A trial lawyer civil war is brewing.

On one side – hyper wealthy trial lawyers who made millions suing tobacco companies – and who are now are gearing up to go after food companies.

On the other – traditionalist nuts and bolt trial lawyers who believe that the tort system is being bent out of shape by mega settlement lawyers who rarely see the inside of a courtroom.

Emblematic of the traditionalists – Michael Stratton a partner in Connecticut’s Stratton Faxon law firm.

This week, Stratton dropped a bomb in the form of an article in the Legal Examiner titled The Enemies of Our Justice System: Big Tobacco Lawyers Looking for New Victims.

Stratton says that the law firms who represents the states against the tobacco comipanies “are not real trial lawyers as they do nothing to help real people, and they never actually try these cases before juries.”

Stratton calls them “pretend trial lawyers” and “charlatans.”

Stratton says these lawyers are now going after food companies and are “hoping for settlements that do nothing for injured victims and extort money from industries based on legal theories and factual theories that have no merit.”

Stratton called on the big food companies “not to settle.”

“Trust the jury system,” Stratton says. “It works but only if you do not settle before the jury’s verdict.”

“About 12 years ago, a very few trial lawyers got very wealthy off the big tobacco settlements,” Stratton writes. “The way these lawyers got wealthy is bizarre and without precedent. They represented, not actual people, but the states who were suing tobacco companies for Medicaid monies paid out by them for the healthcare of sick smokers. The notion that states should have the right to sue a company for healthcare costs was unheard of. The cases never went to trial, and not one sick smoker ever benefited from the settlements.”

Stratton says that “tobacco companies paid billions of dollars to the states to avoid these same states passing laws that could have restricted sales of tobacco to a much larger degree.”

“It was a convenient bargain that had nothing to do with compensating real people or with justice, and it badly distorted the purpose of our justice system,” he writes.

“Now these very same lawyers come forward taking on Big Food to extract the same sort of nonsense settlement that fills their now depleted tobacco money coffers.”

Stratton calls on the food companies being sued by the trial lawyers to “stick to their guns and defend themselves.”