This is truly one of my favorite films with Julia Roberts. Probably because she isn't playing her normal 'sweetheart' of a character. Its what made her a great actress and won herself the Oscar for the biographical true story of the single mother turned legal clerk Erin Brockovich.
Erin Brockovich is an out of work, single mother in her thirties that gets in a car accident on the way home from a job interview. She decides to sue the man that hit her and her lawyer, Ed Masry expects to win. Erin's emotional outburst in court looses the case. She continues to try and look for a job and Ed Masry stops taking her calls. Then we come to one of my favorite scenes in which she just shows up at her lawyers office and convinces Ed Masry to hire her as a law clerk.
He gives her a new case to start a file on and she reads it and has trouble understanding it so she goes and contacts the plaintiff directly to ask why there are medical bills in a real estate pro bono case. She finds out the local gas & electric company paid for the doctor's bills. Which is very generous of them considering the wife has been getting noncancerous tumors and her husband has Hodgkin's lymphoma. Why would they pay, wonders Erin. "Because of the chromium" says Mrs. Jensen. So Erin starts learning all she can about chromium. She speaks to a toxicologist at a college and he tells her there are different types of chromium. But the most dangerous in hexavalent chromium which is carcinogenic. It is used by utility companies to clean the pistons. Erin starts wondering if this is what is making the Jensen's sick. As she continues to do research, more neighbors of the Jensens start coming to Erin to tell them about how they've been sick too. With the combined gas and electric company in town that only offered to buy their houses initially while paying for their doctor visits while they consider their offer, the sick neighbors of the Jensens start piling up and it looks like it could turn into a major class action law suit. Ed Masry starts looking to other law firms to help with the cost of the law suit. But the small town neighborhood doesn't like the stuffy, flashy people that come walking in to talk to them. They like Erin because she understands them because she knows what its like to be down on your luck.
With as many plaintiffs that are involved it the lawsuit, the new lawyer decides that they best way to get all these people the money they need quickly, a binding arbitration is the fastest way to get them the most money quickly. This is in which the judge takes the case from the jury's hands and gives a final judgement in which there is no overturning. It requires an agreement that must be made among most if not all of the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs of the town of Hinkley are still leery of the new lawyers so Ed and Erin have to sell the entire town on the idea of the binding arbitration. They get most of the signatures they need in one night after a town hall meeting on the lawsuit. They have to go door-to-door to get the rest. At this time Erin meets Charles Embry who used to work at the gas and electric company with his cousin. The company asked him to shred a bunch of documents. "But as it turns out, I wasn't a very good employee." says Embry and produces a document that shows that the groundwater has been contaminated since 1966 and the corporate office in San Francisco was aware of it.
Pacific Gas & Electric ended up paying a settlement amount of $333 million dollars to the townspeople of Hinkley, California in 1996.
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