs. From 1991 to 2003, he was a justice on the Supreme Court of Montana. Before that, he taught civil procedure at the University of Montana School of Law.

But it’s as a trial attorney that he feels most at home, he says. He favors the role for many reasons, among them the fact that his financial fate is tied to that of his clients. He advances initial costs and gets a financial windfall only if he’s successful in court. He said he’d rather work for everyday citizens than corporations.

“It also discourages frivolous lawsuits,” he says. “And one-third of nothing is nothing.”

He stepped down as a high-court justice in 2003 with four years remaining on his term. He told colleagues he wanted to return to work as a trial attorney. His goal was met with repeated questions from his counterparts. Judges aren’t supposed to return to the other side of the bench, he says.

Still, he began working in Helena and commuting to Whitefish on the weekends. His wife, Carol, two of his three daughters and two granddaughters reside there. He relocated to Whitefish full time about three years ago.

It’s the approximate location where he initially planned to launch his career in law. He and Carol were in nearby Glacier National Park for their honeymoon in August 1972. Trieweiler wanted to work near his new wife’s family, but his specific goal of being a trial attorney and not a legal paper-pusher was met with repeated denials by local firms.

“They said, ‘You can’t do that here,’” he says. “‘It’s a small state [and those jobs are in short supply].’”

He took a job representing corporate interests near Seattle for two years before being drawn back to trial law and Montana, he says. He worked with Frank Morrison Jr. in Whitefish from 1975 to 1977.

Morrison, who died in 2006, was a prominent figure in Montana law, a man known for representing regular citizens against powerful interests.

It’s a mantra Trieweiler says he tries to hold close.

Much of his time in recent years has been dedicated to representing clients who were not hired by a railroad company because of their height and weight.

They had been approved for employment but were disqualified by an obesity index at the end of the hiring process, Trieweiler says.

He took on the cases of four such denied applicants.

“They’ve gone to trial, and we’ve won them all,” he says.

Then there was the case of a Missoula nurse who contracted osteonecrosis — also known as death of the jaw — after taking a medication meant to strengthen bones in cancer patients.

Trieweiler agreed to take the malpractice case in 2009, focusing on pharmaceutical manufacturer Novartis, which produces the drug Zometa.

The woman never was told she could be faced with the prospect of jaw amputation by taking the prescription, Trieweiler says.

That’s when Mississippi Attorney Bob Germany caught wind of Trieweiler’s plans. Germany was leading a legal team focused on winning damages from the company for some 700 plaintiffs in cases filed in Tennessee and New Jersey.

Germany had never heard of Trieweiler or Whitefish, and he wasn’t about to let an unknown trial lawyer damage a case in which he had invested thousands of dollars and hours.

So the Jackson, Miss., lawyer picked up the phone and gave the mystery man a piece of his mind.

“I didn’t know where Whitefish, Montana, was and I didn’t know who Terry Trieweiler was,” Germany later recalled. “I was concerned about some attorney screwing this up for the other cases. So I called Terry up and told him exactly that: We didn’t want him screwing up our cases.”

As it turned out, there was no need to worry. Germany did some research, called Trieweiler back and met with him that same week.

Trieweiler and Germany joined resources and earned a $3.2 million verdict against Novartis in Missoula County District Court. It’s been ranked by industry publications as one of the top 10 product-liability verdicts in the country in 2009.

The case also was one of many factors that led to Trieweiler being named Trial Lawyer of the Year.

And that’s where Trieweiler’s past 10 years of work completes a circle of its own.

On Sept. 23, he will go before the Supreme Court of Montana to argue the case after Novartis appealed the ruling. He will face some former colleagues on the bench while doing what he says he truly has loved all along.

He expresses guarded confidence when saying he hopes the court upholds the ruling and millions of dollars in damages. It’s as if he knows there is no country song that adequately describes the unpredictable reactions and rulings of judges.

Trieweiler’s looking forward to it, though.

“I see the field better now,” he says of his time as a judge. “But I’m sure my old colleagues will enjoy asking some questions.”

Reporter Eric Schwartz may be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at eschwartz@dailyinterlake.com.