By DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press Writer

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. Lawyer J.D. Lee chuckles as he reads a recent letter from the state attorney general.

The state is threatening to sue him for millions of dollars, tells him he better call his malpractice insurance carrier and suggests his actions are bordering on the unethical.

"I think it is funny," says this 71-year-old, real-life Matlock with silvery gray hair and slightly frayed white shirt, a life-size Remington Bucking Bronco at his door.

The April 27 letter from Special Deputy Attorney General Russell T. Perkins characterizes Lee's efforts to win a piece of a $4.8 billion settlement between Tennessee and tobacco companies for sick and dying smokers as "frivolous."

Lee turns serious.

"The state of Tennessee may sue us - the lawyers and the law firm that has fought this industry for so long when they didn't have the guts to sue the tobacco industry and we (did)," he said. "Then they threaten to sue us because we are complaining about due process of law, being shortchanged and representing the people who have been shortchanged in the settlement."

Known in legal circles as "Tennessee's king of torts," Lee has been waging war on behalf of tobacco users for 18 years. With a mixture of pride and disappointment, he claims to have brought more lawsuits against Big Tobacco - and lost - than any other lawyer in the country.

"These cases would have been won years ago if we knew then what we know now about what the tobacco companies knew," he said, referring to the links to cancer and addictive properties of nicotine.

With a 1997 smokers' lawsuit pending in Monroe County and another filed last month in Nashville, Lee intends to ask the U.S. Supreme Court for an audience.

He contends diseased and addicted smokers' demands were ignored when Tennessee agreed to the national $246 billion tobacco settlement in 1998, which was supposed to address health care costs associated with smoking.

"If we get to be heard in the Supreme Court ... it might upturn their whole $4.8 billion," he said.

State Attorney General Paul Summers acknowledges that there are many Tennesseans with cancer, and heart and lung problems, who feel they have been wronged by the tobacco companies.

"They and their creative lawyers will sue to try to get some of this money," he said. "We will vigorously defend against these efforts."

Lee walked the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail a year ago. He is not easily intimidated by bureaucrats, politicians or other lawyers.

Raised with seven brothers and sisters on a farm with a tobacco patch in Tellico Plains, Lee left school early to serve in the Army and was honorably discharged in 1947.

He got a bachelor's degree from East Tennessee State, a law degree from the University of Tennessee, and quickly built a thriving law practice that eventually concentrated on personal injury cases.

He was the first lawyer in Tennessee to win jury verdicts of $100,000, $500,000 and $1 million. In 1992, he won a $10 million wrongful death suit.

A defining moment came in 1958 at one of the first tobacco trials when Lee, a three-pack-a-day smoker, saw pictures of a smoker's lungs.

"Being raised on a farm, I saw what pigs' lungs looked like," he said. "They were pink and nice and soft. Pigs don't smoke. ... I mean I quit cold turkey."

Since then he estimates he has spent $2.5 million to $3 million on tobacco cases. "It is not just deep pockets for crying out loud," he said of his motives. "If it was deep pockets, my pockets ran dry a long time ago."

In 1972, Lee was elected president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Three years later, the Tennessee Bar Association tried to have him disbarred for advertising and sharing fees with his staff.

Lee responded with a challenge. "Why don't they disbar lawyers who show up for court after drinking liquor?" Lee asked. The case was thrown out.

In 1977, he presided over the state Constitutional Convention that adopted the state's balanced budget amendment - something Lee pondered recently as the General Assembly considered raiding the tobacco settlement fund to keep the state in the black.

In the fallout from an unsuccessful campaign to unseat then-U.S. Sen. Howard Baker in 1978, Lee was charged with counterfeiting. He had distributed campaign literature that resembled $100 bills. The charge was dropped.

Lee's passion for anti-tobacco litigation has rubbed off on his son David Lee, who practices law with him.

Tennessee's current plan to split the first $202 million installment from the settlement between health care and tobacco communities robs smokers while benefiting tobacco producers who already have a separate $390 million settlement, David Lee said.

Their class-action lawsuit filed June 26 in Nashville on behalf of smoker Lucille Myers and others argues that the state is entitled to recover the state's Medicaid expenses for treating smokers.

But the lawsuit contends that Congress, through a 1999 resolution, has waived the federal government's recovery of expenses - which are roughly two of every three Medicaid dollars spent.

Citing a related Tennessee Supreme Court opinion, David Lee said, "That means the money goes to the recipient (the smoker), not to the state."

The amount: possibly $3 billion.

"We think the state of Tennessee clearly knew these things," J.D. Lee said. "That is why they were literally trying to scare us off."

Not intimidated, Lee filed a motion Friday in Nashville for a temporary injunction preventing the state from using the first $202 million in the settlement.