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In the 1940s, Janet Sackman was a beautiful strawberry-blond model who made smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes seem all-American. When she was 17, an ad exec told her that she should start smoking to better look the model part. She became addicted, stopping only when she was diagnosed with throat cancer. She would have her larynx and part of a lung removed. McClain and Leyh filed a personal injury case based on her illness, only days before the statute of limitations was to expire. "He was basically the only lawyer in the country willing to take the case," says Richard Daynard, executive director of the Northeastern University group. Against heavy odds, McClain and Leyh were able to wrest a few key documents from Chesterfield cigarette maker Liggett Group, which showed that the company had taken steps to make its product more addictive. … The case settled. Details of the payoff are confidential, but even $1 would have been more than any other lawyer had wrung out of a tobacco company on a personal injury claim related to smoking. "It was the first time any tobacco company ever settled a case," Daynard says. The victory proved that such cases could be won, and Daynard says it established McClain as one of the ten most important lawyers in the country in tobacco litigation. "He's really a very important national figure in this area," Daynard says.
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