(FORTUNE Magazine) – Increasingly these days, writing about business means writing about lawyers. Think about it: tobacco, HMOs, Internet file sharing--these are all stories that hinge largely on the outcome of litigation. The Microsoft story has had a great big lawsuit at its center for the past several years. Indeed, David Boies, the famed litigator who prosecuted the Microsoft case, has become better known than most CEOs.

At FORTUNE we've been closely tracking the shenanigans--and heroics--of the legal profession for some time. Back in 1995 we published a two-part series, "Lawyers From Hell," that explained how the plaintiffs bar extracted billions of dollars from the makers of breast implants. During the Microsoft trial we had a report in virtually every issue. And we recently published John Helyar's inside look at how the litigation against the HMO industry was shaping up. (All these stories are in the fortune.com archives.) In this issue, we have another fabulous lawyer story: the first truly inside account of the rise--and just maybe the fall--of Bill Lerach, the infamous plaintiffs attorney who has long been the scourge of Silicon Valley. Besides being chock full of new stuff, it's a crackling good read.

No surprise there. The author of the Lerach story, Peter Elkind, has written some classic sagas for FORTUNE in recent years, such as his account last February of the great Azerbaijan oil swindle. A thorough, meticulous reporter, the Texas-based Elkind always arrives in New York to close his stories with a suitcase filled with backup documents. This time he showed up with two suitcases. Once we read the story, we understood. It deserves two suitcases.