(FORTUNE Magazine) – Business advocates typically have a visceral dislike of trial lawyers. But those planning to use John Edwards's past as a litigator to discredit him as a vice presidential hopeful should proceed with caution. Edwards has been down that road before. In 1998 then-incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina tried to portray Edwards as a "rapacious," "fat cat" lawyer who was driving up health-care costs with his medical malpractice suits. Edwards upset Faircloth by four percentage points.

Part of the problem is that Edwards's career is, from an opponent's perspective, disappointingly clean. The most egregious litigation abuses of our day occur in the context of mass torts and class actions, which Edwards never touched. That's where suits are brought on behalf of hordes of barely injured people who hardly know of their lawyer's existence. Edwards, in contrast, represented only individuals, often children, who were all too genuinely injured. Though much of his work was medical malpractice--a flash point of fury in the health-care industry--it's a fury that doesn't translate well into a campaign issue. In 1998, Faircloth reportedly contemplated running campaign ads featuring a doctor who'd quit practice after Edwards sued him. He backed down, however, after Edwards threatened to rebut with ads starring the maimed little girl whom he had represented in the case, according to The Washington Monthly.

The rest of Edwards's docket was mainstream personal-injury work, like the one where a 5-year-old girl sat on an open wading-pool drain and had her intestines suctioned out of her. Business interests won't want to come anywhere near these cases.

Which is not to say that business has no reason to fear Edwards. They do. And their concerns should be magnified by the fact that Edwards's former finance chairman, and the current co-chair of the Kerry-Edwards Victory '04 Committee, is Fred Baron, a mass-filing asbestos lawyer. A Kerry-Edwards administration will obviously not be abolishing contingency fees anytime soon or adopting other sweeping reforms. But the truth is, neither will any other administration.

On the other hand, is it preposterous to suggest that Edwards might represent a rare Nixon-in-China opportunity? Could Edwards be the one politician whom labor unions and the more traditional elements of ATLA could trust to pare away the worst abuses of the current system without fundamentally undermining legitimate protections against corporate abuses?

Yeah, okay, it's probably preposterous. --Roger Parloff