Judy Cates is running for a seat on the appellate court in Illinois. I heard one of her ads on the radio. She said something like, "I'm Judy Cates, and I've been working for the people of Southern Illinois for 30 years."

Not just the people of Southern Illinois, Judy. At one time or another, you've worked for all of us all across this great country.

She is, or was, a class-action lawyer. She represented 48 million of us back in 1999 in a class-action lawsuit against Publishers Clearing House. Her clients included anybody who had received a solicitation from Publishers Clearing House from 1992 to 1997. Rich, poor, black, white. She didn't care. She took us all. Cates and her brother, Steven Katz, claimed that Publishers Clearing House had been unethical or mean or something like that, and so they negotiated a deal on our behalf.

Originally, the settlement was capped at $10 million. About $1.5 million would be spent on notifying the 48 million claim holders. Another $3 million would go to Cates and her brother. That left $5.5 million for us. It came out to about 12 cents for each of us.
I was thrilled just to be on the winning side, and I thought about filling out the form and mailing it in and getting my 12 cents, but I'm essentially lazy and the form was complicated and when you throw in the fact that the price of a stamp was substantially more than I stood to gain, well, I did nothing. Even when the settlement was amended to remove the cap, I still did nothing.

Actually, that's not true. I wrote a column about the settlement. I wrote that the class-action lawyers reminded me of bank robbers, and then I added that the comparison wasn't fair to bank robbers, who never pretend to be robbing the banks on our behalf. That shows a certain candor on the part of bank robbers that seems to lacking with the lawyers, I wrote.

Judy and her brother sued me for $3 million.

I promptly wrote another column in which I tried to explain that because Cates and her brother were from Illinois, they had misunderstood the reference to bank robbers. In Missouri, we like bank robbers. Jesse James is a state hero. If you own a cave in Missouri, you advertise that Jesse James used to stay there. In Missouri, it's a compliment to be compared to a bank robber, I wrote.

That second column did not seem to mollify Cates and her brother.

An odd thing then happened. I began getting e-mails from people in Illinois. Almost none of them mentioned Katz. Instead, they all wrote about Cates. And the things they wrote made me worry that bank robbers might sue me for comparing them to her.

Cates and her brother were soon demanding, as part of discovery, to see all the e-mails and letters that people had sent me in connection with the case. So I had to write another column warning people that if they were to send me e-mails about Cates, she might end up with them. That stopped the e-mails.

By the way, she and her brother finally "settled" the suit. They didn't get a penny.

In fairness to her, not all of her class-action lawsuits have been so one-sided. I later wrote about one in which her clients stood to gain 75 cents each. That even covers postage. The lawyers were getting another $3 million.

But you know something? This is a good year for Cates to be running on her record. The polls show that people want change, and that's what her clients have been getting for years. In fact, I thought of her clients the other day when I saw an ad for a fast-food restaurant. Turn your change into chicken.

Cates is running against James Wexstten. He is a former Jefferson County Circuit Court judge who was appointed to fill a vacancy on the appeals court last year. He is considered a moderate and he has the endorsements of the Democratic Party committees in each of the 37 counties of the district. In a recent advisory poll from the Illinois State Bar Association, 89 percent of respondents said they believed he "meets the requirements of office." Cates got a 51 percent rating.

Wexstten also has a bunch of people who have donated money to his campaign. Cates, who has made a fortune in the class-action business, has put $600,000 of her own money into the campaign.

Apparently, a lot of her former clients have turned their backs on her. Ingrates, is what they are. Or maybe they took their settlement money and bought chicken.