Continued: Jill Burcum: Breathe deeply and ponder this anniversary

It had all the elements of a John Grisham novel: a crack legal team filing a long-shot lawsuit, a behemoth defendant peddling cancer-causing products, secret stashes of incriminating documents, and a mind-boggling, multibillion-dollar settlement. Yet Minnesota's landmark tobacco case was a real-life legal thriller. Ten years ago today, after a dramatic trial in St. Paul, the state settled with the nation's tobacco companies for more than $6 billion.

As Minnesota's sesquicentennial approaches, we're marking 150 years of statehood with wagon trains and faded photos of early settlers. But the 10-year milestone of the tobacco settlement reminds us that the state's more-recent history also offers much to celebrate, including the risk-taking legal pioneers who beat Big Tobacco. The Minnesota case not only paved the way for other states to settle, but blew once and for all the industry's smokescreen on how much it knew about the dangers of its own products.

When the state and Blue Cross and Blue Shield joined forces in 1994, Big Tobacco was invincible in the courtroom. The Minnesota lawsuit was one of the first to try recover state dollars spent caring for patients with smoking-related illness. Many thought it was worth a try; few thought it would succeed. Mike Ciresi and Roberta Walburn from the firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi led the state's team. They decided on a novel approach: using the industry's own words to fight it. Rather than relying on the dramatic testimony of seriously ill patients, they sought to prove that the industry had fraudulently withheld data about smoking's risks. They believed they could make their case with the industry's internal memos and research -- protected for decades by the best legal talent money could buy.

This week, Ciresi recounted how he laid out the strategy to tobacco lawyers at a 1994 meeting. Skipping the lawyer-speak, Ciresi was blunt: "We are coming after your privileged documents like bees to honey." The tobacco lawyers were unimpressed.

"To them, Minnesota was flyover land,'' Walburn said.

Taking the Minnesotans lightly was tobacco's undoing. Ciresi's core group of about 12 lawyers and paralegals prevailed against hundreds of tobacco lawyers by using persistence and patience. Documents were very grudgingly released, and a case was built. In 1998, the effort paid off with the mid-trial release of one of the last stashes of secret documents -- more than 35,000 pages of memos and research previously protected by attorney-client privilege.

It was, as Ciresi puts it, the "Holy Grail" of tobacco documents. There was overwhelming evidence that the industry had known for decades of smoking's addictiveness and its link to cancer. "They were selling a legal product illegally ... and were lying about it,'' said Ciresi.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the Minnesota tobacco settlement changed the world.

At a state level, the huge sums of settlement money continue to have an impact. Tobacco firms still contribute several hundred million dollars to the state's coffers each two-year budget cycle. Settlement dollars helped the state make up a budget shortfall in 2003. The money has helped thousands of smokers quit through Blue Cross and Blue Shield, as well as ClearWay Minnesota, a nonprofit funded in the settlement agreement. The state's smoking rate continues to decline and now stands at between 16 and 18 percent of adults.

The documents obtained by the Minnesota team helped intimidate Big Tobacco into settling with other states and spurred U.S. Department of Justice action against the industry. The World Health Organization officials cited the Minnesota case as the key to a worldwide treaty on tobacco control brokered by that organization. Researchers from around the world continue to mine the publicly available documents. So far, more than 450 peer-reviewed articles have been published. In many ways, each article owes a debt of gratitude to former Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey, who pushed to make the documents available to the public and withstood political pressure to reach a settlement with the industry to keep them secret.

"This was a huge public-health victory -- the most important public-health development of the past 25 years at least,'' said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and an antismoking advocate. "This case was absolutely pivotal in the fight against tobacco.'' All because of the work of dozen determined legal pioneers in flyover country.

Jill Burcum is at jburcum@startribune.com.