About Josh Karp
Josh Karp is the author of three books: A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, which was made into a Netflix feature film starring Will Forte; Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance, and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing; and Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind. He co-produced the award-winning Netflix documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and his magazine work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Playboy, AirMail and other publications. He has a J.D. from Loyola University (Chicago) and an M.A. in journalism from Northwestern University.
Articles written by Josh Karp
If Life Gives You Lemons, Call Vincent Megna
In 1990, a Chrysler employee contacted the Waukesha, Wis., law firm of Jastroch & LaBarge. The man’s new Chrysler, fitted with a lift to accommodate his disabled daughter, wasn’t working properly: The transmission leaked and slipped, and after five trips to the dealer it still wasn’t fixed. The personal injury attorney who took the call knew nothing about lemon laws. Neither did 46-year-old Vince Megna, now 62, who’d joined the firm two years before and had practiced only …
The Team Player
Dennis Archer has been a state Supreme Court justice, two-term mayor of Detroit and president of the ABA — and he still considers it a privilege to practice lawThis January Dennis Archer did something fairly ordinary for a man of his stature. He stood in a crowded Michigan courtroom and delivered a compelling argument. “Nothing bothered him,” says Mark Dover of Kansas City’s Shook, Hardy & Bacon, national counsel for Miller Brewing Company, and Archer’s co-counsel in a class action lawsuit against the company. “He knew the important points to make and how he wanted to make them. It was like he and the judge were the only two people …
The Role Model
Lisa Madigan follows in the footsteps of ... her motherThe attorney general has a cold today. It’s a little at odds with the unstoppable reputation. The tough 39-year-old attorney general manages a department of 350 lawyers prosecuting more than 500 criminal cases a year, and, following up on a campaign promise, helped create the Illinois Sex Offender Registration Team (ISORT) to better track and identify convicted sex offenders. She is also the stepdaughter of House Speaker Mike Madigan and, as a result, has been dogged by charges of nepotism …
Like Father, Like Son, Like Son
Langdon Neal carries on the traditions of a great Chicago familyGrowing up on the city’s South Side, Chicago attorney Langdon Neal had a ringside seat from which he observed the inner workings of city politics and what it meant to be an African-American attorney in a nation that had not yet fully embraced civil rights. Neal’s grandfather, Earl James Neal, had worked his way through night law school as a Red Cap baggage handler and became one of Cook County’s first African-American judges. His father, Earl Langdon Neal, worked for nearly a decade as …
The Lawyer With a Song in His Heart
Joseph N. Welch II has a famous grandfather and a sense of decencyIt was June 1954 and a nation newly accustomed to owning television sets sat rapt in their living rooms watching the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his attorney Roy Cohn accused the military of employing communists. Representing the Army was 64-year-old Joseph Welch, a commercial litigator with the old-line Boston firm of Hale and Dorr. During an examination of Cohn, Welch touched a nerve in the combustible senator, causing McCarthy to explode into …
Getting Even
Robert L. Habush went into the law reluctantly; now Wisconsin’s Trial Lawyer of the Year award is named after him.In the summer of 1999, during construction of Milwaukee’s Miller Park baseball stadium, a 45-story crane fell in high winds while lifting a 450-ton section of stadium roof. Three ironworkers plummeted to their deaths. One of the victims, sensing that the work site was dangerous, had previously instructed his wife to call attorney Robert L. Habush if anything happened to him, which she did the morning after the accident. Sixteen months later, Habush won a verdict of more than $99 million ($94 …
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