The Associate by Phillip M. Margolin
Daniel Ames is a rising star in one of Portland's most prestigious law firms, however the lack of a silver spoon in his background makes him uncomfortable amongst his professional peers. He believes he has something to prove, so he is easily persuaded to take on the most tedious and least rewarding tasks. One of them is to swiftly evaluate a batch of documents a pharmaceutical company has to provide to prove they have properly tested a drug which is now being cited as the cause of babies being born deformed. However when the documents are turned over to the lawyer acting for the parents of the deformed children, papers are discovered which seem to prove that the company's original research had thrown up some adverse results. Daniel is fired for missing these papers and it looks as though his legal career is at an end. But he knows those papers were not present when he was assessing the whole file, so who is rigging the evidence? Determined to see justice done to the damaged children as well as to his own future, Daniel delves deeper into the murky netherworld of malpractice suits and discovers there is no limit to the determined greed of the compensation vultures.