As one of the attorneys who represented the Ground Zero responders, I had a unique perspective on this story, from our first client in 2003 to the negotiations that led, more than eight years later, to a settlement for more than ten thousand responders. More than once, I said to my colleagues and my family that the story of what the responders endured needed to be told, and that what we were witnessing in the World Trade Center litigation, in all its dimensions, was a unique historical undertaking. Telling this story was a great responsibility and a great challenge to do justice to what occurred. Tom Teicholz and I quickly realized the impossibility of telling every responder’s story. So here the few must represent the many.

There were also hundreds of attorneys, paralegals, associates, assistants, clerks, doctors, nurses, legal experts, medical experts, scientific experts, consultants of all stripes, government officials and their staffs, and journalists who were involved in ways large and small in the events chronicled herein, only a few of whom appear in these pages. We are sorry we can neither include nor mention all of them but are grateful nonetheless for their every contribution. This was more than a legal story; it was also a medical story, a science story, a political story, and a story for which the press reporting on all this played a critical role.

As the story expanded to include these various narratives, my own role became one of many, and so when I appear in this narrative, I do so in the third person. It is my sincere hope that doing so freed Tom and me to tell this complex story more completely.

-Bill Groner