Lawdragon Magazine: The 2021 Plaintiff Issue

THE

PLAINTIFF ISSUE

INSIDE THE VERY BEST OF THE PLAINTIFF BAR REID COLLINS BETS BIG ON ITS FOUR YOUNG ACES POMERANTZ ON THE REWARDS OF GOING GLOBAL OUTTEN & GOLDEN’S MODEL FOR DOING GOOD THE COMPASSION OF SEARCY DENNEY’S TEAM Cover spread from left to right: Davida Brook, Stephen Zack, Jennifer Pafiti, Rosalyn “Sia” Baker-Barnes Victor L. George, Frank L. Branson, Conlee Whiteley, Jay Edelson, , Craig Boneau, Joshua Bruckerhoff, Nate Palmer, Greg Schwegmann.

INSIDE THE VERY BEST OF THE PLAINTIFF BAR REID COLLINS BETS BIG ON ITS FOUR YOUNG ACES POMERANTZ ON THE REWARDS OF GOING GLOBAL OUTTEN & GOLDEN’S MODEL FOR DOING GOOD THE COMPASSION OF SEARCY DENNEY’S TEAM Cover spread from left to right: Davida Brook, Stephen Zack, Jennifer Pafiti, Rosalyn “Sia” Baker-Barnes Victor L. George, Frank L. Branson, Conlee Whiteley, Jay Edelson, , Craig Boneau, Joshua Bruckerhoff, Nate Palmer, Greg Schwegmann.

Managing Partner Jeremy A. Lieberman

POMERANTZ CONGRATULATES OUR NEWEST LAWDRAGONS

Partner Austin P. Van

Partner Tamar A. Weinrib

Partner Joshua B. Silverman

Partner Michael Grunfeld

THEY JOIN POMERANTZ LAWDRAGONS: Gustavo F. Bruckner Patrick V. Dahlstrom Emma Gilmore Marc I. Gross Stanley M. Grossman Jeremy A. Lieberman Jordan L. Lurie Jennifer Pafiti Murielle Steven Walsh Matthew L. Tuccillo Michael J. Wernke

PROTECTING INVESTORS IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD Pomerantz LLP is a global leader in championing investor rights, pursuing ground-breaking securities litigation with novel arguments that have shaped the law to the benefit of shareholders. PomTrack®, the Firm’s proprietary, state-of-the-art portfolio monitoring service, monitors assets of over $6.8 trillion on behalf of some of the most influential institutional investors worldwide. From taking on BP plc, the tenth-largest company in the world, in a decade-long litigation that secured the right of international investors to pursue securities claims in U.S. courts, to achieving a record-breaking $3 billion recovery for defrauded investors in litigation against Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, Pomerantz attorneys have earned the right, time and again, to be recognized as “some of the best lawyers in the United States, if not in the world.”* * Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, at Petrobras preliminary approval hearing

NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LOS ANGELES • PARIS www.pomlaw.com

Susman Godfrey We are proud to have 50% of the firm’s partnership included in this year’s guide – more than any other litigation firm.

HOUSTON LOS ANGELES SEATTLE NEW YORK susmangodfrey.com

{ CONTENTS }

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16 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER 18 BET THE HOUSE

Hotshot litigation boutique Reid Collins is putting all its chips on its Four Aces, who have amassed a formidable track record.

27 THE FUTURE IS NOW Law firms worldwide are looking ahead to a changed world. McKool Smith’s next generation of partners shows why the firm is ready for the challenge.

40 THE KELLER LENKNER MINDSET: EXCELLENCE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION A discussion with the lawyers behind Plaintiffs’ Law 2.0.

48 SMALL TEAM, BIG RESULTS

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Kanner & Whiteley’s environmental team explains how the firm has been punching above its weight for decades.

55 LAWDRAGON 500 LEADING PLAINTIFF FINANCIAL LAWYERS These 500 outstanding lawyers represent the best of the bar advocating for plaintiffs in securities, antitrust, whistleblower and other business litigation claims.

56 GOING GLOBAL Pomerantz’s international expansion has changed the firm’s alreadyimpressive game.

62 PRESSURE MAKES DIAMONDS How Kasowitz Benson Torres remains poised to take on the next round of bet-the-company litigation.

Also featuring Lawyer Limelights with:

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LAWDRAGON ISSUE 23 | WWW.LAWDRAGON.COM

Dennis Ellis of Browne George Ross Joshua Silverman of Pomerantz Davida Brook of Susman John Rizio-Hamilton of Bernstein Litowitz Mark Dearman of Robbins Geller Tamar Weinrib of Pomerantz Daniel Charest of Burns Charest Jay Edelson of Edelson PC Austin Van of Pomerantz Stuart Davidson of Robbins Geller Sherrie Savett of Berger Montague

1 36 138

{ CONTENTS } Warren Burns of Burns Charest Michael Grunfeld of Pomerantz

145 LAWDRAGON 500 LEADING PLAINTIFF CONSUMER LAWYERS

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We honor a dedicated and tireless group who range from coast to coast, counseling grieving family members, finding pathways to justice for those who have been harmed or killed.

146 THE ETHOS OF ADVOCACY AT SEARCY DENNEY

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The storied Florida trial firm brings an uncommon level of personal commitment to clients facing the most challenging times of their lives.

Also featuring Lawyer Limelights with:

154 162 170 174 181 188 194 198 202 206 210 216 226 228

Stephen Zack of Boies Schiller Victor George of The Law Offices of Victor L. George Parvin Aminolroaya of Seeger Weiss Frank Branson of The Law Offices of Frank L. Branson Hezekiah Sistrunk of The Cochran Firm Joseph Balesteri of Power Rogers Marty Young of Goudarzi & Young Patrick McGroder of Beus Gilbert Stephen Garcia of Garcia & Artigliere Russ Herman of Herman Herman Debbie Branson of The Law Offices of Frank L. Branson Andrew Yaffa of Grossman Roth Tom Power of Power Rogers Christian Searcy of Searcy Denney

237 LAWDRAGON 500 LEADING PLAINTIFF EMPLOYMENT LAWYERS

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Our indispensable guide to the heroic lawyers throughout the U.S. working to ensure that workers’ rights are respected and fairly compensated – a big ask in these complicated times.

238 DOING GOOD WHILE DOING WELL How Outten & Golden became a model for impact, diversity and transition.

Also featuring Lawyer Limelights with:

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Toni Jaramilla of Law Offices of Toni J. Jaramilla Alan Epstein of Spector Gadon Eve Hill of Brown Goldstein Dolores Leal of Allred Maroko

Frank Branson and Debbie Dudley Branson

Committed to the Pursuit of Justice

SOME OF THE FIRM’S NOTABLE WINS: $242 Million verdict against Toyota $43 Million verdict in fraud/intentional torts case related to oil & gas lease acquisitions $34 Million resulting from the collapse of Dallas Cowboys practice facility

2020

$20.7 Million verdict in motor vehicle/wrongful death case $15 Million in wrongful death case against trucking company $15 Million in electrocution/wrongful death case $15 Million in triple-fatality truck crash case against transportation company

Making an Impact for the Clients We Serve

HIGHLAND PARK PLACE, SUITE 1800 4514 COLE AVENUE, DALLAS, TX 75205 (214) 522-0200 | FLBRANSON.COM

Accepting Referrals

EXPERIENCED TRIAL LAWYERS REPRESENTING SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT, ABUSE, AND MISCONDUCT

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(310) 209 - 4100 CONNECT WITH US

@taylorringlaw

TAYLORRING.COM

TaylorRingLA

Fighting to Vindicate the Rights of Both Wronged Employees and Victims of Catastrophic Injuries for Over 25 Years

Gabriella Gutierrez, Wayne Smith, Meylin Alfaro, Victor George, Sonia Revolorio, Norman Coe, Karla Hernandez

CALIFORNIA EMPLOYMENT LITIGATION | CATASTROPHIC INJURY AND WRONGFUL DEATH Victor L. George and the attorneys at the Law Offices of Victor L. George are passionate about taking on entities that harass, discriminate or otherwise treat their employees unlawfully or parties that cause their victims catastrophic injuries/wrongful death.

“When people face tragedy or extreme hardship from illegal or negligent acts, we hold responsible parties accountable through jury verdicts and monetary settlements designed to somehow ease the massive burden on plaintiffs and their families,” says Victor George.

In 2017, George obtained a $26 million jury verdict for the parents’ “loss of love” in the largest United States wrongful death jury verdict ever for a minor. George has won dozens of such multimillion-dollar jury verdicts, and he never lost a trial during one 10-year stretch. Defendants in these jury trial verdicts include: Walmart, Ford, Wells Fargo, Fidelity, Metrolink, Sears, Sunrise Senior Living, Kindred Healthcare, Starline Tours, the Catholic Church, numerous school districts, major production companies/studios, public entities and many others.

In recognition of such outstanding results, George received Loyola Law School’s 2019 “Champions of Justice” award for “...professional excellence, technical proficiency, and uncompromising integrity...”

George has previously won the ”Trial Lawyer of the Year” award from the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles, an honor for which he has been nominated in 12 of the past 18 years. He was also named the 2016 Southern California “Lawyer of the Year” for Employment Law by Best Lawyers®. George is listed in Lawdragon’s National “500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers.” He has twice been nominated for Public Justice’s National Trial Lawyer of the Year.

$26 Million

$4.25 Million

$20 Million

Largest wrongful death jury verdict

Sexual harassment/ retaliation jury verdict

Personal Injury burn case result

20355 Hawthorne Boulevard, 1st Floor | Phone: 310.698.0990 | Fax: 310.698.0995 | www.vgeorgelaw.com

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Helping law firms ignite their growth.

Congratulations to all our InterAction Clients recognized as a Lawdragon Leading Plaintiff Lawyer

2021

InterAction - proud to partner with the leading global law firms: 75% of Am Law 100

74% of Global Top 100 Law Firms

Trusted for growth across 5 continents

Learn why we have continued to evolve as legal’s leading CRM for almost 30 years - visit www.interaction.com

InterAction is a registered trademark of LexisNexis, a division of RELX Inc. © 2021 LexisNexis. All rights reserved. 02/21. A5698

SDSBS attorneys recognized by 2020 Lawdragon

Chris Searcy

LAWDRAGON HALL OF FAME

Jack Scarola SHAREHOLDER

Sia Baker-Barnes

Brenda Fulmer

SHAREHOLDER

SHAREHOLDER

Searcy Denney attorneys have been recognized in Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers 2020 Guide.

This selection is one of the most elite distinctions in the legal profession.

Chris Searcy’s distinguished career was recognized by selection in Lawdragon’s Hall of Fame.

We are honored to receive this recognition.

SEARCY DENNEY SCAROLA BARNHART k SHIPLEY PA

Attorneys at Law

AVIATION & RAILROAD DISASTERS • BOATING & WATERCRAFT INJURIES • VEHICLE ACCIDENTS • COMMERCIAL DISPUTES CONSTRUCTION DEFECTS • DEFECTIVE DESIGN • INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES • MASS TORTS • MEDICAL MALPRACTICE PREMISES LIABILITY • PROFESSIONAL LIABILITY • TRUCKING ACCIDENTS • UNSAFE PRODUCTS • WILL AND TRUST DISPUTES

WEST PALM BEACH / TALLAHASSEE • 8OO.78O.86O7 • WWW.SEARCYLAW.COM

“Brilliant lawyers with courtroom savvy.”

— BENCHMARK LITIGATION

NEW YORK 430 Park Avenue New York, NY 10022 T: 212.607.8160

WASHINGTON, D.C. 600 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 T: 202.556.2000

www.mololamken.com

CHICAGO 300 North LaSalle Street Chicago, IL 60654 T: 312.450.6700

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A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER AND EDITOR

ELL…THAT WAS FUN. Not making light, and for sure we know it’s not over yet.

But as we write this Valentine to the 1,500 lawyers featured here and everyone kind enough to spend some time with our magazine, we’re happy to report the dragons are vaxxed, half or completely. It’s been a hell of a year: global pandemic, black men and women killed indiscriminately and social justice demonstrations, unprecedented wildfires, political insurrection – we’re almost certainly missing something of an epic scale that’s been minimized against the vast upheaval of 2020-2021.

And so, how are you? Well, we hope, feeling renewed confidence, energy and a returning sense of well-being, possibility and confidence.

Because that’s what we need right now. From each of us and most especially the remarkable U.S. plaintiff legal corps, who produce remarkable miracles for injured and defrauded consumers.

You are the greatest leveler of legal injustice the world knows. And even though Covid largely shut your courtrooms, you held your clients close. As we talked to you throughout the year, we heard you as caged tigers, needing to roar, to speak your peace, to advocate and fight. For those who need you most.

Easy tigers. We’re almost there.

To whet your whistle, we offer The Plaintiff Issue, 2nd Edition. And if this doesn’t inspire, eat a steak, have a martini (or whatever), get a massage, remember how damn lucky we are to be here and do what we do to help people.

You want inspiration? This issue is bursting at the seam with it: Kanner & Whitley’s David v.

Goliath environmental work, Pomerantz’s global effort for investors, Searcy Denney’s compassion for injured consumers and Outten & Golden’s leadership for executives and employees, among so many more features and lawyer profiles – including our look at “The Four Aces” on which litigation powerhouse Reid Collins has staked its future.

Enjoy. Be well. Believe.

And thank you for supporting our work in good times and the most challenging we can imagine.

Let’s all roar together now. One … two … three!

K AT R I N A D E W E Y Publisher and CEO katrina@lawdragon.com

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J O H N R YA N Editor-in-Chief john@lawdragon.com

“one of the nation’s greatest plaintiff lawyers” —Lawdragon

“a dealmaker” —Chambers USA 2020

Christopher A. Seeger

A founding partner of Seeger Weiss LLP, Christopher Seeger has led some of the most complex, groundbreaking, and high-profile litigations in the United States, including the NFL Concussion Litigation, where as lead counsel and chief negotiator he helped obtain an uncapped settlement valued

New Jersey 55 Challenger Road Ridgefield Park, NJ 07660

at more than $1 billion on behalf of thousands of retired NFL players and their families, and the National Prescription Opiate Litigation, where as co-lead counsel he represents over 34,000 counties and cities grappling with the medical, social, and legal consequences of the opioid crisis.

New York 77 Water Street New York, NY 10005

se e ge r we i s s . c om

Pennsylvania 1515 Market Street Philadelphia, PA 19102

BET THE

HOUSE

BY KATRINA DEWEY

HOTSHOT LITIGATION BOUTIQUE REID COLLINS IS PUTTING ALL ITS CHIPS ON THE FOUR ACES, WHO HAVE AMASSED A FORMIDABLE TRACK RECORD: THE MATHEMATICIAN. THE COACH. THE ASSASSIN. THE PITCHER.

From left to right: Gregory Schwegmann, Craig Boneau, Joshua Bruckerhoff and Nate Palmer

PHOTOS BY LAURA CROSTA

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hen it comes to high-stakes financial litigation, Reid Collins has not just one ace up its sleeve, but four: Josh Bruckerhoff, Craig Boneau, Nate Palmer and Greg Schwegmann. The Assassin. The Coach. The Pitcher. The Mathematician. These partners may be the most successful young trial corps in law practice today.

Reid Collins has ascended to the top ranks of America’s most successful financial plaintiff firms in no time flat. In its 12th year, the firm has achieved billions in verdicts and settlements with a compact crew of lawyers anchored in Austin, Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. and recently Wilmington, Del. The firm’s name partners – Bill Reid, Jason Collins and Lisa Tsai – laid the foundation for the firm’s success.

But the firm’s national ascendance also is due to the hard work and success of its Four Aces.

Well uh beat the drum, and hold the phone, the sun came out today. We’re born again there’s new grass on the field.

A $300M lawsuit, now settled, against Brown Rudnick accusing it of bungling litigation over the leveraged buyout of Lyondell Chemical Company.

A $20M settlement for dealmaker Sarah Bradley against her former colleagues at Kainos Capital.

An against-the-odds win at the U.S. Supreme Court in Merit Management v. FTI creating new safe-harbor bankruptcy law. A recently upheld derivative claim against Renren insiders implicating billions in connection with SoFi and SoftBank. A $1B trial set for May against Celtic for defaulting on debt to Highland Capital, and – never a dull moment – Reid Collins had a jury verdict for fraud in its decade-long case against Credit Suisse upheld by the Texas Supreme Court last year in one of the few financial crisis cases to reach a jury verdict The Aces are the beating heart of the firm’s success.

Bruckerhoff, Boneau and Palmer threw in with the founding members of Reid Collins fresh out of law school. And, once Schwegmann left Big Law practice in New York behind, they joined forces on the ground floor of Reid Collins when that firm began just 12 years back. Over the years they have galvanized as a tactical team that takes a knotted-up problem and ferrets out the tiniest bit of string to follow through a forest obscura to find answers and accountability for some of the world’s biggest frauds.

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They bring together a rare combination of skills honed in battle and forged by necessity of putting food on the table at a new firm. They are hyper competitive, yet thoughtful. Contemplative, but calculating. The same, but different in a rare law firm environment that prizes individuals and gives them room to succeed on their terms.

It’s been that way since they set up shop in a suburban office park in Austin on an old door laid over banker’s boxes foraging files rejected by other law firms. “If we hadn’t done that, then we wouldn’t have had any cases to work on,” says Boneau, the Coach, whose amiable nature pulls together the other three.

“Out of necessity, we had cases that nobody wanted and didn’t, on the face of it, even look like cases.”

“Saying, ‘This doesn’t work,’ wasn’t an answer we could ever give,” says Schwegmann, the Mathematician. “It doesn’t add any value. I need the solution. Because we’re here to generate recoveries for our clients and, in the end, make money.” Solutions to these difficult cases are what Bruckerhoff, Boneau, Palmer and Schwegmann unraveled. And, although the Reid Collins’ cases have gotten bigger and better over the years, these litigation aces are still finding innovative ways to win for their clients and make money in the process.

The firm works on contingency in taking on financial frauds. That puts the premium on the analysis and legwork to take the string and follow it not just to an impressive legal theory you can tie in a bow – but also then to wrap around a core, cover it in cowhide and throw 100 mph fastballs at a culpable wrongdoer with financial resources.

Firm founder Reid has more than a little to do with the team’s success. A turbo-charged legal warrior, he relishes a good fight, going up against great adversaries and making money. But despite his new role as law professor, he makes no claim on being able to trace the roots of fraudulent transfer law back to the Justinian Code.

“I’m only as good as the ideas the people on our team can come up with. I don’t have the bandwidth or the brains, in a lot of cases, to actually come up with these ideas myself,” says Reid.

“I think I’m a little like Ronald Reagan in the sense that I have an unbelievable cabinet,” he adds.

A-roundin’ third, I’m headed for home. It’s a brown-eyed handsome man. Anyone can understand the way I feel.

Front and center in discussions of the Four Aces is Bruckerhoff. Quiet and thoughtful, the Assassin brings a unique ability to scope out the main issue in a case, then find the pathway to resolve it. He has played the role of sniper in many of the firm’s most vaunted wins, including many with international intrigue, which it can’t disclose. Bear Stearns, Lyondell Chemical, Doral Financial, ICP Strategic Credit Income Fund, AJW Master Fund, and Merit.

He is the master of not only unraveling complex cases but also finding the right pressure points for defendants to compel them to settle, often before any public lawsuit is filed. Bruckerhoff has settled more than half of the cases he has handled before actual litigation. His ability to take down defendants quick and stealthy is one of the reasons Reid has dubbed him the Assassin. (Meeting Bruckerhoff in person, he is one of the friendliest and most downto-earth folks around. Except that long, unrelenting stare. Assassin giveaway.)

nothing about the case concerned Washington, D.C., Bruckerhoff found that the lawsuit could be filed there because Washington, D.C. has a longer statute of limitations and a rule that a defendant cannot seek dismissal on forum non-conveniens grounds without agreeing to waive all statute of limitations defenses. Reid Collins threatened to bring the lawsuit in D.C., and the defendant, not wanting to litigate in an otherwise inconvenient forum, agreed to waive its statute of limitations defense before the case was even filed.

“Each case presents a different puzzle to solve, particularly when we are assessing why a company collapsed,” Bruckerhoff says. “Given the complexity of a lot of our cases, we often have the opportunity to think outside of the box, and to try new or creative strategies. Some of my and the firm’s notable successes were achieved after other lawyers told our clients they had no claims.”

But not everyone settles in advance, as is evident from some of the recent high-dollar cases that Bruckerhoff has handled. Referencing one of those cases, Reid explained: “I gave the case to Josh with low expectations he was going to find anything. Josh figured all this out, literally, in a matter of three or four days.

You know I spent some time in the Mudville Nine. Watchin’ it from the bench. You know I took some lumps when the Mighty Casey struck out.

“I’m pretty good at identifying the best idea in the room,” Reid says, “and it’s disproportionately the case that the ‘Eureka’ moment or a brilliant idea will come from Josh.”

Boneau grew up as a “latchkey kid” in a trailer park in Southeast Texas. By the age of 8, he was pretty much taking care of himself, making his meals, doing his homework and playing ball.

Bruckerhoff is Midwest through and through, from Columbia, Mo.; he remembers watching the O.J. trial and reading John Grisham books growing up. While he always had an interest in the law, what he really enjoyed was anything that allowed him to use his analytical skills. He brings that same inquiring mind and love for unraveling issues to his work at Reid Collins.

“My ability to look at problems from different angles and find solutions probably just comes down to my stubbornness,” he says. “I approach each problem in my cases from the perspective that there has to be a solution to it.”

In high school, his basketball coach had a particularly strong influence, and was the first person who really pushed Boneau, with very high expectations for the team’s effort and attention to detail.

Reid now uses many of Bruckerhoff’s “brilliant ideas” when teaching his students at the University of Texas School of Law. For instance, several years ago, Reid Collins was given a potential legal malpractice case that appeared dead in the water on limitations grounds. Bruckerhoff, however, figured out a creative solution to the problem—what his firm now internally refers to as the “D.C. heist.” Although

“He approached basketball as a tool to teach us how to work hard at something and understand that if you put the effort in every day, the rewards will come,” says Boneau. “But he also made it very clear that you can’t just show up and expect someone to give you something. And, because we were part of a team, he was very big on teaching us to support each other and pick each other up when one of us was struggling. He helped us understand that we were all much stronger when we worked together and for each other.” Boneau has applied those lessons to his practice of law.

Recently, Boneau led the team in pursuit of claims for Sarah Bradley, who claimed her membership in a private equity firm, Kainos Capital, was stolen from her. Boneau’s team figured out the scheme Bradley’s

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former partners employed to steal her interest and keep her in the dark. They put together the litigation strategy that led to a $20M settlement of Bradley’s claims. According to Boneau, “the Bradley case is another great example of teamwork. When Sarah came to us, it was clear she had lost something of value, but what wasn’t clear was how it happened and how to make a claim out of it. But we got to work and figured it out as a group with one idea leading to another. It is so much fun to watch that happen.

yers lack, which can be useful in evaluating damages in tricky cases and in interrogating financial experts to either pick their work apart or make their opinion stronger,” says Schwegmann, who recently snagged a vast bonus for a case he brought in and successfully settled against a multi-billion financial firm before filing. In typical Reid Collins fashion, Schwegmann saw solutions where other firms only saw problems and devised creative legal arguments to create the risks necessary to generate the result.

“When no one is worried about taking credit, there is no resentment about one person refining another person’s idea into something better. That’s the type of environment I want to create because I think that makes us much more likely to succeed and it makes playing this game a lot more fun for everyone. And, in Sarah’s case, it led to a fantastic result,” he says.

Reid Collins secured one of its biggest legal achievements through its representation of FTI, as the litigation trustee that held the claims of a bankrupt planned “racino” – a racetrack and casino, at Valley View Downs in Pennsylvania. In 2007, Valley View Downs agreed to buy out the shareholders of Bedford Downs, among them Merit Management, for $55M if it succeeded in acquiring the last harness-racing license in Pennsylvania. They won the license, but the project, and Valley View Downs collapsed in bankruptcy, eventually leaving FTI to pursue the claims to void the $55M payout on behalf of creditors.

Heaven help the foe on whom the Assassin and the Coach team up, as they regularly do. When Reid Collins filed suit against Reed Smith for blowing a statute of limitations, they asserted a $500M claim, thanks to the Assassin’s fondness for tracing claims through old English law and the Coach’s extensive knowledge of residential mortgage-backed securities claims. The case settled prior to the completion of motion to dismiss briefing.

Boneau is a natural leader, Reid says: “He runs teams very well; he gets them. He’s a very good group thinker.” So much so that in Reid’s first role as litigation trustee, in the Brooks Brothers case, he chose the Coach as his lead counsel to run the investigation.

So say hey Willie, tell Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio. Don’t say it ain’t so. You know the time is now.

It doesn’t get much bigger than the team’s U.S. Supreme Court victory in Merit Management Group LP v.

FTI Consulting Inc., anchored by Bruckerhoff and, of course, the Mathematician. Schwegmann studied formal logic and reasoning as an undergrad, providing the framework to evaluate and simplify fact patterns and complex legal arguments. A stint in Tanzania in the Peace Corps after graduation added perspective, as well as improvisation and the opportunity to hone problem-solving skills.

“On a surface level, having a degree in mathematics – even theoretical mathematics – also comes with a certain level of comfort with numbers that a lot of law22

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Merit, naturally, wanted to keep the $16.5M it got in the deal, and thought Bankruptcy Code section 546(e)’s safe-harbor was a silver bullet that would put a quick end to FTI’s claim. Merit claimed the safe-harbor protected transfers made to purchase stock that passed through a bank from avoidance, including in this case – in which the transfer passed through both Credit Suisse and Citizens Bank. And at least five different federal circuit courts – all but one of the appellate courts that had addressed the issue – agreed with the firm’s opponent.

Bruckerhoff and Schwegmann searched for grounds to buck the trend of circuit courts expanding the scope of the safe-harbor and identified the 7th Circuit as their best chance for success. They brought the case in Illinois with an eye toward getting the 7th Circuit to weigh in on the issue. When the case inevitably arrived there, Schwegmann underscored the harbor’s limits with a commonsense argument about a Christmas card to grandma: “If I put a Christmas card in the mail to my grandmother and the postman delivers it, who was the card sent by? If Merit is right, we’d have to conclude that the card was sent not by me, but the postman. But, that’s ridiculous, and that is not what Congress meant when it protected transfers that were made by a financial institution,” he argued.

They won 3-0 in the 7th Circuit with Schwegmann at the podium. It was the first time in 30 years that any plaintiff had successfully contested a 546(e) safe harbor claim, creating a true split among circuits. The U.S. Supreme Court, which seeks to keep federal standards uniform nationwide, heard the case and in February 2018, FTI and Reid Collins won “nine-nothing on arguments that Greg and Josh wrote,” Reid says.

Determining whether the 546(e) safe harbor protected Merit’s payout from cancellation required looking “to the overarching transfer from Valley View to Merit,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, and not the banks through which the transfer passed.

“Winning the 546(e) in the 7th Circuit and getting the Supreme Court to affirm is what people know about and rightfully, I think, put a spotlight on our firm.

And Josh and I definitely spent a lot of time thinking about the argument and the best way to make it over the years,” says Schwegmann. “But, the piece that often gets missed, and that is at least equally impressive, is the strategy we developed and set in motion at the very outset of our representation that was designed, and eventually led to that incredible outcome. I think it speaks to our team’s creativity and willingness to take risks and break from conventional wisdom when the situation calls for it, and it’s a great example of maximizing value to the client through creative legal strategy.”

The Merit ruling may prove a catalyst for a lucrative area of practice, Reid says, “with literally billions of dollars in claims subject to 546(e),” and the possibility of a flood of cases in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.

Got a beat-up glove, a homemade bat and brand-new pair of shoes. You know I think it’s time to give this game a ride.

‘I don’t think you should be a pitcher,’ and moved me to first base.’”

His dad knew that he could tap into his son’s stubborn streak. “If you tell me I can’t do something, then I’m going to do it. I wasn’t the most talented baseball player. But I could outwork – and was willing to outwork – anyone. So I just worked at the craft.

I showed up early, stayed late, and worked.” He got older, and stronger and the work paid off. He became a pitcher.

He continued that passion on the mound for the Wheaton Thunder, where he amassed an impressive record. When he was pitching, he owned the ballpark.

Which is just how he liked it. He thrived in the oneon-one battle that exists between pitcher and hitter.

And the mind game. Throw high and tight to back a hitter off the plate, and then a breaking ball low and away or a sinker low and in. And while he didn’t top 100 mph, he came close.

The competitive part of practicing law resembles how he pitched. “Not liking to lose, that’s definitely there. I like high pressure situations, like being in the courtroom for an oral argument. There’s a similar controlled aggression that’s at play, although not quite like my days on the mound. You can’t exactly throw high and tight in the legal world,” he says. “But I do think there are similarities. Your mental state when you’re called in from the bullpen is similar to oral argument or trial.

“Bill’s a great example. You have to walk in confidently, like you are in complete control. Then you have that presence, you have that ability to argue and think and listen and respond,” the Pitcher explains.

The courtroom is now Palmer’s field of dreams. He recently played a key role in cementing one of the firm’s signature victories, taking on Credit Suisse for its role inflating valuations of Lake Las Vegas properties and ultimately – in a rare feat - helping to secure a jury verdict for fraud, which was upheld in the Texas Supreme Court last year.

And then there is the Pitcher. Starting at least by the age of four, Palmer was throwing a baseball. His dad had been a catcher and he doesn’t remember a time he wasn’t playing baseball. Growing up as a Texas Rangers fan, his dream was to be Nolan Ryan.

Palmer’s currently on the mound for Reid Collins’ in the $500M In re: Renren Inc. Derivative Action, centered around a company that once had designs on – and raised money to become – the Facebook of China.

But early on, he wasn’t the obvious talent on the field.

And around the time he was 10-years old, he was struggling on the mound. His dad was the coach and walked out to the mound. “He said something like,

The company failed to live up to its ambitions, however, and millions of dollars left over from its initial public offering were deployed throughout 45 portfolio companies.

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What happened next, Palmer alleges in a New York state court lawsuit, was that Renren’s most valuable assets – including a stake in lender Social Finance Inc. or SoFi – were transferred through a sham spinoff to Oak Pacific Investments, a vehicle controlled by Renren CEO Joseph Chen and insiders including affiliates of SoftBank.

For the lawsuit to fly, Reid’s aces once again needed to find U.S. jurisdiction – a nifty trick given that Renren is based in China and incorporated in the Cayman Islands (a jurisdiction of particular expertise for Reid Collins).

me a problem. Go back and find me a solution,’” Schwegmann says.

What makes the task tougher for those who would follow the Aces is that neither the odds nor the risks of failure are as high. The firm is turning 12 and is now known nationally for its abundant success and fearless trial techniques, which has led to better quality cases.

“Given where we started as a team and as a firm, it’s exciting to see that the work has paid off and we have arrived at the next level,” Schwegmann says.

“Nate did what he always does, which was to outwork his opponents, scouring the public filings and other publicly available information to connect the transaction to New York and thereby establishing jurisdiction,” says Reid. “Others – including notable law firms – had abandoned any hope of establishing jurisdiction, until they saw Nate’s analysis in the filed complaint. Then, everyone joined in and several other law firms intervened in the suit,” says Reid.

The firm can now be a bit choosier, “and we have cases that are more likely to be, on their faces, pretty good cases. I don’t know that our young people get the same challenge,” Boneau says.

Just to hit the ball and touch ‘em all. A moment in the sun.

“I honestly don’t remember in most cases whose idea it was,” says Boneau. “It could have been my idea, but it could have been somebody else’s idea because it was such a group-think thing. Even if there’s one person that ultimately will make the final call and solve the problem, that person will have effectively stood on the shoulders of giants, because there’s never an idea that is completely out of the blue, it is always a product of teamwork.”

How each of the Aces has capitalized on their individual strengths is all the more impressive considering they are all in their late 30s or early 40s.

“They are figuring out some of the most complicated cases I’ve ever seen in my life, and not just figuring them out – figuring out ways to win them against some of the best firms in the country,” Reid says.

For the Aces, it’s all about the team. “Every innovative idea is a product of my work with the amazing team of lawyers we have. In fact, I’d say that my favorite part of work every day is getting to brainstorm issues with our team,” says Bruckerhoff. “Many of the firm’s successes came from doing things that have never been done before. When that is the case, it certainly helps to have a group of other creative attorneys who are willing to take risks.”

Teaching the next generation their skill set and appetite for risk will be the next test of leadership for this group – one that may be as dicey a proposition as acquiring it in the first place.

“As Nate says, it’s the hardest thing to do but it’s also rewarding to be able to say, ‘No, you just told 26

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The power of the Assassin, the Coach, the Pitcher and the Mathematician is also in a shared experience where building something together eclipsed individual aspiration. While each can detail their aha moments in their cases, at the end of the day, there is a tremendous amount of pride in what they, Reid and the firm have done together.

For The Four Aces, that giant is first and foremost Reid, whom they credit for trusting his partners with the freedom to let it rip when the right one crosses the plate.

“For Josh, that means something different than it means for me,” Boneau explains. “And it’s different for Nate and different for Greg. But at the end of the day, it means the same thing, which is we’re all more effective at creating success for our clients because we get to do it in a way that is a good fit for each of us. And it also makes it far more enjoyable because we’re able to practice law in a way that we love.”

It’s a gone. And you can tell that one goodbye...

The Future is

NOW LAW FIRMS WORLDWIDE ARE

LOOKING AHEAD TO A CHANGED WORLD. ZACH MAZIN, KAT LI, LAUREN FORNAROTTO AND JOSH BUDWIN SHOW WHY MCKOOL SMITH IS READY FOR THE CHALLENGE.

BY KATRINA DEWEY and ALISON PREECE

PH OTO S P RO V ID E D B Y TH E FIRM

Zach Mazin

ZACH MAZIN Almost a year into a global pandemic that shook global markets and emptied commercial buildings, Zach Mazin has a trained eye on emerging securities litigation, particularly in the commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS, space.

The McKool Smith principal is uniquely positioned to understand and evaluate distressed and defective loans, having spent the last eight years with the bulk of his practice focused on residential mortgage-backed securities, or RMBS, cases arising out of the 2008 credit crisis. Before that, he was tossed into the deep end of one of the most sweeping securities cases in a generation, defending a bank that did business with Enron, the former energy company whose name remains synonymous with corporate fraud.

Mazin was a new associate at White & Case when he started on Enron, and says that “having the experience of working on Enron right out of the gate has informed how I approach anything new that lands on my plate.” The case was a crash course in hard skills for the young litigator, who quickly learned how to get smart about deliberately complicated transactions, and how to advocate effectively and efficiently while always keeping the clients’ business objectives front of mind.

In 2006, barely two years into his career, Mazin was asked by three departing White & Case partners to join them at a litigation-focused national firm, where he spent 11 years building his skills suing banks, rather than defending them. In early 2017, Mazin and Christopher Johnson moved their practice to join a cohort of other ambitious and effective young lawyers in the New York office of McKool Smith. He and his colleagues have their eyes on the emerging horizon, both towards pandemic-related litigation and the hugely fun task of building out the firm’s financial litigation practice into new markets and practice areas.

As his expertise grows, Mazin holds onto a beginner’s mindset: “You have to be able to adapt and understand what you don’t know, and know when you need to learn.”

Lawdragon: What sorts of cases are on your plate these days, Zach?

Zach Mazin: For the past eight years, I’ve been absorbed in RMBS put-back work, and that continues.

Now, CMBS is something that we’re looking closely at, coming out of the pandemic. Office buildings have been empty, malls shuttered, warehouses aren’t at 28

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capacity or are closed, all from Covid outbreaks. So, we’re watching how the events of the last year are going to hit the CMBS bond market. Lenders and tenants and landlords are trying to work through it still, so we haven’t seen that breaking point yet.

LD: Will the CMBS work be very different from RMBS? ZM: There’s no doubt that we are seeing the shadows of the 2007-2008 financial crisis playing out over again in the context of the Covid pandemic. But CMBS is not the same as RMBS in every respect. The risk profile associated with a corporate borrower who owns an office tower or a shopping mall is radically different than individual residential mortgagees.

Concomitantly, the due diligence involved in the loans underlying CMBS was radically different than what we’ve seen – or more, to the point, not seen – in the RMBS space. Banks are run by smart people with highly skilled outside lawyers. They are doing a better job of avoiding the widespread malfeasance that gave rise to the residential mortgage crisis.

LD: That’s what their publicists tell us and it’s probably mostly true.

ZM: I’ll bet. There is truth to it, of course. For example, they recognized coming out of the RMBS repurchase litigation wave that they had to change the process that the governing agreements call for in the case of a suspected defective loan, meaning, a loan that doesn’t match the representations and warranties that the sponsor of the transaction makes about it.

That said, we’re still finding instances in the CMBS context where people involved in these transactions were willing to cut corners. There are enforcement mechanisms available to rectify those missteps and we at McKool Smith are as well-positioned as anyone to prosecute those claims.

McKool Smith is in a strong position because we’re on the front lines of the RMBS work. There are natural synergies between the two types of practices.

So, while it’s not a cookie-cutter scenario, those of us who have been spending 100 percent of their time for the past eight years looking at loans, understanding how to re-underwrite loans, understanding how the deals are structured, knowing who the players are, watching the litigation play out – we’re at the ready to take on whatever might come in the CMBS context.

In fact, we have a significant amount of CMBS work already inside the firm, advising investors about waterfall issues. Disputes over how the funds flow through the trust waterfall to pay out to the investors.

We’re well up the curve on that stuff, and we’re ready for what’s likely coming.

LD: Can you tell us about the work you do with pro football agents?

ZM: I’ve been an NFL certified contract advisor for a number of years. I stepped away from that work as a senior associate to focus on my traditional law practice. But because of that experience, while at my last firm, I was brought in to advise two NFL agents who were in a contract dispute with their boss. It took a few years to resolve, involving some different phases.

First, I navigated them through an arbitration involving their boss and a former employee as witnesses.

That required some extremely delicate lawyering, as we were sympathetic to the employee’s position, but my clients desired at that time to remain in their jobs at that agency. I then attempted to renegotiate their contract with their now-former employer. But when we realized there wasn’t going to be a deal, we cut bait and negotiated their exit. As it happened, I had a friend at a sports agency without a football practice, so I helped arrange that marriage and I negotiated their new contract at that agency.

Since then, I’ve been working to support these two very successful NFL agents. They’ve been able to establish themselves on their own, and they’ve built a roster that includes pro bowlers and young players who are on the path to stardom. I’m a source for them to bounce ideas off of, talk through strategy, and I provide support during their negotiations with the NFL clubs. I’m extremely proud of them, and I’m glad to be able to play a very small part in their success.

LD: Sounds like you have a lot of fun with what you do. Where did the idea to become a lawyer start?

ZM: I don’t know that I ever contemplated doing anything else.

LD: Did you know lawyers growing up?

ZM: No. It’s certainly not a family business. My father and grandfather were plumbers. My maternal grandfather was a coal miner who died young, before I was born. I’m privileged and thankful that I get to make a living by thinking and writing, whereas they had to use their hands and their bodies.

For me, dating back to high school, the job just fit with my skillsets and interests. I was always interested in politics and public policy, and I was a poli-sci major in undergrad. Those things fit hand in glove.

LD: When did you get into litigation?

ZM: I was never going to be anything but a litigator.

I distinctly remember when I got my 2L summer associate position at White & Case, telling them, “Hey, look, don’t bother rotating me. Just stick me on the litigation floor for the eight weeks or 12 weeks,” whatever it was, “just stick me on a litigation floor and leave me alone. I’ll see you at the end of summer.” I was fortunate that they obliged. As were their transactional clients.

LD: Can you tell me about the work you did on the Enron case there?

ZM: We represented Royal Bank of Canada in the massive Newby shareholder class action. They were one of 15 or so banks that were sued by Enron shareholders, who alleged that the banks aided and abetted the corporate fraud. We also had a spinoff litigation with Rabobank, where Rabobank argued that they should not have to honor a $500M total return swap because, they alleged, RBC knew all about the Enron fraud. The reality is that RBC was defrauded itself.

They had an extraordinarily strong risk management program, but they got caught up in Enron like the shareholders and everybody else who viewed Enron as a legitimately strong company.

It took many, many years but we were ultimately successful in moving to dismiss the claims against RBC. Whereas other banks settled for upwards of $2B, we succeeded in getting RBC out for zero. That was a very proud day when that happened.

LD: That’s incredible. You must have learned so much tackling that case so early in your career. Are there any major lessons or takeaways that have stayed with you?

ZM: The thing that always stood out to me was that I didn’t have much of a business background, coming straight out of law school, and I had to figure out how those transactions worked. These transactions were intentionally designed to be opaque, even to people who knew what they were doing. So it was up to me and the other team members to understand those transactions inside and out. The skills that you develop doing that will benefit you for the rest of your career because you have to learn what you need to learn.

LD: Such great training ground.

ZM: Absolutely. I’ve said to students that I interview coming out of law school or younger attorneys who are lateraling, you really need to have an experience like that. There may never be another case like that with that volume of documents, but you need to have a really huge litigation that you work on as a young lawyer because spending that time doing the doc review or

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doing the research projects gives you the skills and the knowledge and the know-how that you need in order to manage those projects as you get more senior.

LD: Those cases keep the lights on at a lot of firms, and are like a master class for young associates.

ZM: Right. And if you can supplement those kinds of cases with some smaller one-offs, where it might be you and a partner or you and a senior associate and you have plenary responsibility for everything that comes up, that’s the best way to develop. You just take on whatever comes up. Whether that’s interacting with your adversary or showing up to court conferences, those are the soft skills that you need to have the opportunity to develop as a young lawyer so that when the high-stakes cases come in, you’re ready.

perceptible to me to be at a Dallas-based versus a New York-based firm. Having access to the decision makers face-to-face is different than when your managing partner and the majority of your board of directors and the person whose name is on the letterhead are down in Dallas versus down the hall.

That was an adjustment, but I don’t think twice about it now. There’s also just a different mindset in different parts of the country and so I felt like I had a bit of a leg up on some of my New York colleagues because I went to school in the Deep South, in Gainesville.

I love it there.

LD: McKool sounds like a great fit for you.

ZM: It really is. It’s a firm that knows how to win trials.

Our adversaries know that we’re willing to try cases.

LD: That makes a lot of sense. In the bigger cases, you can watch more experienced attorneys in action and you can see how the machine is built and how it works, without being on the frontline and having to make those calls quite yet.

LD: You’re not there to settle.

ZM: That’s exactly right. There was a mid-level associate at the time when I started at White & Case, Kara Headley, and she had that role as a point-person at the associate level for managing the document review and basically anything that would come up throughout the course of the case. Getting to watch how she handled that experience and thought about the issues and managed the team, all of that was very influential in my development and my career.

It’s an incredibly exciting place to be. We have a senior cohort of amazing trial attorneys – Mike McKool’s number one with a bullet in that respect. Then there are just so many. Sam Baxter. Ted Stevenson.

Ashley Moore. Robert Manley. Christine Woodin. I can keep going.

LD: After being at two very New York firms, what were your initial impressions as you started interviewing with McKool? And how have they changed over the time you’ve been there?

ZM: I was no stranger to McKool Smith attorneys before I arrived here. RMBS is something of a self-contained ecosystem. The plaintiff-side RMBS attorneys all talk to each other, and I’m sure defense attorneys do too. We are a collaborative community because these RMBS contracts, while snowflakes in a lot of ways, have overlapping issues.

ZM: That’s right. We have the infrastructure inside the firm, and I don’t just mean the bench of absolutely stellar trial attorneys, but we have the support staff and the know-how to pull it all off.

LD: You guys are star-studded.

ZM: Right. It’s not about one or two big rainmakers here. There’s a braintrust in place steering the firm, and they are committed to building and empowering the next generation of great McKool Smith trial lawyers. We have this younger bench of people who are growing into that. I see it. People from my generation are going to take the ball from these legends and continue this firm as a national powerhouse. It’s incredibly exciting to be a part of that.

LD: Ambitious, accomplished, up-and-comers need to know that leading the firm is within your grasp.

That you’re helping shape the future of the firm.

LD: What a great feeling.

ZM: Exactly, I’m going to have an opportunity to influence how the firm is run, which is refreshing. For me personally, at this point, it’s also very important to be able to lead my practice, to grow my practice organically. At bigger firms, sometimes a person may have all the skills, have all the capability, but they’re the fourth or third person on a client relationship and they can’t get any oxygen.

ZM: It really was. It felt like home almost immediately.

You’re right, there is a difference, and it really was

I would put out a clarion call to people like that who are in those situations to come talk to us at McKool.

So I came into the firm already having longstanding professional relationships and friendships with Courtney Statfeld, Rob Scheef, Dave Schiefelbein and all these wonderful people who I’m now able to call colleagues. We walked into work the first day and knew 80 percent of the people in the office.

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To look carefully at this firm because we would love to invest in those kinds of people. To be entrepreneurial, to build their own practice and build their own name.

LD: The freedom to be able to achieve what you want to for your practice can’t be understated.

ZM: That’s exactly right. There’s a lot of value to building something like what we’re building. It’s encouraging and fun to have the bench, the experience we have, while staying nimble enough to direct our efforts where our clients need them. It really is a pleasure to be here.

KAT LI Kat Li has always had a laser-like clarity on who she is and what she wants. She knew she would be a lawyer back in middle school, and by eighth grade, when some of us are still planning to grow up to be pro athletes or pop stars, Li had settled on patent law.

The patent aspect came from a deep interest in all things science, and, following a master’s degree in materials engineering from MIT, a J.D. with honors from University of Texas, and two years of federal clerkships, she’s working on the cutting edge of the intersection of technology and law as a principal at McKool Smith in the Austin office.

Li clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and at the Eastern District of Texas, and is now on the Board of the Association of Former Law Clerks of the former and President of the Association of Former Law Clerks for the latter.

Her years of clerking, combined with her technical background, means Li can engage with inventors and technical experts, then is able to turn around and distill the information in a way that is compelling for judges and juries.

The legal profession, and the world, has a real shortage of women in STEM, and female lawyers of color are still sorely lacking. As an Asian woman practicing patent law, Li still finds herself too-often surrounded by all white men in her practice. But she’s part of the change we all want to see, including as an active mentor and a founding member of the Diversity Initiative at McKool Smith.

Li had a baby during lockdown, and we spoke to her a week after she returned from maternity leave, as she was juggling inter partes reviews with toddler meltdowns and cat cameos on Zoom meetings. Through it all, her calm and capable air gave us hope: The future looks bright.

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Kat Li

Lawdragon: Can you tell me about your interest when you were younger in engineering and science, and how you moved into a law career?

Kat Li: I was interested in the law from a young age.

The reverse trajectory is more common for patent lawyers, but I joined competitive debate in middle school and knew back then I wanted to be a lawyer.

By eighth grade, I’d settled on patent law. I’d been telling everyone I was going to be a lawyer, and someone said to me, “If you like science, you should be a patent lawyer.” So I decided that’s what I would do.

LD: Were your parents lawyers?

KL: No, there are no lawyers in my family. My father is a chemical engineer; he worked in the oil industry all his life. My mother is a business analyst, and she worked in the telecommunication industry. I am the first lawyer in my family.

LD: But when you know, you know!

KL: If I could have gone to law school straight out of high school, I would have. That said, my strengths have always been in math and science. There were only three girls in my AP Physics class senior year.

In high school, I won in my category twice at the International Science and Engineering Fair.

LD: Then you went to MIT for engineering?

KL: Yes, I got my bachelor’s and then my master’s in

Material Science and Engineering from MIT. I originally planned to go to law school right after I graduated, but then I got into a master’s program at MIT, and decided to stay an extra year to get my master’s degree before going to law school.

Yeah, I’m a nerd.

LD: Nerds are going to save us all. How then did you come to McKool Smith?

KL: After law school at UT, I clerked for former Chief Judge [Leonard] Davis of the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler, Texas, and then [former] Judge [Arthur] Gajarsa on the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. When I was with Judge Davis, I watched some of the top patent litigators in the country. We had about eight patent trials that year, which is a lot.

One of the cases that I observed involved McKool Smith.

It was an interesting dynamic to watch because it was a team of only four McKool attorneys – Doug Cawley, a senior trial lawyer, and three associates. The other side had a dozen people crowded around their counsel table.

LD: That would make an impact.

KL: Not only were there fewer people, but every single one of the McKool attorneys got up and spoke in front of the jury and took a witness – even the associates.

I knew I wanted to join somewhere where I would get that level of experience early in my legal career.

LD: When you joined McKool, was it what you were expecting? Did you get that level of experience early on?

KL: It was exactly what I hoped for. I was drinking out of a fire hose, but I knew I was in the right place when I was asked to write a motion to compel early on. It had three distinct issues that the parties were arguing. The motion got set for hearing by the judge.

Since I was new, I assumed I would prepare the senior attorney and get the documents ready. But, he said to me and another attorney, “Well, there are three issues here. Why don’t we split it up. I’ll take this one.

You take this one. And Kat, take this one.” We all went to the hearing and each argued our issue. I won on my issue, too. It was all very exciting.

LD: That’s incredible. I know you’re based in Austin.

I’ve heard the Western District of Texas is really picking up these days. Are you finding that?

KL: Absolutely. The Western District of Texas has seen a significant increase in the number of cases filed there after Judge Alan Albright took the bench a couple of years ago. I worked with Judge Albright before he took the bench when I was a summer associate at Fish & Richardson. He’s located in the

Waco Division, but often does hearings in Austin, and I am leading the work that McKool Smith is doing in the Western District.

I’m a member of Judge Albright’s working group that advises him on patent orders and rules. I’ve also been counseling clients on how to navigate this new district and understand its growing prominence in patent litigation.

LD: Is it growing because lawyers have a high degree of confidence in him so that’s attracting more cases?

KL: Yes. Also, he’s enacted some patent rules for his court that encourage plaintiffs to file their cases there. He moves quickly in his cases too.

LD: Is most of your work focused in Texas?

KL: My practice is unique in that I represent several international clients, one of which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. I speak Chinese, so I can communicate with clients like TSMC, and at the same time, do highly technical patent work. Another example is Ericsson, which is based in Sweden.

LD: It’s interesting because any litigator needs to learn the ins and outs of a company’s technology to communicate the issues to a jury or judge. Your technical background must really give you a leg up in being able to translate the nuances of these technologies in a courtroom.

KL: It does, yes. An attorney who has a technical background can speak directly to the company’s engineers and engage with them. For example, in a defense case, it’s often the product designer, the person who designed the accused product, that has technical expertise, and it is valuable to be at their level of understanding. I’m not afraid to engage those folks, ask hard questions, and pull the information that I need from them to properly defend them against patent infringement. On the other hand, if an engineer is the inventor and I’m enforcing their patent, I’m able to talk to the inventor about his or her invention story.

Building trust with the technical members of a company is so important – I want them to feel that their attorney understands them. Technical awareness is also critically important when working with technical experts who are often professors or subject matter experts. I have to talk with them through all the technical issues, and then translate it into something the jury and judge will understand.

LD: Are you able to talk about some of the cases you’re working on now?

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KL: I can’t talk about most of the matters I’m working on at the moment.

LD: That’s so often the case in your area. Can you talk about why that is, where the sensitivity comes from?

KL: That comes in on both offensive and defensive work. On the plaintiff’s side, it’s important to do due diligence before filing. The work that we do before we bring a case is extremely thorough, well thought out, and not taken lightly. I also have clients who aren’t enforcing patents, but rather defending against patents. If they see a competitor enforcing patents against a different entity, they may say, “If that competitor comes after me, I am going to be ready.” Then, there are the situations where assertion letters are sent between companies saying, “You infringe my patent. You need to stop selling your product.” A lot of my work is helping clients avoid litigation by finding resolutions before an issue like this ends up in court.

LD: That makes so much sense. Now, I know you’re active on your firm’s Diversity Initiative. Will you tell us why you were drawn to that?

KL: There’s a lack of representation, as you know, across the entire legal community. When you take the subset of the legal community, patent law, there’s even less diversity. More times than not, I am both the only woman and the only person of color in a meeting, especially technical meetings.

MIT was a really diverse campus, but law school was significantly less diverse. It was interesting to see how my personal racial ethnicity was not represented in law; it was something I was not used to after MIT. A few years into my practice, I met this amazing lawyer at another firm. She was African American, older than me, and had an incredible practice. She said to me, “We women of color have to stick together.” It really struck a chord with me, and I’ve been focused on building diversity and inclusion at the firm ever since.

As a principal at McKool, it is important to me that we build diversity and inclusion in our ranks. It’s crucial to the future of the firm, and a lot of it comes down to mentoring junior associates. We still have a lot of work to do. Even if you see more women in law school, you still see fewer women in law firms. If you see more women at the associate levels, you still don’t see them at the partner levels. Not only do I want to see more diversity in the profession, I want to see it at the highest ranks. I am committed to working towards retention and promotion of diverse attorneys.

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Lauren Fornarotto

LAUREN FORNAROTTO Sanofi and Regeneron invested years of research efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars in developing Dupixent, the first and only FDA-approved biologic medicine for the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema and a debilitating life-long disease. When Amgen-owned Immunex threatened patent litigation, Sanofi and Regeneron turned to Lauren Fornarotto and her team at McKool Smith to protect their groundbreaking drug.

Her background is perfect for her role as one of two lead partners building out the firm’s pharmaceutical practice. Growing up, math, science and especially chemistry were her favorite subjects, so pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and interning at the pharmaceutical giant Merck were logical next steps.

Less obvious was the occupation to which that career path would ultimately lead: the law.

Professors at Cooper Union teaching engineering and law classes initially prompted Fornarotto to consider the possibility of becoming a lawyer.

Training programs at ABB Lummus Global Inc., where she worked as a chemical process engineer after completing her undergraduate studies at New York-based Cooper on a full-tuition scholarship, heightened her interest.

“The company had a lot of proprietary technology, and I was introduced to the patent process for protecting that technology,” says Fornarotto, who grew up in the New York City borough of Staten Island.

“We had some lectures about the patent process and inventions, which interested me, and supported my thinking that I was a better fit as a lawyer than a chemical engineer.”

“I want McKool Smith to be known as the go-to firm for the pharmaceutical industry’s highest-stakes cases, those with life-changing drugs that might be taken off the market or with large amounts of money on the line,” she says.

With a specialty in intellectual property and complex commercial litigation, Fornarotto, who made partner in 2018, has already handled cases in U.S. District Court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the International Trade Commission as well as inter partes review proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Lawdragon: Tell me more about the Dupixent case.

Was the inter partes review the end of the matter?

Lauren Fornarotto: No, after we won the IPR and invalidated all of Immunex’s patent claims at the PTAB, Immunex appealed and I argued the appeal in the Federal Circuit in August. Recently, the Federal Circuit issued its precedential decision affirming our IPR win, which felt really great both personally and because of my fantastic clients. Dupixent is a breakthrough treatment, and you’ve probably seen commercials for it. Kristin Davis, who played Charlotte on “Sex and the City,” has spoken recently about how Dupixent is helping her child’s eczema.

LD: Interesting. I’ve always thought one of the fun parts of intellectual property litigation is that you have the opportunity to take amazingly technical processes and innovations and put them in layman’s terms for judges and juries.

LF: I totally agree. That’s one of the reasons I love patent litigation. I do other disciplines as well; I try my hand in any kind of patent case because I’m open to learning new technologies. But in the pharmaceutical space in particular, I feel like I have a good ability to understand and grasp the science and then break it down in understandable terms to a judge and a jury and give rational, reasonable explanations that they can buy into.

LD: Patent law is a thread running through your professional experiences. Did you always know this was the type of law you wanted to focus on?

LF: I went to Cardozo thinking that I would certainly focus on patent law, though I didn’t know if I’d become a patent litigator or prosecutor. I knew I wanted to do something with patents, but you don’t even take patent law in your first year of law school. So after law school, I started out at Cravath because I could do general litigation there, and try patent litigation.

I also sampled some other areas of the law, but I quickly confirmed my initial thinking that of all the areas I sampled, what I most enjoyed and was most passionate about was patent litigation.

LD: Once you realized that, what prompted you to move to McKool Smith?

LF: It was two-fold, really. I wanted to get more early-on litigation and trial experience, which was part of it. While Cravath is obviously fantastic, and the generalist model was particularly appealing when I was in law school, I wanted the ability as I gained experience to focus the majority of my practice on patent litigation. I wanted to go to a place where I could both focus on patent litigation and also get some real hands-on litigation experience: depositions, hearings, trials, etc., and I found that in McKool.

LD: And obviously you’ve been able to develop your pharmaceutical expertise, too, building on your science and chemistry background. What is it that you love about that space?

LF: At McKool, it’s a growing practice where I was able to be in on the ground floor. When I came into the firm, it was, and it still remains, a goal to build out that practice. The biologic space, especially, is a burgeoning one; there are a lot of antibody drugs out there right now. That’s, I think, the new wave of pharmaceutical cases and I was able to be part of that and help get us this huge case, which so far, we’ve been successful in. To be – at a pretty young age – one of the leaders in this practice is a phenomenal thing.

LD: It seems like you’re in the enviable position of being able to sell to the firm what a monstrous opportunity this is.

LF: The great thing about McKool, not just in the patent space, is that the firm is extremely entrepreneurial and always looking to grow and adapt with the times. So if they see an opportunity, they give their attorneys, including me, the freedom and the leeway to run with a new practice area.

LD: That’s one of the areas where McKool truly excels. There are lots of firms with star power, but one

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thing they often struggle with is building the bridge to exciting new talent and giving that talent a voice.

Whereas McKool has shown a willingness to let you take the ball in the pharmaceutical practice, for instance, and run with it.

LF: That’s so true. I think everyone here feels invested in the firm, not just monetarily, but also in wanting to see it succeed, and that starts at the top. I worked with Mike McKool on a case while I was an associate, and he supported me all along the way, gave me opportunities to argue and took the time to give me feedback. What impressed me the most was that he cares about every single person who works for the firm, everybody he comes across from any level. I just couldn’t believe that somebody as busy and high up and impressive as he is would give somebody like me the attention and care that he did, but I’m not unique in that. That’s how he treats everybody he works with.

Mike and the other top-ranked trial lawyers at the firm, like Doug Cawley and Ted Stevenson, they all support the next generation. They not only help train us and teach us how to be great litigators, hopefully as good as them one day, but they give us the freedom to grow and have our own successes.

JOSHUA BUDWIN Winning a jury verdict for a client can be just the beginning.

Joshua Budwin learned that early on in a 2007 patent infringement claim for Versata over its pricing software, which resulted in a $400M verdict against Germany company SAP AG. The Philadelphia-area native, who has an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic, had started at McKool Smith’s Austin office a few years earlier after graduating from Temple University Law School in 2005. He is now a principal in the office, continuing to focus on technology law.

Josh Budwin

Lawdragon: Were there particular lawyers you got to know early on at McKool who have significantly influenced your career?

Joshua Budwin: There are three. One is Sam Baxter, whom I can remember going to trial with in 2006.

The big thing that I learned is that so much of the stuff you focus on during the discovery phase of the case doesn’t matter as much when you get to trial. He really taught me early on the things that you need to focus on when you’re in the discovery phase. Some things are important for trial and some things aren’t, and you have to figure out which to let go.

After the massive victory, the judge threw out part of the damages award and ordered the case reheard.

Another one who had a big impact – and still does – is Doug Cawley. I’ve done a ton of trials with him. We’ve done three ITC [International Trade Commission] hearings in a row for Rovi, a TiVo subsidiary. Working with Doug and seeing him in action has always been amazing. And the thing that he really taught me is that patent cases involve complex technology, but at the end of the day, it boils down to a story about people. And it’s who can tell the most persuasive story about people that will probably win in the end.

You can get so focused on the technical nuances that you lose sight of the bigger picture.

“We got a bigger verdict the second time,” Budwin says. He was part of the team that defended the second verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to take up the case.

The third one is Ted Stevenson because I’ve done a few trials with him also. And he is really good at drilling down to the nub of an issue. I can remember myself or other more junior lawyers trying to explain

“Before that, my sense had been that you go to trial, get your jury verdict and that’s it. In that case, I learned otherwise: It’s often just the first step in the battle,” explains Budwin.

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something, and him almost being a little bit impatient with us, like, “OK, that doesn’t matter. Focus. Get to the point. Get to the thing that really matters.” And then as soon as you hit whatever that was, he would say, “OK, that’s it. Focus on that.” The thing that he really taught me was to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat, or the haystack to get to the needle.

Especially when you’re doing these patent trials, but it’s true elsewhere, where you have really limited time, you’ve got to focus on those important things and be able to jettison the rest.

LD: Those are three amazing mentors. You’ve had some tremendous success and so much trial experience. Your work for TiVo in particular seems like the kind of legal work most lawyers spend a career hoping for. Can you talk a little more about that?

JB: They’ve been a great client. We’ve had three successes for them at the ITC, which is a really interesting and unique forum that’s very important now. And those cases are a lot of work because from filing to hearing is about a year. They have unique procedures, too: no jury, judge only, very fast-paced.

The first of those cases is particularly interesting: A ruling in our favor was affirmed with a precedent-setting opinion by the Federal Circuit that embraced the broad scope of the ITC’s jurisdiction. And then that went to the Supreme Court on certiorari, which was denied. But you have to get through all those steps to secure a victory, which we did.

LD: When you think about the number of trials you’ve had so far and the level of mentoring, it says a lot about McKool Smith.

JB: The firm has always had this mentality of trying to let more junior people have an opportunity to do things. And a lot of that comes from the entrepreneurial spirit of the firm and wanting to give the younger people opportunities so that they can grow. This isn’t a place where somebody says, “That’s my client. You can’t talk to them, you can’t deal with them.”

You have the ability to interact with clients at a very early stage. They give young people opportunities to speak in court, to handle motions, to take witnesses at trial, because that’s ultimately how you find the next generation, but it’s also how your younger people learn early on what to focus on. If you’re somebody who spent five years writing legal research memos, when you go to take a deposition, it’s probably not going to be a good deposition. But if by your fifth year you’ve gone to two trials and you know what’s really important – how that deposition is used in court

and the ability to focus, at the time of the deposition, on the things that will matter down the road at trial – you can go and take a good deposition. That then helps immensely when it comes to trial.

Our young people have the confidence to go and take a two- or three-hour deposition instead of wasting all day on something because they know what’s important. And they know at the end of the day, depending on who the witness is, if that person isn’t coming to trial, you might play 10 minutes of that deposition by video.

LD: As a trial lawyer, though, you’ve probably found that some of your best lessons are from cases where you lost or something unfavorable happened, right?

JB: True. Ted Stevenson, a principal in the Dallas office, has said, “If you haven’t lost a case, you haven’t tried enough cases.”

In 2013, we won a substantial verdict for ParkerVision from a federal jury in Orlando, Fla. The next year, the judge granted judgment as a matter of law against us and an appeals court upheld the decision.

It was really hard because we’d spent so many years working on this case and litigating it, and we got a successful result, and then it felt almost like we had the rug pulled out from under us. But in these types of cases, you’re building a house of cards where each one has to stand up on top of the previous one. It has to stand up not just through the trial but all the way through the appeal.

All the defense team has to do is knock one of the cards out. If it can, the whole thing falls down, and that’s what this felt like. It was really frustrating because I believe to this day that we were right and I wish that we were able to convince the trial judge and the Federal Circuit of that (much as we’d convinced the jury already). It’s frustrating to have to live with a result that you believe was wrong.

LD: Tell me a little more about your background, where you grew up, how you decided to move from engineering into law.

JB: I grew up on the East Coast, just north of Philadelphia. One of the closest towns to us was Washington’s Crossing, Pa., where Washington crossed the Delaware during the Revolutionary War for a surprise attack on British allies encamped at Trenton, N.J. It was an area with a lot of history. I had a friend who lived in a house that had a fireplace from the 1700s with one of those big hooks that you could use to swing a cauldron over a fire. My

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mom was a schoolteacher. And my dad passed away when I was 8, so we were raised in that environment for a while until my mom remarried some years later.

I did decently well in high school and went to Rensselaer, an engineering school in upstate New York. I finished in three years, partly to save my folks some money on tuition and also because I just didn’t really enjoy the upstate New York winters very much.

I wanted to get out of there.

LD: A wise man.

JB: After that, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I had a technical degree, but I had this summer internship working for Bristol-Myers Squibb in New Jersey. And I was working in a computer lab that had these really high-end, at least at the time, supercomputers. So, they had to air condition it to something like 50 degrees in the room. Every time I went into this secure room – which required an extra badge to get into – I basically had to wear a coat.

At some point, I just decided, I didn’t really want to have a career sitting in a refrigerator talking to computer programmers all day. Plus, even though I worked in this lab, I always had to work harder at the hardcore computer programming aspect of it than other people. It was a little like playing a piano.

You can learn to play a piano and you can memorize and do all that, but somebody who just has a natural ingrained ability at that is always going to be better at it than you are.

LD: I understand perfectly.

JB: So I was that guy who worked hard and learned how to play the piano, but it was more mechanical piano playing than natural artistic piano playing. And so I decided that I needed to do something different, something that maybe suited my natural talents a little bit better. I was looking at different options, grad school and things like that, and I knew that going and getting a doctorate or a master’s degree or something in a hard science was probably not exactly what I wanted.

Then I thought about how my mom always jokes, and I’m sure everybody says this, that I was argumentative as a child. I did have a bit of an interest in the law. And I said, “OK. Why don’t I try going to law school?” And I really wanted to go to one of the law schools in Washington, D.C.: Georgetown, George Washington, American. Those were the three that I was focused on. I wanted to be in the heart of things.

I wanted to see policy.

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As I was going through that process, Temple in Philadelphia, which is close to where I grew up, sent me a notice in the mail that basically said, “You can apply here, and we won’t charge you an application fee.” And I’m like, “All right. I’ve already got all this done for all these other ones.” So, I applied. I got into two of the three D.C. schools. I think Georgetown waitlisted me. And then Temple offered me a scholarship. And Temple’s a state school in Pennsylvania. I basically was looking at having my tuition mostly paid for, and I was able to live at home for the first year and a half.

I commuted for the first year and a half, riding the train every day. I knew with my science background and my engineering background that I probably would be pushed toward doing some of these information technology matters, so I took law classes in IT. I clerked at a law firm in Philadelphia that was doing a lot of patent prosecution and some litigation.

LD: So how did you connect with McKool Smith?

JB: I had a professor in law school, an adjunct professor, who was actually working with McKool Smith in Austin at the time on a case. I came into class one day and he basically said, “I got you a job in Texas.”

This was between the second and third year of law school. “You’re going to go there, you’re going to meet a nice Texas girl and you’re not going to come back,” was what he said. And I’m thinking, “I’ve been on the East Coast my whole life. I’ve never been to Texas. All I know about Texas is like cowboy hats and all that kind of stuff.” But I was a single guy.

And really, the hardest choice I had to make was leaving the clerkship at the Philadelphia firm. They’d been so nice to me and they’d offered me another opportunity to stay for the summer. I just decided that that was the time to get out of my comfort zone and have an adventure.

I went and interviewed with McKool Smith. I had my interview, and I liked it. They offered me a job. And then I moved to Austin for the summer of 2004. And I was here a few weeks and I met my wife. I’m still at McKool 16 years later and my wife I have been married almost 15 years now. My parents actually moved to Austin from Philadelphia. My wife’s parents moved to Austin too. So we’ve got everybody here now (other than my brother, who stubbornly refuses to leave Blacksburg, Va.).

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INSIDE THE KELLER

NOT? LENKNER MINDSET PLANTIFF’S LAW 2.0: EXCELLENCE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION

For the most promising business startups, creativity, innovation and experimentation are critical elements of success.

But what about success in law? It seems counterintuitive to associate a startup mentality with a profession that relies on staunchly traditional models of practice and function.

But this is exactly the sort of unconventional thinking that has led to the rapid success of Keller Lenkner.

Since its launch in early 2018, Keller Lenkner has grown at a lightning pace. Today, the firm has more than three dozen attorneys and 60 professional staff. Its lawyers hail from AmLaw25 firms, elite trial boutiques and federal appellate and district-court clerkships. And they use their legal acumen to craft groundbreaking complaints against opioid manufacturers, 3M, Facebook, DoorDash and Google – from securities class actions to product liability MDLs to entirely new practice areas.

Lawdragon sat down for a roundtable with the Keller Lenkner team to understand the strategic, growth-oriented mindset behind their mission and culture – a mindset that has allowed the firm to earn the respect of the nation’s elite judges and top-gun plaintiff lawyers, and to build a high-performing business infrastructure to provide their clients with unparalleled service.

LR: Adam Gerchen, Travis Lenkner and Ashley Keller P H O TO S P R O VI DE D BY TH E F I R M

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Lawdragon: Many are marveling at how you did this so fast and the strategy you had in mind at the outset. What were the most important elements of your strategy for establishing a top plaintiff law firm?

Travis Lenkner (Managing Partner & Co-Founder): We’re building something that hasn’t really existed on the plaintiffs’ side. And to the extent it has, not at this size. First and foremost, we are laser-focused on building the best team of plaintiffs’ lawyers in the country, period. That has been the cornerstone of our growth and our philosophy.

Ashley Keller (Partner & Co-Founder): We have a culture of excellence in everything we touch, from the people we hire to excellence in client advocacy. It’s foundational for us. I think we’re increasingly known as a firm that consistently produces the quality of work that rivals any large defense firm in the country.

Adam Gerchen (CEO & Co-Founder): It’s a complete mindset, really. It’s merging really smart, talented people with an openness to extreme change. That’s why a lot of firms haven’t been able to achieve it at the levels we have, because you need that rounded dynamic to people’s skillsets, outlooks on the world, appetite to learn new things. You have to be entrepreneurial, nimble and roll with what is a constantly evolving landscape, internally and externally.

LD: Can you comment more on the firm’s entrepreneurial approach?

Warren Postman (Partner): An entrepreneurial spirit permeates every level of our firm. And we strive for innovation at every turn, whether innovation in the law or in our business strategy. It’s the way we’re all wired. We enjoy the specific work of trying to come up with a creative, new strategy, a new tactic to solve

L-R: Warren Postman, Ashley Barriere and Seth Meyer

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a legal problem. And we’re structured to make it very easy to take on new things when they make sense.

Gerchen: We have succeeded when there’s a marriage of complexity around operational aspects, capital needs, and the raw intellectual horsepower of doing cutting-edge things in the law. I think you see a lot of firms that might have one or two of those three, but normally not all.

Seth Meyer (Partner): And everyone here is receptive to new ideas and taking things in a new direction. But you’ve got to survive the intellectual gauntlet to try and turn that idea from just a rough concept to an actual reality. If you can do that, this is the platform for you.

LD: Those themes are so up front in your mission statement: to achieve exceptional results for your clients, drive innovation and strive for unparalleled excellence. One thing that comes through loud and clear is how Keller Lenkner is a firm that’s actually scaled.

Meyer: Again, I think we’ve been absolutely committed to bringing the defense-side level of client service to every client we work with. At Kirkland & Ellis, I was working for sovereignties and multinational corporations, and there’s a certain level of client service associated with those engagements. We take that same mentality here. Whether it’s a city or state we represent or an individual person who’s out there fighting against corporate America.

Keller: A challenge I have always seen in the market is when you’re dealing with a significant number of clients, it’s a lot harder to keep your clients abreast of what’s going on compared to when you represent a Fortune 500 company. And so we built an

AN ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT PERMEATES EVERY LEVEL OF OUR FIRM. AND WE STRIVE FOR INNOVATION AT EVERY TURN, WHETHER INNOVATION IN THE LAW OR IN OUR BUSINESS STRATEGY. IT’S THE WAY WE’RE ALL WIRED. WARREN POSTMAN infrastructure, using our own processes and technology, so we can communicate with our clients at key inflection points in their cases and give them the ability to talk with a lawyer throughout the entire engagement with us.

Lenkner: We’ve built a team beyond the traditional roles of a law firm. We have all of the people in-house, both attorneys and professional staff, who manage our clients’ cases and speak to our clients day-today. This is not a place where we’re outsourcing that work to others. We take those responsibilities very seriously.

Nicole Berg (Partner): And I think we all believe that everyone at this firm plays an equally important role in our work for our clients, lawyer or not, including the case managers, client services, the legal assistants, the paralegals. I don’t know that all law firms feel that way. There’s a sense of ownership and pride that I think makes people want to work even harder.

Everybody here will roll up their sleeves and do the work. We’re all in the trenches here. That leads to good things.

LD: It’s fascinating to observe the investment in your people and the liberty you give your team to own their own piece of the firm.

Keller: Yes, agreed. It’s all about people, people, people. We have an incredible assembly of talent from top to bottom. Not just the lawyers, although of course they’re exceptional, but the support staff, the people who support client service. We’ve built an organization around people who are extremely dedicated to their work and that has been a recipe for success.

Gerchen: We’ve formed an environment where people have far more autonomy and opportunity than normal given their relative seniority or lack thereof.

And what has impressed me the most is how people who had no entrepreneurial background – who on paper would look like the most regimented of lawyers – they’re the ones feeding up ideas. It’s like the Patton quote: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and be surprised with their ingenuity and the outcome.” That’s been our philosophy.

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Ashley Barriere (Associate): That’s definitely been my experience, as well. The firm very much fosters a team of collaboration, and they want to hear from the younger lawyers. And I think that further speaks to our goal of putting out innovative work product.

They want everyone’s voice to be heard to reach that end. The firm also has the resources to put its lawyers, even young lawyers like me, up for leadership positions. They want to put them out there in a way that is very rare for plaintiffs’ firms. I currently lead the Law & Briefing Committee for the Onglyza and Kombiglyze XR Products Liability Litigation MDL. That is not typically something you would see an associate doing, and it certainly is not every law firm that would support an associate in pursuing that position and taking on that level of responsibility.

LD: To that end, what are your thoughts in terms of those key factors that have allowed you to stand out in the plaintiffs’ bar?

Barriere: Well, outside of my leadership position, Nicole [Berg] also sits on the Law & Briefing Subcommittee in the 3M Combat Arms Earplug MDL and the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee for the Paragard IUD MDL. And Ashley [Keller] chairs the Law & Briefing Committee in the Zantac MDL. I think the other firms welcome us because we bring our strategy and writing expertise to the table. It’s been three years since the firm was formed and the fact that we’ve managed to break

Nicole Berg

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IT’S A COMPLETE MINDSET, REALLY. IT’S MERGING REALLY SMART, TALENTED PEOPLE WITH AN OPENNESS TO EXTREME CHANGE....YOU HAVE TO BE ENTREPRENEURIAL, NIMBLE, AND ROLL WITH WHAT IS A CONSTANTLY EVOLVING LANDSCAPE, INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY. ADAM GERCHEN into what can be a very closed world so quickly is a testament to that.

one’s saying it can’t be done, I want to figure out a way to do it.

Meyer: I think the experience we had on the defense side, and for many of us, in our clerkships, gives us a better view into how the other side is likely to act. That cannot be overstated from a tactical advantage. And how arguments will be received by judges at all levels.

That the team has all of these different experiences is so unusual on the plaintiffs’ side, and it leads to a remarkable way to put together exceptional legal work product. That’s a really, really exciting feature of being here.

Then hearkening back to our operational innovation, we saw synergies with what was being done in other large, multi-plaintiff matters. One way to think about our arbitration practice is that it’s taking a mass-tort model and making it a couple orders of magnitude more efficient, so that it makes economic sense to pursue smaller claims. We designed our own efficient process, we built the infrastructure to support it, and we’ve now secured more than $200M in settlements for more than 100,000 clients in just two years. And the amounts we’ve obtained for our clients are 10 to 20 times more than they would have gotten in any class settlement. That feels good.

Ben Whiting (Partner): I’d also say that Adam, Ashley and Travis’s previous experience founding Gerchen Keller Capital influences the approach we take to our work today. An entrenched law firm is always going to say, “The idea we came up with is the right one and we’ll figure out how to make it work.” I think what we’re good at is making quick decisions to pivot and reevaluate risks. And using that to keep the ship pointed in a positive direction the whole time. That mentality has really helped drive the growth of the firm and is a strong reason for why we’ve done so well in just three years.

Postman: And we’ve always strived to come up with different strategies. Because most of us have avoided specializing throughout our careers, that enables us to come into cases and legal problems with an unbiased perspective. We don’t know the standard answer or strategy that most plaintiffs’ lawyers in the field would use. And that’s actually what led to the arbitration practice.

LD: With your pioneering arbitration practice, what initially led you to recognize this as a strategy?

Postman: One of the things that I think is true about all of us at the firm, another culture aspect, is that we’re all kind of contrarians. Defendants are always enforcing arbitration clauses, and plaintiffs criticize them for preventing consumers and employees from getting relief in a meaningful way. They eliminate a class action, and most lawyers say that it’s then not feasible to bring the claims in arbitration. As a contrarian, I say, “Well why not? Says who?” If every44

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We’ve now had seven federal judges and three statecourt judges who have heard complaints from defendants, and not a single one has given that the time of day. I think it’s too soon to say how it will change arbitration agreements. I think defendants are still trying to figure out what to do about us.

LD: While arbitration may have earned you that initial success, your portfolio of cases today is also quickly growing. What are some other recent matters?

Lenkner: Yes, we’ve continued to advance our complex litigation practice with a range of significant matters. We’re currently litigating a number of antitrust actions, including against Google, Facebook and Intuit. We also represent consumers in a class action against LinkedIn. One of our newest partners, Jason Zweig, joined the firm to help grow our antitrust and class action practice. And Zina Bash recently joined us as a partner, as well. We already represent States in different types of matters and, with Zina’s background working in both the White House and the Office of the Texas Attorney General, she will help grow our public institutions practice.

LD: Jason and Zina, you’ve certainly landed in an exciting place. What initially drew you to Keller Lenkner?

Jason Zweig (Partner): I met Ashley when I was at Hagens Berman and we worked together on the

The Partner You Need

Zantac litigation. I noticed right away that the backgrounds of the individuals at Keller Lenkner and their credentials are outstanding. And the energy is something that is quite unique in the plaintiff bar or really any bar. It’s an energy that one would expect in a startup enterprise. I’ve been in three law firms and I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered the excitement and passion that each person I spoke to exhibited about growing the business. And it’s contagious.

Zina Bash (Partner): For me, I’ve known a few of the partners at Keller Lenkner for about 15 years. Aside from being excellent lawyers, they are dynamic and take an enterprising approach to litigation. They are stalwart advocates for their clients and craft novel, winning strategies again and again.

Zweig: I’ve worked at old defense firms, and you’re getting spoiled at Keller Lenkner, because it’s not really a law firm in a traditional sense. I mean, it is a law firm, obviously. But in terms of the environment and the energy, it’s not something you see at most law firms.

Bash: On the practice front, Keller Lenkner is a trailblazer in anticipating the needs of future clients and establishing practice areas to tackle those needs.

The team is composed of tremendous lawyers who are even better people, and I’m just elated to now be their partner and to help grow the thriving firm they have already built.

LD: It’s interesting, because most lawyers of this caliber have a very tried and true path out of law school, which usually ends at a defense-side, whiteshoe law firm.

Lenkner: Our aim is to erase the controlling notion among law schools and many litigators that the defense side is the only side. We want to create a home where someone who has the background and ability

to succeed as a partner at an AmLaw 10 firm can have a platform on the plaintiffs’ side where the quality of the cases and the work and the colleagues and the environment are the same.

LD: So what’s next for Keller Lenkner?

Gerchen: We have something special that has far exceeded my expectations. I analogize that there are s-curves with the development of a business. I think we’ve been really good at stacking s-curve on s-curve, and I don’t expect any plateau or downward patterns in the near future.

Lenkner: And we’ll continue to bring on new people who share the vision for what we’re building. People who don’t want to just put their heads down and litigate, but want be a part of the drive to do more, to expand, and to be even more of a force nationally.

We will continue to set our sights higher, to pursue new claims that have merit where our team can be successful, and to innovate in the legal world. And always, to meet the highest standard of excellence, and to do so for plaintiffs.

Keller: It’s true that our team possesses top-line credentials, but our differentiator is what we’re doing with that, and the extraordinary impact we’re having for our clients. We’re challenging the conventional and applying our unique experiences to nontraditional areas of law and business, which I think will lead to a new mindset in plaintiffs’ law.

Postman: In our next phase of growth, I think we will continue to operate with a high sense of urgency in everything we do. Plaintiffs win by pushing the ball down the field, and we push very hard. We’re aggressive in our work and will continue to be aggressive in taking on new projects. Every day here is exciting.

I wake up and I’m anxious to get going.

L-R: Jason Zweig, Ben Whiting and Zina Bash

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16

NOW IN OUR

th

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OF PROVIDING EXCEPTIONAL LEGAL JOURNALISM

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Small Team

Big Results

BY JAMES LANGFORD Think of the Biblical account of David slaying the fearsome warrior Goliath.

Or a pint-sized Harry Potter vanquishing the evil wizard Lord Voldemort in J.K. Rowling’s first book.

Those stories show that in a fight, being bigger and more experienced isn’t necessarily better, a truth that the litigation boutique of Kanner & Whiteley is adept at wielding to its clients’ advantage.

With just nine lawyers, the New Orleans firm founded in 1981 has commanded a leading role in complex, headline-making environmental cases from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill MDL, in which it represented the state of Louisiana, claims for natural resource damages (“NRD”) litigation against a number of industrial entities on behalf of the state of New Jersey, to those involving likely carcinogenic contaminants including firefighting foam in New Mexico and Vermont.

The New Orleans plaintiffs’

firm Kanner & Whiteley has

been punching above its weight for four decades. The firm’s environmental team shows how.

“It’s funny how lawyers evaluate themselves and believe big is better because we all went to law school and heard about the big firms and how they must be better than all the other firms,” says named partner Allan Kanner. Focus and expertise beat size every time.

Landmark litigation the firm handled for the state of New Jersey against ExxonMobil, proves the point. The small size of the Kanner & Whiteley team gave its attorneys an edge because they mastered case details and their interplay across different fields of expert testimony, knew the points that mattered most for their side and were able to adapt on the fly if needed and knew how to work together as a team. As a result, they are quicker and more efficient.

“We all pretty much had a sense of what the case was going to be about before we went to New Jersey to try it, and we never really took our eye off the ball,” Kanner says.

The relative youth and responsibilities of some of the firm’s attorneys is another counterintuitive edge. Their successes sparring with older, more experienced lawyers at large defense firms have prompted some of Kanner & Whiteley’s opponents to rethink how they conduct their day-to-day litigation.

In a recent roundtable discussion, Kanner & Whiteley attorneys opened up to Lawdragon about the firm’s trailblazing environmental law practice, explained the trends that will shape the field in the months and years to come and recalled how they got started.

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From left to right: Katherine Wells, Lili Petersen, Allison Brouk and Allan Kanner

PHOTO BY SARA ESSEX BRADLEY LAWDRAGON ISSUE 23 | WWW.LAWDRAGON.COM

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The firm’s founder, Allan Kanner, originally planned a career in teaching law, but while clerking for a federal judge, the late Robert Vance, a partial meltdown occurred at a reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.

Judge Vance encouraged him to litigate environmental cases instead, finding his creativity and legal skills more suitable for court than classroom. This suggestion was well-made: Environmental Law was not taught in law school at the time.

thought I would be an environmental lawyer, but you make the contribution you can make when you can do it. For me, at that moment, that was it.

Undertaking the Three Mile Island challenge, Kanner recognized immediately a huge chasm in the law. “You had the public environmental law, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, that set the standards,” says Kanner. “And then, on the other hand, you had tort law, which was mostly the province of bodily injury and less explored in terms of environmental damages and trespass.”

LD: Lili, tell me about how you became a lawyer and what brought you to Kanner Whiteley.

Lawdragon: Can you talk more about your mindset during this period?

Allan Kanner: It immediately dawned on me that if you could help the evolution of tort law and maybe also lobby for some evolution in the public law, you could actually do some real good and effect change.

For example, the Three Mile Island case, I think was the first to really raise the medical monitoring issue as a remedy because it was different than other kinds of remedies. Most torts involved injuries that manifested right away. In Three Mile Island, one of the big issues was whether to try to protect the person in the future or to sue in the present for increased risk.

The question was how to take care of people who’ve been exposed to a contaminant before they manifest a serious harm. One possibility was to provide monitoring and try to detect it earlier. Cancers that are detected earlier can be easier to treat, and other times you can implement something as innovative as offset programs. In the Three Mile Island area, we put money into things like wellness programs for pregnant women to enhance or produce better birth outcomes. I was also working on some personal injury cases for children, first-trimester birth defect cases that eventually I settled. Those were very difficult cases.

But the notion is if you know complex litigation, if you know federal civil procedure, if you can familiarize yourself with public environmental and private environmental law, you can effect real change. There was, in the 1980s, a huge gap that needed to be filled if anything good was going to happen for people.

That’s what got me interested in it. I never set out or 50

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Shortly thereafter, in 1981 I founded the firm in Pennsylvania, later to be permanently relocated in New Orleans and to be known as Kanner & Whiteley. We expanded our environmental practice to include several outstanding environmental attorneys including these partners, Lili Petersen and Allison Brouk as well as Katherine Wells.

Lili Petersen: My family tells me to say I’m originally from California because that’s where I grew up, although I was born in New Orleans. My dad was in the Army as a doctor, and so we moved around a good bit before settling in California. I went to Tulane Law School, in part because we had grandparents down here and had lived here and my sister was at Tulane Med. I decided I’d give it a shot, even though I had not gone far from my home, which is in the Bay Area in northern California for college. I had a wonderful time there and enjoyed the opportunity early on to participate in litigation at the Environmental Law Clinic. It’s a beautiful school, I loved the city, but I had every intention of going back to California to practice environmental law somewhere. But then I decided I didn’t want to leave New Orleans. Although New Orleans does not really have a big environmental plaintiffs’ bar, it has a large defense bar due to the oil and gas industry. I was working in insurance defense, and then I got this ad for an environmental position, and it was clearly plaintiff side. And the firm, I’d been told, did some fascinating cases. I met Conlee Whiteley first, and I remember she showed me this huge box of documents to give a realistic idea of what environmental litigation would really be like, and asked me if I would enjoy looking through that. The amount of paper we end up using is crazy for environmental law (we are trying to do better…), but that’s how I started.

I loved the work immediately, and all of the work has been topical. It’s been all over the country. It used to be more class actions and groundwater contamination, but then we moved into the representation of New Jersey, and that has been going on since the early 2000s. I never thought I’d spend that much time in New Jersey, but being in on the creation of their NRD Program made it all the more interesting because we were literally making the law as we went along. We’ve already won appellate rulings on loss

of use as part of natural resource damages, the interaction of statutory and common laws, and statute of limitations. And we’re still trying to do more.

LD: Allison and Katherine, can you discuss your entry into environmental law?

Allison Brouk: I first became interested in environmental law while traveling in Central America as a college student, where I saw first-hand the difference in the use of land that was protected by environmental laws and land that was not. I was intrigued by the way that laws would directly influence people’s actions, and in turn, how those actions impacted the health of the environment, so I decided to pursue a career in environmental law. While at Tulane Law School I participated in the environmental law program, and it was during my second year that the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, which ultimately led to an opportunity to join Kanner & Whiteley, who was representing the State of Louisiana in its claims against those responsible for the oil spill. That became the first case that I worked on as a young lawyer. Soon after that I began working on the NRD case against ExxonMobil in New Jersey. Being at a small firm, even though I was a young lawyer, my role in these historic cases was as involved as a senior attorneys’ would be at any of the larger firms we were litigating with. I bring those same lessons to each new case, but also keep an eye on differences that require a different approach.

Katherine Wells: I started my legal career on the defense side, typically representing large corporations and oil industry clients. But I originally became interested in law while working at a Washington, D.C.-based international health policy firm that provided technical assistance to policymakers and governments to ensure that gender and maternal and child health issues were integrated into national laws, policies and budgets. And I have always been an environmentalist: I grew up visiting a farm in North Mississippi, where I’m from, every weekend and so preserving our environment had always been important to me. So, while I gained a great deal of valuable experience defending corporations, ultimately that work did not really hit home with me. I had always wanted to work on the plaintiffs’ side and when I learned about the opportunity at Kanner & Whiteley, I thought it would be a good fit and allow me to use the skills I had gained while working on the environmental defense side. And I was right; it has been a great experience. We work on cutting edge cases and have a national presence, which

allows us to practice in a number of different states that have very different legal frameworks from the system in Louisiana, where I had previously been focused. And given the size of the cases we work on, the level of advocacy that the defense brings is generally top-notch, which constantly challenges our team to operate at or above that same level. Finally, the work we do is constantly evolving, and this keeps it interesting.

LD: The willingness to tackle complex issues that can lead to new law has been one of Kanner & Whiteley’s hallmarks since its founding. Can you talk about a few more of the cases you view as particularly significant?

AK: One example – and really, all the credit goes to my partners – is our work with the Conservation Law Foundation on landmark litigation against a number of legacy oil companies like Shell Corp. over failure to address the risks of increased flooding and greater storm tides at its Providence Terminal in Rhode Island, due to the effects of climate change.

Shell’s motion to dismiss was denied, and the case has proceeded to discovery, which is significant, since it’s the first climate change case to do so.

We’re now going to have a chance to get some discovery and develop some models and do some real immediate good for people and encourage industry to do some hardening of infrastructure – consistent with sound engineering practices which are required by Clean Water Act permits – at their facilities to avoid spills, explosions and other failures due to extreme weather. In the Gulf region, we’ve seen tons of that after hurricanes, and the rest of the country is beginning to experience the effects of this and other natural disasters, such that these are no longer just coastal issues.

Another case, dating to 2004, involves one of New Jersey’s first natural resource damage cases against ExxonMobil over two of its former refineries in the state. After 12 years of litigation, we were able to resolve the oil giant’s liabilities for $225M, through a settlement approved by the trial court and upheld on appeal.

We recently were asked to assist New Mexico in addressing the Department of Defense’s local pollution activities, and came up with a great theory using RCRA’s imminent and substantial endangerment provision, to address a really inexcusable pollution situation. Since the U.S. Military is one of our nation’s largest polluters, the case is very important.

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We’re also representing the Permian Basin oil companies fighting against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is trying to move America’s spent nuclear fuel via planes and trains to two spots in the Permian Basin, in Texas and New Mexico, to sit, basically, in shallow holes on top of unstable geology.

We’re also known for bringing the first few successful Cancer Alley cases for injured fence-line communities that was subsequently lauded by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and environmental justice advocates.

LD: What’s the interaction between the four of you in terms of what you’ve mastered, what you’ve built, and what the new generation of lawyers is bringing to this battle?

AK: Well, Lili, Allison and I tried the Exxon case. We worked well as a team, using a divide and conquer approach to proof and heavy motion practice from the other side. Allison came to us right out of law school, has developed clients of her own and been an instrumental part of everything that we’ve done for the Conservation Law Foundation. Really, Lili and Allison have done 99 percent of that with some great CLF lawyers. I focus on court, trial prep, helping develop new theories and new business. Lili is running most of the New Jersey cases still, has a great working relationship with the DEP and AG’s team, and the state will probably build a statue for her one of these days at a Jersey Turnpike exit. Allison is running our Vermont litigation over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of compounds and possible carcinogens found in a variety of products, including aqueous film-forming foam that is used in firefighting exercises. She’s also running our New Mexico RCRA litigation, though everybody’s involved and helps when needed. And the clients have been pleased with the results she has achieved in these cases so far.

Katherine and I are currently working on deposition strategy and prep for one of our NRD cases.

LD: Allison, and then Lili, can you expand on some of your work with your current cases?

LP: The cases I currently spend most of my time on are for NRD on behalf of the state of New Jersey against a few oil companies and several claims under the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act which are proceeding in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. This latter group of claims is focused on violations of applicable permits and regulations due primarily from a failure to guard against the effects of climate change such as increased weather variability, sea level rise, 52

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storm surge and other climactic events. These cases are fascinating in that they involve highly regulated industries such as oil terminaling facilities where we argue that their permits and associated regulations require express consideration, identification of and adaptation for known foreseeable risks (including those from climate change). We have seen that these companies routinely incorporate adjustments to armor against the risks of climate change where they are engaging in new undertakings and developing assets but they seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to their existing facilities such as the ones that are the subject of our claims. Much of our litigation has, thus far, been the subject of hard-fought motions to dismiss, which we have defeated. In one case, relating to the Shell Terminal in Providence, R.I., we are beginning the discovery process.

The current New Jersey NRD cases involve similar claims to those that were the subject of the former Exxon Mobil Corporation refinery cases that we litigated and settled after eight months of trial in 2015. Because the area of law is relatively novel, the litigation often involves relitigating issues other courts have rendered decisions on but are arguably not precedential for various reasons. That briefing typically involves revisiting the rationale for some of the holdings rendered in our prior cases where we were successful in our prior briefing of the issues.

And, just as when I started at the firm, there are still many, many pages of documents to review and while they are more often now produced electronically, I still find myself craving the paper copies!

However, the real focus of these cases is the actual assessment of natural resource damages, which is a process referred to as Natural Resource Damage Assessment (“NRDA”), and the development of restoration plans to compensate for those damages.

We work with the experts within the Department of Environmental Protection and outside experts in this field to determine the amount of restoration or replacement of natural resources that will be required to offset the damages caused by responsible parties.

I’ve worked closely with state employees for years on these assessments and have developed close professional and personal relationships with many of these wonderful people who all share in our goal of restoring lost ecosystems.

The importance of this work was highlighted when, in 2017, the citizens of New Jersey voted to amend the State’s Constitution to require that funds recovered under the program be dedicated to that natural resource

restoration and replacement work of the Department.

Over the course of the nearly 20 years that our firm has partnered with the Department in pursuing NRD claims, the State has completed a number of restoration projects that have brought thriving ecosystems back to life in coastal areas of New Jersey.

AB: My current work focuses on our representation of the State of New Mexico in its lawsuit against the United States related to PFAS contamination at Cannon and Holloman Air Force Bases, as well as the State of Vermont in two statewide PFAS cases against manufacturers of PFAS and PFAS-containing products.

The New Mexico Attorney General retained Kanner & Whiteley to represent the State, the United States and the U.S. Department of the Air Force seeking an order requiring the Air Force to clean up extensive PFAS contamination at the Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, New Mexico and the Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, N.M., resulting from decades of defendants’ releases of PFAS-containing aqueous film-forming foam (known as “AFFF”). Defendants’ contamination of the environment at Cannon and Holloman with PFAS has migrated offsite into the surrounding communities, impacting drinking water and agricultural wells, including those used by neighboring dairy farmers. The impacts that these contaminants have had on these communities are real and significant, but the Air Force has been dragging its feet in the cleanup process, saying that there are too many contaminated sites across the country for it to get to the problems in New Mexico. But the Attorney General and the Secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department have the responsibility to protect the people and environment of the State, so we, as outside counsel, get to think of creative strategies and solutions to get relief as soon as possible and protect against further harmful effects of this contamination.

In Vermont, we represent the State in its efforts to protect Vermont’s drinking water and natural resources from dangerous PFAS chemicals. The State filed two lawsuits against companies for the manufacturing and distribution of PFAS chemicals and PFAS-containing products in the State. One lawsuit specifically focuses on harms caused by PFAS-containing AFFF, and the other, a consumer products-based case, is pending in Vermont Superior Court. We were recently successful in defeating defendants’ motions to dismiss when the Vermont Superior Court ruled in favor of the State and denied in large part defendants’ motions.

Discovery is now proceeding as to the State’s claims.

The manufacturers of these chemicals have been sued by hundreds of plaintiffs across the country, including other states, and have taken a hard stance in their legal defense. There is no exception in Vermont, where even early discovery battles have proven to be aggressive. That, combined with the number of documents and witnesses to be involved in discovery show how challenging these kinds of cases can be, but it is nothing that we haven’t faced before.

LD: Katherine, can you discuss the matters that will be keeping you busy in the months or years ahead?

KW: I work mainly with Lili on the NRD cases in New Jersey and with Allison on the PFAS cases in Vermont and New Mexico. In the New Jersey NRD cases, the practice is constantly building on the firm’s work over the past fifteen years. There is a whole body of institutional knowledge that is applied in different ways depending on the specific case, and it is fascinating to see firsthand how this actually moves the law forward. The PFAS cases are interesting because the harm that can come from these contaminants has only recently come into the public eye, even though the knowledge of the potential harm has been known by manufacturers for decades. And as an emerging area of law, we are constantly considering how to address novel issues such as PFAS contamination as they arise.

LD: It seems like, with your successes, the firm really has a SWAT team capability.

AK: True. I’m very proud of that. First, the attorneys here are incredibly talented and have high levels of expertise in trial practice and environmental law.

Second, we have a culture of taking ultimate responsibility, which means they deliver high quality work every time. We have five lawyers who have tried a natural-resource damages case. I don’t think any firm but the U.S. Department of Justice has more lawyers who can say that.

Bigger is not always smarter. I have found that when a core team immerses itself in the litigation goals, strategies and substance are shared and internalized for trial – start to finish – it creates the best results.

Everybody on our team knew what the pivotal issues and the main themes of the State’s case in our New Jersey NRD case were since the start of discovery and motion practice, and we did not waiver from that at trial. Our smaller size plus the consensus we had formed based on real teamwork made a real difference in our presentation at the end of the day.

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Congratulations to all the attorneys recognized, including the 40 Robbins Geller attorneys named Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers in America.

Robbins Geller attorneys recognized include: X. Jay Alvarez, A. Rick Atwood, Jr., Aelish Baig, Randall Baron, James Barz, Alexandra Bernay, Luke Brooks, Spencer Burkholz, Patrick Coughlin, Patrick Daniels, Stuart Davidson, Mark Dearman, Michael Dowd, Travis Downs III, Daniel Drosman, Jason Forge, Paul Geller, Benny Goodman III, Elise Grace, Tor Gronborg, Robert Henssler, Jr., James Jaconette, Rachel Jensen, Chad Johnson, Laurie Largent, Arthur Leahy, David Mitchell, Brian O’Mara, Willow Radcliffe, Jack Reise, Darren Robbins, Robert Robbins, Samuel Rudman, Joseph Russello, Scott Saham, Jessica Shinnefield, Mark Solomon, Shawn Williams, David Wissbroecker, and Debra Wyman.

Recovering Assets.

Reforming Business.

Restoring Confidence. www.rgrdlaw.com | 1-800-449-4900 Attorney Advertising

500

We’re delighted to present the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers in America for 2020.

These 500 lawyers specialize in representing plaintiffs in securities and other business litigation, antitrust and whistleblower claims. The past year has seen a bumper crop in each of those categories. And while some of the business litigators occasionally play defense, the heart and soul of this list takes on the plight of plaintiffs who often can’t afford to go to court for the wrong they’ve been done. In many cases, these firms will shoulder the risk and take the cases on contingency.

Plaintiff financial litigation is the provenance of a handful of powerhouse firms, led once again by the one and only Susman Godfrey. It’s been a year of change, with founder and Lawdragon Hall of Famer Steve Susman passing away in July, and star L.A. trial lawyer Kalpana Srinivasan joining Houston’s Neal Manne as managing partner.

Susman Godfrey is joined by other heavyweights including Robbins Geller; Quinn Emanuel; Motley Rice; Lieff Cabraser; Labaton Sucharow; Cohen Milstein; Hausfeld; and Reid Collins.

We’re proud to recognize each and every member of this group, which is 31 percent female and more than 10 percent inclusive.

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HOW INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION CHANGED POMERANTZ’S GAME

BY KATRINA DEWEY What a year. No transatlantic flights – let alone 50 of them – with power suits yielding to momwear and a good jacket.

Somewhere in there, we learned that a lot of the frippery in which we wrap ourselves is just the wrapping. Not who we are.

Case in point: Jennifer Pafiti, head of client services at plaintiff securities litigation powerhouse Pomerantz. Qualified as a solicitor in the UK as well as an attorney in the U.S., Pafiti has built her reputation expanding the firm by helping clients turn obstacles into opportunities in tandem with managing partner Jeremy Lieberman as the younger generation of leaders expanding the venerable securities law firm, the oldest in the U.S. Nowhere has that been truer than in developing business overseas, an accomplishment that has not only driven the firm’s growth but paid off handsomely when pandemic restrictions stalled the in-person meetings that tend to be table stakes for lawyers wooing prospective clients.

“My job, pre-Covid, involved traveling every week, long-haul, somewhere,” Pafiti says.

“Now, working with people that we had already established great relationships with before Covid hit, we’ve been able to keep the momentum going.”

Late last year, European Pensions recognized the firm’s work in the region with its Thought Leadership Award, noting Pomerantz’s success in helping overseas retirement plans take advantage of robust U.S. securities laws despite limitations imposed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Morrison v.

National Australia Bank.

That 8-0 decision, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, barred investors who bought securities such as stocks and bonds on nonU.S. exchanges from pursuing claims through American courts.

In the aftermath of Morrison, some entrenched U.S. firms threw up their hands and moved away from such cases.

Not Pomerantz.

Jennifer Pafiti and Jeremy Lieberman PHOTO BY LAURA BARISONZI

500 “There was a shift in the class action space as a result of that, a rupture, because of the way doing business changed with the decision,” Lieberman says. “We were in a competitively disadvantaged situation 10 years ago, so when the market experienced those changes, it was a little like when a lane opens up on the highway: OK, you have an opportunity.”

The New York-based firm’s attorneys responded with novel legal theories that could give their clients a fighting chance.

On behalf of a number of U.S. pension plans, for instance, they filed individual negligence and common-law fraud claims, rather than securities actions, against British oil giant BP in 2012, after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill lowered the value of their securities that had been purchased on the London Stock Exchange.

The cases survived BP’s motions to dismiss on a variety of grounds, and the firm later convinced the federal court to afford the same opportunities to foreign institutional investors. Over nine years of hard-fought litigation, Pomerantz earned a series of ground-breaking wins on behalf of the 125+ institutional investors who ultimately pursued such claims against BP. Pomerantz’s foresight and perseverance paved the way, post-Morrison, for both foreign and domestic investors to pursue foreign law claims against a foreign company, seeking recovery for foreign-traded shares in U.S. courts.

Pomerantz also expanded global investor rights in late 2019 by obtaining class certifications for Perrigo Company plc stockholders who purchased shares on the Tel Aviv as well as the New York stock exchanges. And more recently, Pomerantz broke new

ground when a district court agreed to exercise supplemental jurisdiction in a securities class action against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, in which the firm represents several Israeli institutional investors who purchased Teva shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (“TASE”). This means, in effect, that the court recognizes that Israeli securities law expressly permits TASE stocks to be “dual-listed” in Israel and the U.S., and will apply U.S. securities law to any fraud-related claims regardless of where the shares were purchased.

Had the court declined to do so, Pomerantz would have needed to hire separate Israeli counsel and institute a separate lawsuit in Israel – for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses suffered on the TASE – based on the same facts and misstatements being litigated in the U.S. case.

“Whenever there’s a ruling that goes against the plaintiffs’ bar, like the Morrison decision, we sit down and try to find other ways,” Pafiti explains. “Every now and again you reveal an avenue that you can take your clients down to achieve a recovery.”

While she and Lieberman have tag-teamed the firm’s effort to weave Morrison’s straw into gold, the process is never a simple one. It involves far more than one meeting or conversation with a client worried that the precedent will keep him or her from obtaining justice.

“This involves months, if not years, of trying different approaches,” Pafiti says. “It’s calls at 2 a.m. with an idea, e-mails back and forth, sitting down – sometimes virtually – to share an idea and build upon it.

We know when we’re on the right path and just need to collaborate to strategize how to achieve our goal to enable our clients to recover.”

Development of Pomerantz’s overseas business began with the Comverse Technology case, in which the

Pomerantz’s foresight and perseverance paved the way, postMorrison, for both foreign and domestic investors to pursue foreign law claims against a foreign company, seeking recovery for foreign-traded shares in U.S. courts....“Whenever there’s a ruling that goes against the plaintiffs’ bar, like the Morrison decision, we sit down and try to find other ways,” Pafiti explains. “Every now and again you reveal an avenue that you can take your clients down to achieve a recovery.”

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500 “Rather than knocking on the doors of the same institutions in the U.S. – a route our competitors had already traversed 10 or 15 years prior – we felt that the international sphere presented less competition from our brethren in the bar, and was where we could make more of an imprint in the securities class action space.” Jeremy Lieberman firm worked with lead plaintiff the Menorah Group, an Israeli insurer, to negotiate a $225M settlement in 2009, says Lieberman.

Lieberman says actually fared much better than they would have if they instead had purchased stock on the U.S. exchange.

“Once we had a taste of success in Israel, it became clear that not only could we replicate that, but it was important to do so,” he says. “Next, we had success in England.”

“We did not look at this case as a big moneymaker,” Lieberman says. “We looked at it as an important point and a way to get traction in the international arena. Not only did we secure real financial benefits for damaged investors and secure precedents that expanded the rights of global investors, but the case really elevated the firm’s global profile.”

The BP litigation, in particular, offered hard evidence of the strategy’s payoff potential.

“This has a lot to do with the story of the firm’s rise as we sought to distinguish ourselves,” Lieberman explains. “Rather than knocking on the doors of the same institutions in the U.S. – a route our competitors had already traversed 10 or 15 years prior – we felt that the international sphere presented less competition from our brethren in the bar, and was where we could make more of an imprint in the securities class action space.”

How does a law firm go boldly where none has gone before, to make new law? The firm’s strategy in a nutshell, Lieberman says, is devising common-sense solutions to problems created when jurists make case law that has unforeseen complications in the real world.

“When Morrison came out and held that ‘if you purchased your shares on a U.S. exchange, you’re covered by the federal securities laws, but if you buy the same securities of that same company on a non-U.S. exchange, you’re not,’ that’s just pure folly,” Lieberman says. “It makes no sense. You’re going to have certain investors that are hurt by the same actions, the same statements and the same issues, yet one gets a recovery and one doesn’t.”

Pomerantz’s success in devising a remedy for frustrated BP stockholders brought dozens of new clients and “gave us a real platform for exposure to larger institutional investors,” Lieberman says.

Ultimately, Pomerantz was able to negotiate a highly favorable settlement for its BP investor clients, who

Pafiti’s connections and experience with European law, garnered in a pre-Brexit era when the United Kingdom was a full-fledged member of the European Union, opened even more doors that might otherwise have remained barred.

“There’s that European nexus: The European clients gravitated toward, I think, an attorney with a good understanding of European law and business practices,” she says. “They appreciated that there was somebody who had that background.”

In fact, one of the clients in the BP case – USS, or Universities Superannuation Scheme Ltd. – would later become the lead plaintiff in Pomerantz’s litigation against Petrobras, in which the firm achieved a record-breaking $3B settlement for damaged investors.

USS, notes Pafiti, is “a very conservative British pension fund without desire to pursue litigation unless absolutely necessary.”

One factor that proved important in the pension plan’s change of heart was “that they had somebody with an understanding of British perception of litigation on the team,” she says. “We held their hand and gave them weekly updates, sometimes biweekly updates, which can be very different from the frequency of updates required by an American plaintiff.”

Big picture, the case was “a UK company suing a Brazilian company in U.S. courts,” Lieberman says.

“Talk about international scope and how everyone internationally is connected to one another,

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500 Both Lieberman and Pafiti see tremendous demand from the broad market of investors caught in Morrison’s limbo. Nonetheless, they both recognize that careful evaluation and selectivity in taking on cases is crucial to honoring the firm’s commitment to clients…. “I will never recommend a case in which I don’t believe to a client,” Pafiti says.

“And when a client does engage in litigation, I’m fully involved from beginning to end.” and what Morrison did by restricting U.S. law so that no single international forum is available to handle all of those issues just makes very little sense,” he says.

“We’re doing the best that we can to address those kinds of problems.”

Both he and Pafiti see tremendous demand from the broad market of investors caught in Morrison’s limbo. Nonetheless, they both recognize that careful evaluation and selectivity in taking on cases is crucial to honoring the firm’s commitment to clients.

“I will never recommend a case in which I don’t believe to a client,” Pafiti says. “And when a client does engage in litigation, I’m fully involved from beginning to end – I’m not going to pass that on. The person that they speak to is me, the person that they trust and know is me; I am right beside them.”

What that mindset has enabled her to accomplish is impressive on its own.

While Pafiti left London for L.A. and took a prep course that billed itself as “everything you need to know to pass the bar,” it was premised on students having completed three years of law school in the U.S. Her background as a British civil litigator exempted her from that prerequisite, but she knew it wouldn’t be sufficient.

To make up for the gap, she spent nine months, 16 hours a day, “learning as much as I could before I sat the bar because I knew that the prep course wasn’t enough. I bought the law school books and taught myself as much as I could,” she says. She passed the California bar in 2012.

That work ethic carried over to Pomerantz, where she has balanced her professional responsibilities with 60

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the demands of being a single mother of three, a feat made possible in part by management’s willingness to accommodate her scheduling needs.

“Now that I’m more senior at the firm, I’ve been a big advocate of making sure that when I’m hiring somebody I let them know my story because I think it’s important that they know there is an option,” she says.

“We have some amazing attorneys, some of whom are mothers,” Pafiti adds. “We have to let them know it’s OK, that you have every opportunity to be both a mother and an attorney.”

In Pafiti’s own case, her dual roles meant that one son had racked up more than 200 flights by the time he was two years old because he was too young to leave at home.

Over the past year, though, that hasn’t been an issue.

Instead, she’s juggling her caseload with supervising remote schooling for two of her three children.

While her 16-year-old daughter is self-sufficient, her 6-year-old has just started kindergarten.

“Every five minutes, it’s ‘Mommy, where’s this document? Oh, I need this. What am I supposed to be doing?’”

At this point, the pandemic and its related safety restrictions are obviously not short-term situations, she says, but conditions you have to accept and manage as best you can.

“Yes, I’m missing the planes, missing adult interaction, missing wearing a suit – or a full suit, at least – to work, and definitely missing whatever was normal before,” Pafiti says. “But we’ve just got to power through and trust that this year brings new hope and more freedom that we can safely enjoy.”

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2020

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DIAMONDS PRESSURE MAKES

HOW KASOWITZ BENSON TORRES REMAINS POISED TO TAKE ON THE NEXT ROUND OF BET-THE-COMPANY LITIGATION

BY ALISON PREECE When investors need tenacious litigators bold enough to step into the ring and go toe to toe – and win –

against some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, they turn to the hard-hitting attorneys at

Kasowitz Benson Torres. For the financial services and structured finance litigation teams at Kasowitz, the disputes are challenging in the best way, bringing justice

to parties that have been wronged in connection with

highly complex and esoteric financial product disputes, while taking to task some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions.

Firm founder Marc Kasowitz works closely with partners Michael Hanin and Sheron Korpus in developing cutting-edge strategy and attacking the most egregious areas of the law that favor large bank defendants, reshaping securities law to better protect investors.

All three are members of the prestigious Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers.

These attorneys excel in the complex and thorny arena of financial fraud, regularly going up against some of the largest, most sophisticated legal teams in the country representing the nation’s largest banks. And

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tracts prevent any claims about common law fraud or breach of fiduciary duty being brought, making new law that enables greater recourse for defrauded investors.

As the Warren Buffet wisdom goes, attorneys at Kasowitz Benson Torres caught the naked swimmers as the tide went out following the 2008 credit crisis. Now, over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic that roiled the markets, this elite corps of financial services litigators stands poised to tackle the next round of wrongdoers.

Lawdragon: Your recent trial win for MBIA is a stunning achievement after 10 years of litigation. What challenges did you face along the way, going up against a mammoth bank like Credit Suisse?

Marc Kasowitz. Photo provided by the firm.

THE KEY IS TO REPRESENT YOUR CLIENTS ZEALOUSLY, EFFECTIVELY AND LOYALLY, AND INSPIRE THEIR CONFIDENCE. THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS. time and again, they prove their mettle, bringing an unparalleled level of representation for defrauded investors.

Kasowitz led a team that dug in for a full decade in a RMBS put-back case against Credit Suisse, resulting in $600M for the defrauded bond insurer, in a case that spoke directly to the issues at the heart of the Great Recession: Were these loans inherently risky?

Or were the bond insurers deceived about the nature of the poorly packaged loans?

Hanin is representing several funds holding $2B in notes issued by the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, which suffered major losses coming out of 2008. He recently secured a closely-watched decision in Delaware that asserted the fiduciary duties owed to the funds.

Korpus, through his securities work for hedge funds and other institutional investors, effectively overturned the old assumption that the big banks’ con64

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Marc Kasowitz: Not only did we face the challenge of proving that Credit Suisse misrepresented the nature of thousands of loans comprising the structured finance product MBIA insured, but Credit Suisse’s litigation strategy was to draw the case out as much as possible, hoping that MBIA would cave and settle for pennies on the dollar. Throughout the decade-long litigation, we never wavered from our client’s goal to hold Credit Suisse accountable for its numerous misrepresentations and to recover the substantial damages MBIA suffered. Ultimately, after the trial court’s decision, MBIA settled the case for $600M. LD: Can you share an overview of your strategy that led to this win?

MK: Our strategy from the beginning was to plan for trial – to develop the evidence presenting a compelling narrative clearly demonstrating how Credit Suisse made myriad false representations about its own operations and the loans they included in the product. We believed that focusing the court on the overwhelming evidence of Credit Suisse’s defective internal operations and processes leading up to the Great Recession, in addition to the specific ways the loans did not meet Credit Suisse’s own criteria, would be key. We were right, and the court referred to and cited that evidence throughout its lengthy decision.

LD: The court’s decision has some powerful language, denying Credit Suisse’s contention that these mortgage loans had an “inherently risky” nature. Can you speak to the significance of that?

MK: Credit Suisse argued that it did not make any misrepresentations because, supposedly, everyone knew that the loans were inherently risky. As we showed at trial, the problem was not that the loans were inherently risky, but that Credit Suisse misrep-

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resented how risky they were and included loans in the transaction that should not have been issued in the first place, let alone included in the securitization at issue. The court saw through Credit Suisse’s hollow defense – as well as Credit Suisse’s excuse that everyone was doing it – and noted that, as we made sure to repeatedly point out, it was conduct such as Credit Suisse’s here that led our nation and the world into the Great Recession.

LD: Michael, can you walk us through the work you’re doing for the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts?

Michael Hanin: We are representing fifteen investment funds managed by Angelo Gordon, Waterfall Asset Management, One William Street and Libremax Capital, who collectively hold nearly $2B in senior notes issued by the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts in litigations nationwide concerning management and control of the Trusts. The Trusts are among the largest securitizations of private student loans in history.

The Trusts suffered catastrophic losses in the 2008 financial crisis, causing several of the Trusts’ original service providers and investors to go bankrupt. Since, the Trusts have been plagued not only by claims of improper collection practices by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”), but also attempts by opportunistic investors, including the holder of the Trusts’ out-of-the-money residual interests, to profit at the expense of more senior investors in the Trusts, including our investor clients.

The Trusts attracted national attention in 2017 when these residual interest-holders negotiated and executed a proposed consent judgment with the CFPB (the “PCJ”) that roiled the multi-trillion dollar securitization market by threatening to invert the Trusts’ payment waterfall and undermine the basic assumptions on which securitizations are based.

The residual-holders’ actions, with respect to the PCJ and otherwise, were the catalyst for numerous litigations by and among stakeholders in the Trusts.

Our group of senior holders took the lead in opposing the PCJ and are seeking to hold the residual-holders accountable for their conduct.

Michael Hanin. Photo provided by the firm.

AS SPECIALTY LITIGATORS, OUR CLIENTS BRING US THEIR MOST COMPLICATED AND CHALLENGING CASES THAT REQUIRE OUT-THE-BOX THINKING AND INNOVATIVE LEGAL STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS. IT’S INCREDIBLY SATISFYING TO COME UP WITH STRATEGIES THAT OTHER LAWYERS HAVE NOT THOUGHT OF AND SUCCESSFULLY RESOLVE OUR CLIENTS’ ISSUES.

LD: How’s the case going so far? Are you making strides?

MH: In the past year, our group and other stakeholders have achieved several crucial, precedent-setting victories in these cases. In May 2020, after securing a ruling concerning the “fiduciary exception” to attorney-client privilege requiring the residual holders to

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500 produce their communications with their attorneys, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware issued an opinion – widely praised by industry participants – rejecting the PCJ. In August 2020, the 3rd Circuit ruled in favor of our clients and rejected an attempt by the Trusts’ residual holders to install their affiliate to service the Trusts’ loans. Nine days later, the Delaware Chancery Court issued a precedent-setting series of declarations concerning the Trusts, holding, among other things, that the residual equity holders owed our clients fiduciary duties, including an obligation to preserve the Trusts’ assets for the benefit our clients.

Litigation concerning the Trusts is ongoing, although we expect the decisions issued in 2020 will serve to preserve and protect the Trusts’ assets for the benefit of our clients.

LD: That Delaware decision sounds significant for the broader securities market.

MH: Both rulings were instrumental in preserving the securitization “grant” and ensuring that the Trusts’ assets are managed for the benefit of the Trusts’ senior secured stakeholders, the noteholders and the note insurer, consistent with long-held market expectations. Contrary rulings would have injected newfound uncertainty into the securitization market and potentially increased costs for borrowers of all types, including student loans.

LD: Sheron, tell us about the work you’re doing for Loreley Financing?

Sheron Korpus: In the leading collateralized debt obligation (“CDO”) litigation following the financial crisis, we represent Loreley Financing, one of the largest investors who lost billions of dollars following the catastrophic 2007 collapse of the residential mortgage market. Following an investigation into fraud claims against arranging banks and collateral managers, we sued some of the largest Wall Street banks for $13B collectively, including Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citigroup, Wells Fargo Securities (successor to Wachovia Capital Markets), Bank of America/Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The allegations stemmed from the banks’ undisclosed collusion with a short investor, Magnetar Capital, as well as from the use of CDO investments as a means for banks to divest risky assets from their own balance sheets.

LD: Are the cases ongoing?

SK: We have secured favorable settlements in many of these cases. The remaining cases are pending before the state and federal courts in New York.

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Along the way, we have won five out of five appeals following motions to dismiss in these cases. Notably, I secured three victories for Loreley in the New York Appellate Division, First Department, and secured a reversal in favor of Loreley in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. We have also established precedent on New York pleading standards for fraud claims and the applicability of broad disclaimers and disclosures.

LD: How about your work for Primus Partners?

SK: We represent Primus Partners, a large hedge fund, in an action for fraud and breach of fiduciary duty against Goldman Sachs (Singapore) and its former chairman Tim Leissner stemming from the 1MDB scandal.

LD: Can you walk us through the 1MDB scandal, for readers who haven’t been following it?

SK: Goldman and Leissner were financial advisors to the board of directors of a Malaysian bank of which our client was the largest shareholder. We have alleged that Goldman and Leissner improperly used confidential information provided by the board and advised the bank to accept a below-market takeover bid from a competing bank with close ties to the Malaysian Prime Minister to further their own business interests in Malaysia as part of a larger pattern of corruption, which is the subject of multiple law enforcement investigations. As widely reported in the press, criminal charges were brought against Leissner in connection with the scandal and Goldman recently entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement in connection with 1MDB. Although the trial court initially dismissed the complaint on the grounds of forum non conveniens, we filed a motion to reopen the decision based on these new criminal charges.

LD: Can you talk about your lender liability work for Emergent?

SK: We represented Emergent Capital and its subsidiary White Eagle, global leaders in the life settlement industry, in a lender liability claim brought against commercial lender LNV Corporation, a subsidiary of Beal Bank, major hedge fund Silver Point Capital and financial services firm GWG Holdings in connection with a $370M credit facility. We filed a complaint in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware alleging nine causes of action, including improper conduct by the defendants.

LD: What was the result?

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SK: Our complaint caused the defendants to rethink their litigation strategy and ultimately settle. As a result, White Eagle reached a highly favorable settlement on the lender liability claim as part of the debtors’ Chapter 11 reorganization, which provided 100 percent recovery to all holders, including Emergent Capital, of claims and interests. The lender forgoing its onerous equity participation rights was the key to White Eagle’s successful exit from bankruptcy.

LD: There’s a common thread in these cases, representing institutional plaintiffs against major banks and financial institutions, which is really representative of the type of high-level, complex work being done at Kasowitz Benson Torres.

SK: These cases are bet-the-company litigations, meaning that they can make or break the client.

There are billions of dollars at stake in these cases for our clients.

LD: No pressure.

SK: Pressure makes diamonds. We enjoy being powerful advocates for clients who want to take on these well-funded and sophisticated defendants in high-stakes litigation, and have deep experience as a result of being successful going up against them.

These are widely publicized, complex cases requiring out-the-box thinking, innovative legal strategies and artful negotiations.

LD: All areas in which you excel. Do these types of cases present unique challenges, as well?

SK: One of the challenges inherent in the nature of these cases is that the large bank defendants typically argue that we cannot assert common law fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims because the parties’ relationship is governed by contractual agreements and those claims are excluded by contractual terms.

We have made law that the parties’ contractual relationship does not prevent such claims in appropriate circumstances.

Additionally, the financial instruments and the parties’ contractual agreements in these cases are typically very complex, requiring a deep understanding of the clients’ business, the industry and complex financial products, as well as how the underlying deals are constructed. Our experience in this area is second to none, and we have been tremendously successful in developing strategies that allow us to achieve wins for our clients.

Sheron Korpus. Photo provided by the firm.

PRESSURE MAKES DIAMONDS. WE ENJOY BEING POWERFUL ADVOCATES FOR CLIENTS WHO WANT TO TAKE ON THESE WELL-FUNDED AND SOPHISTICATED DEFENDANTS IN HIGH-STAKES LITIGATION, AND HAVE DEEP EXPERIENCE AS A RESULT OF BEING SUCCESSFUL GOING UP AGAINST THEM. THESE ARE WIDELY PUBLICIZED, COMPLEX CASES REQUIRING OUT-THE-BOX THINKING, INNOVATIVE LEGAL STRATEGIES AND ARTFUL NEGOTIATIONS.

LD: Each one of you is a powerhouse in complex financial litigation, with impressive track records

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500 and ongoing, high-level work. Aside from being incredibly good at what you do, what do you like about this practice?

MH: At the core, like most of my Kasowitz colleagues, I’m a general commercial litigator who can deploy the essential tools of the trade – written and verbal advocacy – to achieve the best possible outcomes for my clients.

Working on complex financial litigation, however, combines my passion and experience in financial matters with cutting-edge, high-profile and high-stakes litigation matters. Early in my career, I represented Arthur Andersen in connection with the demise of infamous companies like WorldCom and Enron. After the 2008 financial crisis, I represented the federal government, as conservator for housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in trailblazing lawsuits against Morgan Stanley and other large financial institutions for their role in selling the toxic mortgage securities that helped caused the 2008 financial crisis. Leveraging that experience with mortgage securitizations, I’ve spent the last decade litigating disputes concerning all varieties of securitized products, a $10T market, generally on behalf of bondholders and investors. I’m fortunate to have great relationships with numerous investment funds for whom we’ve achieved terrific results.

Litigating in the complex financial product space requires understanding voluminous and arcane agreements and formulating strategies that distill complicated subject matter into easily digestible points that are compelling and persuasive for the fact-finder. The practice is fast-paced and requires frequent court appearances, proceedings, hearings and trials.

I also enjoy working closely with my clients to help them achieve their business and legal goals. As specialty litigators, our clients bring us their most complicated and challenging cases that require outthe-box thinking and innovative legal strategies and solutions. It’s incredibly satisfying to come up with strategies that other lawyers have not thought of and successfully resolve our clients’ issues.

LD: How did you first know you wanted to be a litigator?

MH: I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer, and litigation – particularly arguing on your feet (or nowadays, on Zoom) – was always the only option. The only dilemma was what type of litigation and in what context: public or private, plaintiff or defense, big firm or 68

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boutique, etc. I’m fortunate that Kasowitz provides such an extraordinary, meritocratic platform for topflight litigators that has allowed us to develop a deep bench in financial services litigation.

LD: Sheron, how about you? How would you describe your style as a litigator?

SK: The cornerstone of my litigation style is effective communication, with my clients, my adversaries, judges and juries. I handle extremely complex cases involving sophisticated financial products that are impenetrable, for the most part, to laypeople. To achieve my clients’ goals, I have to transform those complex issues and facts into straightforward, compelling stories that judges and juries can understand, while making sure to capture a bird’s-eye view of the case that is supported by the granular facts and the law.

In addition, I pick my battles. I do not believe in litigating every little discovery issue. Rather, I focus on the most salient facts and issues of the case, and then formulate a discovery strategy that drives those issues.

LD: Now Marc, you are something of a legend in the financial litigation space, with an incredible track record in your practice, and the founder of a very successful firm. What advice do you have for a young associate looking to build a similar career?

MK: The key is to represent your clients zealously, effectively and loyally, and inspire their confidence.

There are no shortcuts. You have to master both the law and the facts of the cases on which you are working. You need to develop strong oral and written communication skills – you need to be able to advise clients and to present your arguments to the judge and jury in a way that is not only clear and understandable, but also compelling and persuasive.

Finally, find a place where you really enjoy working with your colleagues. In my case, Zoom has worked pretty well, but I can’t wait to see everyone in person again as soon as it is safe and possible to do so.

LD: I am so very ready to be done with Zoom. As we’re clawing our way out of this pandemic, are you foreseeing a similar influx of complex financial litigation as we did from the mortgage crisis?

MK: We are already seeing an increase in complex financial litigation and bankruptcy litigation and expect that to continue. Our firm is working closely with our clients to help them navigate pandemic-related issues, including in, among others, the structured finance, bankruptcy, real estate and employment arenas.

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Michael Absmeier

Michael Angelovich

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

NIX PATTERSON AUSTIN

Anthony Alden

Maribeth Annaguey

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

BROWNE GEORGE LOS ANGELES

Fields Alexander

Seth Ard

BECK REDDEN HOUSTON

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

Joseph M. Alioto Jr.

Gregory Arenson

ALIOTO LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

Jeff Almeida

Gregory Asciolla

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

X. Jay Alvarez

A. Rick Atwood Jr.

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Parvin Aminolroaya

Aelish Marie Baig

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

ROBBINS GELLER SAN FRANCISCO

Naumon Amjed

Sean Baldwin

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

Jeffrey Angelovich

Lauren Guth Barnes

NIX PATTERSON AUSTIN

HAGENS BERMAN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

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Alexander Barnett

Phil Beck

COTCHETT NEW YORK

BARTLIT BECK CHICAGO

Barry Barnett

Bradley Beckworth

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

NIX PATTERSON AUSTIN

Randall Baron

Matthew Behncke

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

David Barrett

Eric Belfi

BOIES SCHILLER NEW YORK

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

Michael Barry

Katherine Lubin Benson

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Fred Bartlit

Daniel Berger

BARTLIT BECK DENVER

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

James Barz

Daniel Berger

ROBBINS GELLER CHICAGO

GRANT & EISENHOFER NEW YORK

Samuel Baxter

Max Berger

MCKOOL SMITH MARSHALL, TEXAS

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

David Beck

Norman Berman

BECK REDDEN HOUSTON

BERMAN TABACCO BOSTON

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Steve Berman

David Boies

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

BOIES SCHILLER ARMONK, N.Y.

Stuart Berman

Swathi Bojedla

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

Alexandra Bernay

Craig Boneau

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

Matthew Berry

Amanda Bonn

SUSMAN GODFREY SEATTLE

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

Julia Beskin

Rebecca Boon

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Vineet Bhatia

Jeniphr Breckenridge

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

Michael Blatchley

John Briody

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

Jeffrey Block

Daniel Brockett

BLOCK & LEVITON BOSTON

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

David Bocian

Davida Brook

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

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Dennis Ellis BROWNE GEORGE (LOS ANGELES)

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DENNIS ELLIS DENNIS ELLIS KNEW HIS MOTHER WAS PROUD

of his football career. She came to all his games. She cheered. But the look of gratification on her face when her son successfully defended General Electric from a claim that its full-body scanners were defective was one he had never seen before.

Ellis couldn’t resist asking her about it afterward, he recalls.

“She said pretty succinctly, ‘You know, when I watched your football games, I thought you were doing good, because you were out there all the time, but I didn’t really know for sure what was going on. But this, I know.

I do this, I know how hard it is, and I know what I saw, and you were as good as I have ever seen.”

It was an exhilarating moment for Ellis, who as a scholarship student athlete at California State University Fullerton, had once dreamed of a gridiron career but opted to pursue the law instead. He mirrored his mother, Sharon Majors-Lewis, a single parent who earned her law degree in night school and went on to become a deputy district attorney in San Diego; judicial appointments secretary to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; and now a Superior Court judge.

At early points in his legal career, their respective victories seemed almost synced. In 2002, the San Diego UnionTribune covered the $92M verdict that a Paul Hastings team including Ellis won against investment firm William Simon & Sons in the same week that Majors-Lewis earned a conviction in a high-profile murder trial.

Later, Ellis was named attorney of the year by California Lawyer magazine after he captured a $2.87B judgment for Chinese telecom giant New World. Just about the same time, his mother was chosen to become the judicial appointments secretary, the first woman and African American to hold the position.

“In some way, there was this symbiotic connection with my mom all the way through,” he says. The law “wasn’t a path I initially sought out, because I was trying to be successful as an athlete. But when I decided to move forward into practicing law, I benefited from having seen my mom do it at such a high level for so long, first as a kid watching her go to law school when I was in high school and then, the early stages of her career as a prosecutor.”

Ellis has recently made headlines protecting restaurants desperately trying to survive, winning a ruling

PHOTO BY: AMY CANTRELL

BY KATRINA DEWEY that L.A. County acted arbitrarily in shutting down all outdoor dining.

Lawdragon: Dennis, can you tell us how you got involved in the restaurant lawsuit? I know Browne George Ross O’Brien Annaguey & Ellis routinely is hired by private and governmental powerbrokers in L.A. Dennis Ellis: Depth of practice. We have some of the most talented, experienced and well-versed litigators and trial lawyers in the industry, and as a result we are always in demand by all clients in both the private and public sector. What we are building here is going to be disruptive to the industry, because we will stand alone as a litigation firm that can operate equally on either side of the “v.” as both a plaintiff and a defendant in nearly any type of case.

LD: What has been your pandemic dining regime?

I know you have a new baby, Townsend, so did that impact your routine? And what does this lawsuit mean to you?

DE: Well, first of all, my regimen has been changed dramatically with the birth of my first son in September. My wife Ashleigh, who has been a tremendous supporter during this transition to my new firm, and a tireless mother to our son Townsend, has shouldered most of the load at home leaving me to continue to develop my practice on this new platform. However, because I am and have always been an early riser, I handle the 4:00 a.m. feedings for Townsend. After that, I head to my office in our home to begin my day.

One of the few days I had to miss my feeding shift, was the day we first appeared before Judge [James] Chalfant seeking to challenge the L.A. County order prohibiting outdoor dining. I had to be at court with the ex parte papers so early that Ashleigh had to finish pumping and then take my turn feeding Townsend.

She must have been up the whole night.

That began what led to a landmark decision for our client the California Restaurant Association. CRA’s President, Jot Condie, and I were staffers together in Sacramento as 20-something-year olds, and we have remained friends throughout the past 30 years. But we never really had an occasion to do much work for them other than a couple of research projects. The decision is a landmark – Chalfant followed the rule of law and confirmed that the decision process of County Public Health Departments is not free from judicial scrutiny.

While their decisions are entitled to great deference,

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HE MIRRORED HIS MOTHER, SHARON MAJORS-LEWIS, A SINGLE PARENT WHO EARNED HER LAW DEGREE IN NIGHT SCHOOL AND WENT ON TO BECOME A DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY IN SAN DIEGO; JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS SECRETARY TO GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER; AND NOW A SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE. their ability to act is not unbridled. Their decisions must be supported by evidence and rationally related to the interest they seek to protect – public health. In our case, there was no evidence supporting an increased risk of Covid transmission through outdoor dining at restaurants, and thus the Court rightfully issued an order prohibiting the L.A. County order.

This all comes full circle too. The verdict that I was a part of against William E. Simon and Sons, was before Chalfant also. He took that jury verdict away with a similar lengthy order. It feels much better to be on the other side of one of his carefully-reasoned decisions.

LD: Can we take it back to the beginning – you were playing football throughout undergrad, right? Go Titans!

DE: I played in college, but then that was the end. I do still watch football. I’m not a fan of any particular team, but I’m a fan of the game. I’ll always love the game. It’s hard to say, because I’ve not been a football player more of my life than I was a football player, but I still view myself as an athlete, a football player. It’s hard for me to look at myself differently.

LD: By the time you went to Howard, to law school, where was your head at? After watching your mom progressing as a lawyer, what kind of lawyer did you think you’d be?

DE: I had just left the state legislature, where I had worked for San Diego area Assemblywoman Carol Bentley after college; that’s who Jot and I worked for.

When I was going to law school and going to Howard, I thought – like a lot of Howard students do – that it was my time to be a social engineer and to work on things that are affecting our society. My thought was that I would have a different approach and be a different, balancing voice for a conservative viewpoint. This was also during the time that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was going through the confirmation process.

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LD: That’s an interesting context for figuring out your future.

DE: I was 24 years old and trying to figure out what my path was going to be. I thought, “Maybe I’ll come back and be a legislator or do something along those lines.”

I wanted to be a prosecutor, like my mom. There were a lot of things going through my mind, but I definitely thought I was more likely to be in public service in some capacity – federal prosecutor, district attorney, or one day running for public office.

Despite my feelings that I had a very balanced view of the world and could be a good voice of reason for others, for Blacks and conservatives in 1992, watching the Clarence Thomas proceedings and other things that were going on in the country at that time, I was a little concerned that my voice would never be heard.

Being misunderstood based on my conservative views definitely concerned me.

So I started thinking about other things to do. Although I thought being a U.S. attorney could still be really good, I wound up performing much better in my first year of law school than I anticipated and finished fourth in my class. That gave me the opportunity to take advantage of going to a big firm, which I had never even considered. There was also an importance in interviewing and showcasing some of the good students at Howard – and the diversity at Howard, in mind, body and ability. The professors there impressed upon me that even if I didn’t desire to go to a law firm, I should at least consider the process and think about it and interview.

LD: I always find it so interesting where the inflection point occurs in legal education where we focus on joining a law firm, for many different reasons.

DE: A professor at the time, a former dean, sat me down and said, “You’ve just got to do it. We need you to do it. We need you to interview, we need em-

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THERE WAS AN IMPORTANCE IN INTERVIEWING AND SHOWCASING SOME OF THE GOOD STUDENTS AT HOWARD – AND THE DIVERSITY AT HOWARD, IN MIND, BODY AND ABILITY….

A PROFESSOR AT THE TIME, A FORMER DEAN, SAT ME DOWN AND SAID, “YOU’VE JUST GOT TO DO IT. WE NEED YOU TO DO IT. WE NEED YOU TO INTERVIEW, WE NEED EMPLOYERS TO SEE THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE YOU HERE.” ployers to see there are people like you here. For the people that come on campus from these firms, this is a place where they say, “OK, let’s go interview so we can do our due diligence to say that we tried to bring in people of color for our law firm.”

Now they can see that there’s a broad swath of people that come from different experiences, they’re talented and good. I did it and I was still in the back of my mind thinking, “I will never take these jobs.” But man, with the challenge they presented and the people I met, I came out of that feeling like I had to try to be the best and practice at the highest level, something I was never able to accomplish as a football player.

LD: Be still your competitive heart.

DE: As a football player, I relished those opportunities when we played big teams. My philosophy of life was that I wanted to play on the biggest stage and perform well. At Howard, I was getting this opportunity to go to the biggest firms and I got an offer from one of the top law firms in the country at that time, Coudert Brothers. They were a big New York firm and I think at the time they were paying more than anybody else.

Paul Hastings also made me an offer, as did Fulbright & Jaworski. I met a guy named Kelvin Westbrook, a Black attorney who had just made partner at Paul Hastings, and he knew how to speak to me. He said, “It won’t be easy. This is a different type of practice.” He knew the challenge would resonate with me. It did, and I decided to go to Paul Hastings. It was a great decision because it really helped me to become the lawyer I am today.

LD: And here you are after attaining partnership at Paul Hastings and rising to be its global chair of complex

litigation and arbitration, your name has recently been added to Browne George Ross O’Brien Annaguey & Ellis in recognition of your amazing accomplishments.

DE: There were all these times over the years that I was like, “OK, is now the time to go be a U.S. attorney?” I just never did it. It even went so far as having an offer to join the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego and go back home since I am from San Diego, and I was really thinking of doing it. One of the partners I worked for was a former U.S. attorney, one of the true gentlemen of the legal profession and just a great mentor and trainer. His name was Nick DeWitt. He was a paraplegic, and a great attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District. He passed away, oh I guess now it’s been about 8 years ago.

He just had this great perspective on life: If you’re 15 and they tell you that they’re going to operate on you and it’ll save your life but it’ll make you paralyzed, you have to live that way. He just always lived like every day was a blessing. He never let all the pressure and all that goes with practicing in a big firm or practicing law generally get to him, he was always better than that. He never let anybody drag him into the petty fighting that can happen in litigation. He taught me never to do that either, to have the tools that were needed, to always be prepared, to understand that it’s just litigation and you’ll figure it out.

Because of all of that, I always feel like I had this unique perspective coming to Paul Hastings because I had Nick on the one hand and a guy named Alan Steinbrecher who was a former F4 fighter pilot during the Vietnam war, a very strict military-type guy. He was the kind of father figure who would be very stern and provide dis-

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500 cipline and structure, and Nick was like the big brother who would hug when it was over and say, “It’ll be OK.” I had that great balance. While I didn’t see that path, I’m glad that path came to me because it certainly put me in a good place to do well in my legal career.

LD: Mentors are so crucial to career success, especially in terms of providing balanced perspective and clueing you in about how the system works. Tell me about some of your early cases.

DE: The first time I was the first chair at a trial was in Sonoma County. We represented a company called MRV Communications in a civil case brought on behalf of a company called Broadlink. My second chair was a young associate, a woman named Gillian Garrett who had never tried a case before. Being Black, I always thought it was important to try to give diverse lawyers an opportunity. Which is what I did in this case, albeit with a young female attorney. So there was this big guy, me, and she was this demure, small petite woman. The guy who was the lead plaintiff witness was my size. I thought, “OK, if I cross-examine this guy and I draw with him, it would just be like two big bulls hitting at each other. But if she crossexamines him and even comes close to getting him, we’ll look like the winner.”

So I gave up the most critical witness in the case to her, and she cross-examined him. He was one of two witnesses I gave her, and she did great. Not only did she come close, she got him good. Made him admit a critical fact for our side during cross-examination – that he had never sent a termination notice regarding the contract.

Then the first trial I did as a partner was VitaScan v. GE Healthcare. I’ve had some great successes throughout my career but the most difficult, most significant victory of my career – regardless of the numbers but in terms of what was at stake for me as a lawyer – was VitaScan. I think it’s my best performance and my most difficult challenge.

This was during the period of time in 2006 when a lot of private companies had bought full-body scanners from General Electric. There was this whole notion about doing a full-body scan to determine whether

you had a risk of heart attack, which would allow you to get preventative care. Oprah Winfrey had a program about this. VitaScan had bought these scanners and they were, according to VitaScan, temperamental, so they made this massive lost-profit claim for $24M, saying that their business failed because GE’s scanners didn’t work. There were people across the country making similar allegations. It wound up that this case that we believed to be a challenging case was the first one to go to trial.

LD: No pressure.

DE: Here I was, a partner, newly minted, and I was going to try the first case on the matter for one of our longtime legacy clients, GE. One of the legacy partners at Paul Hastings was representing them, and the pressure was on. The second chair was an associate who was up for partner. It was a big case. Only $24M was at issue in the matter, but if we lost, there were like 10 to 20 more cases out there.

LD: Right, it could cascade.

DE: At one point in time, I heard GE say the problem could be an $800M problem. On that case alone, it was 57 trial days, with essentially my whole career on the line. I remember at one point in time, I went to the lead relationship partner in our firm for GE, Kurt Hansson, and said, “I get it. If I lose this case, it’ll be the shortest partnership in history.” I always laughed and joked after the fact that he didn’t say, “No, it’ll be OK.” He just was like, “OK, as long as you know ....”

But we went through that trial, basically three months, and we won. A complete defense verdict.

There was an article in one of the Santa Barbara papers talking about GE versus a small company and the David v. Goliath dynamics. It was entitled, ‘Goliath Wins.’ Even though I felt like the underdog up there, I always took it, since I’m such a big guy, it’s like Goliath did win, finally. Wilt Chamberlain always says, “Nobody roots for Goliath.” The person that’s supposed to win doesn’t get a lot of support.

LD: That’s really incredible. You were such a young partner when you accomplished all that and then you just never looked back.

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Luke Brooks

Michael Buchman

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

MOTLEY RICE NEW YORK

Benjamin Brown

Christopher Burke

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

SCOTT + SCOTT SAN DIEGO

Deborah Brown

Spencer Burkholz

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

John Browne

Warren Burns

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

BURNS CHAREST DALLAS

Devon Bruce

Elaine Byszewski

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

HAGENS BERMAN PASADENA, CALIF.

Joshua Bruckerhoff

Elizabeth Cabraser

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Gustavo Bruckner

Diane Cafferata

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

David Buchanan

Peter Calamari

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

Jacob Buchdahl

Regina Calcaterra

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

CALCATERRA POLLACK NEW YORK

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500 DE: There’s some truth to that, but when you have those kinds of accomplishments, what happens next?

Does it keep going up like a V-shaped curve or is there a plateau, followed by a smoother progression?

In my career, it was more of a smoother progression over a couple of years where I was doing fine. But when you have the kind of start that I had, fine is not what is expected. So I had those issues like every other partner has: Concern, self-doubt. This is hard stuff. Nobody just says, ‘This is it, I made it, I don’t need to do anything else.”

LD: What drove you to make the switch from successful partner at Paul Hastings to Browne George?

DE: It was a process, really. One of the critical things that happened to me was that in 2016, I got really sick; I got a staph infection. I had sepsis, and it was really scary. I was working on a case in Hong Kong, and I got a really bad pain in my shoulder, so I went and got acupuncture. We cannot be sure, but that is what we think might have gave me the infection.

How the sepsis affected me was that my knees got infected, and I had to have four knee surgeries over an eight-day period. There was a time amputation was not being dismissed. In any event, the great doctors at Cedars-Sinai got me back in good health and I began the lengthy rehabilitation process.

it, and it’s freed up a lot of time for trial work. Once we get back to a more normal world, you’ll see the effects as we get more and more into the courtroom.

LD: You’ve talked a little about your experiences as a Black man and an attorney. What have the events of 2020, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, meant to you professionally and personally?

DE: I think every Black person in this country right now is wondering, “Where are we going to go from here? Is this going to be another time where there’s been attention on a point but then it just dissipates?”

We’re also always wondering, “How can we help with that? How can we help with these things?”

When I got better, I did an arbitration that I won and then I had one more trial left for L’Oréal that was coming up that I thought would be my last case. I was tired, and thought I would retire. We lost that trial, and it was my first real trial lost ever. It hurt then, it hurts now, but it also inspired me to keep going.

In my case, I was blessed to be offered these unique opportunities, but I’m certainly not so vain as to believe that I was the only one to deserve them or that I was the only one who could have leveraged them.

If you really think about it, this kid from the inner city who was raised by a single mother going to night school winds up being taken under the wing by a professor at Cal State Fullerton who helps him get a job with the legislature in Sacramento, who then works for an assemblywoman who helps him with the experience and credentials he needs to get into law school. He winds up getting a scholarship to Howard, one of the most prestigious schools in our country, and gets all the training that he could need to do well and gets the guidance to go pursue this path when he doesn’t even expect to go into practice at a major international law firm.

Who knows if I would be at Browne George had we won that trial, but we didn’t. There was no way I could leave the profession on that note. There’s no way I would live with that being my last case. That made me think about what I wanted to do and one of the things that came out of that was with the Paul Hastings model, you might try a case every couple of years if you were lucky like I was, but then you could go long stretches without doing any of them.

I needed to be back in court before juries more often was my conclusion.

It doesn’t have to be in the practice of law, either.

What if somebody who was a sales manager got that opportunity, what would he deliver? That’s really what we need, the opportunities, and we need to be seen as agents for change and agents for success, not as criminals who might rob or hurt you. I myself have been that guy in a car who got arrested for no reason but my race. I’ve had officers come into my home holding their guns, and that happened while I was a Paul Hastings partner.

LD: Sometimes it’s the low moments that really focus us.

So despite what I’ve accomplished, there have been these moments where I could have been George Floyd. What would my universe look like if any of them had gone the wrong way? They didn’t and so I am here. But there are many people just like me that weren’t as blessed. What would they be today?

DE: I wanted a new model where I could be in the courtroom using the skills that I have as a trial lawyer because that’s where I believe my real value lies. I wound up considering some other big national firms, and I discovered that, in the end, this was the move that was right for me. I’m very, very pleased that I did

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Ophelia Camina

Johnny Carter

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Melinda Campbell

Laura Kissel Cassidy

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

Jeffrey Campisi

Gregory Castaldo

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

Michael Canty

Ryan Caughey

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Robert Carey

Lin Chan

HAGENS BERMAN PHOENIX

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Michael Carlinsky

Daniel Charest

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

BURNS CHAREST DALLAS

Bill Carmody

Peter Wilson Chatfield

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

George Carpinello

Darren Check

BOIES SCHILLER ALBANY, N.Y.

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

Shanon Carson

Daniel Chiplock

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

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Joshua Silverman POMERANTZ (CHICAGO)

JOSHUA SILVERMAN HELPING INVESTORS HURT BY SECURITIES

fraud is a satisfaction earned by many lawyers on our guide to the nation’s best plaintiff financial lawyers.

Only a more refined group, however, can point to results that include important precedents within the field. Among those stars is Joshua Silverman, who devotes 100 percent of his practice to securities litigation.

The Chicago-based partner previously practiced on the defense side at McGuireWoods before switching to plaintiffs’ work at Pomerantz, which he lauds for its team approach to complex cases.

Lawdragon: How did you first become interested in developing this type of practice?

Joshua B. Silverman: I began my career on the defense side, representing corporate defendants, mostly in commodities fraud, antitrust litigation and civil RICO cases.

Although I liked the subject matter, I wanted to represent those wronged by financial fraud instead of protecting perpetrators. Because I had a passion for the markets, plaintiff-side securities litigation was a perfect fit.

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BY JOHN RYAN LD: What are some aspects about this work that keep you excited about it?

JS: I enjoy the entrepreneurial nature of contingent fee litigation and figuring out how to advance a case. That is a much more creative process than I experienced on the defense side, which was more reactive. I also enjoy Pomerantz’s culture of excellence and the team approach that we take to securities litigation.

LD: Can you elaborate on Pomerantz’s team approach and culture of excellence?

JS: It starts with hiring. We expect that all of our attorneys have or are able to develop capability to take on any aspect of a case, so we are able to staff cases with small teams. That means that the associates on a case have broad levels of responsibility, including depositions of high-level executives.

LD: Of all the work you have done in your career, what would you say is the most interesting matter you’ve handled?

PHOTO BY: LAURA BARISONZI

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I BEGAN MY CAREER ON THE DEFENSE SIDE, REPRESENTING CORPORATE DEFENDANTS, MOSTLY IN COMMODITIES FRAUD, ANTITRUST LITIGATION AND CIVIL RICO CASES. ALTHOUGH I LIKED THE SUBJECT MATTER, I WANTED TO REPRESENT THOSE WRONGED BY FINANCIAL FRAUD INSTEAD OF PROTECTING PERPETRATORS. JS: One that stands out is the Countrywide RMBS litigation we pursued on behalf of three institutional investors. We identified a strategy for these three funds to recover large losses in Countrywide mortgagebacked securities that had been overlooked by other plaintiff securities firms. The lawsuit – New Mexico State Inv. Council, et al. v. Countrywide, et al. – was the first non-class institutional investor suit addressing these securities. By moving quickly and supplementing conventional document review and depositions with big data analysis of loan files, we were able to complete an extraordinary amount of discovery in the short time that the court allowed, and we gathered strong evidence for trial. As a result, we were able to obtain a very favorable settlement shortly before trial was to begin. By that time, there were many other Countrywide-related cases, but they were still stuck in the early stages. Our settlement was the first and, to my understanding, the greatest proportional recovery of any of the Countrywide RMBS cases. And we set important precedent with a ruling that investors could show Section 11 damages for asset-backed securities even without a default in payment.

LD: Can you discuss additional precedent-setting work?

JS: In the Perrigo Securities Litigation (Roofers’ v. Papa, et al.), which is ongoing, we obtained the very first certification of a foreign investor class since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Morrison. The stock in Perrigo was dual-listed in the United States on the NYSE and in Israel on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. For dual-listed stocks, Israeli law adopts the standards of the country of primary listing. Because the Israeli claims turn on the same standards under the Securities Exchange Act that apply to U.S. investors’ Section 10(b) claims,

we persuaded the court to exercise supplemental jurisdiction. This is a ground-breaking precedent for international investors.

In MannKind Securities Litigation, we established that investors may support complaints with expert information. MannKind involved misrepresentations about a drug-device combination that was rejected by the FDA after the company sought approval of a device design that was slightly different from the one used in clinical trials. Because the importance of that change was not readily apparent, we included in the amended complaint an explanation from an expert who literally wrote the book on the FDA new drug approval process. Defendants moved to strike those allegations.

We successfully argued that the court should accept the expert’s description of factual information including the FDA’s regulatory practices, because it provided important context to the misrepresentations that the defendants had made to investors.

LD: Are there any trends you are seeing in your practice regarding the types of matters keeping you busy these days?

JS: Two major trends have emerged regarding the types of litigation. First, we are seeing a large increase in cases involving the use of aggressive accounting and projections to cover up operating deficiencies. Second, state-filed Securities Act cases have become more common after the Supreme Court’s Cyan decision in 2018.

Also, Covid has changed many of the procedures in our cases, especially depositions. In the 15 years prior to Covid, I can recall only a single remote deposition.

Now remote depositions are common, and this trend may last. I think many lawyers are finding that with the right technology and protocols, a remote deposition can be just as effective as in-person.

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500 LD: Can you describe a recent matter that you’ve handled?

JS: I served as lead counsel in the Nantkwest Securities Litigation. That was an IPO case where the CEO hid a large part of his compensation. In reality, he was the highest paid executive of any company that year, even though the IPO was a flop. It was clear that the defendants hid damaging information in the IPO registration. But it was not easy to show that any given investor’s purchase was traceable to the IPO because a small amount of unregistered shares also traded in the market. After thoroughly analyzing market characteristics and trading patterns, we persuaded the court to accept statistical proof of traceability, which had never been done before. Because of this, we were able to achieve class certification and secure a very favorable settlement for investors.

LD: Did any experience from your undergraduate work push you towards a career in the law?

JS: No. By the time I chose my major, I knew I wanted to go to law school. I chose English literature, a curriculum that would emphasize writing and analysis. And then, I started law school in the summer session, only a month and a half after finishing my undergraduate work. I was always interested in the law.

LD: Is this the type of law you imagined yourself practicing while in law school?

JS: I knew after taking a complex litigation seminar that I wanted to practice high-end litigation, but I did not have a securities focus at that time.

LD: Was there a course, professor, or experience that was particularly memorable or important in what practice you chose?

JS: It would have to be that complex litigation seminar I just mentioned. The course was taught by one of the best litigators in the country, Bill Jentes. At the time, he headed the litigation department of Kirkland & Ellis. On the first day of class, he showed up with one of those ambiguous pictures that looks like a

duck from one direction and a rabbit from another.

He said that our job as litigators — even as we work against big teams of the smartest lawyers out there — is to make sure that the court and jury see the duck, not the rabbit. And that’s how the whole course was taught, instructing us how to use the federal rules and the class action mechanism to advance the client’s interests at every step.

LD: Was there an early experience or mentor who really helped shape the course of your professional life?

JS: As a young lawyer, I was mentored by the junior partner who directed most of my work, Amy Manning, who is now chair of McGuireWoods’ commercial litigation practice. She taught me the value of thinking strategically, paying attention to detail, and out-hustling my opponents. Those are lessons that I continue to use every day.

LD: How would you describe your style as a lawyer?

Or, how do you think others see you?

JS: I hope they see me as prepared. I strive to understand not only my case better than my opponent but also to understand my opponent’s case better than they do.

LD: How do you do that?

JS: For briefing, the team will brainstorm about how we would attack our chosen argument if we were on the other side. And we often come up with better arguments than they do. For discovery, in addition to finding hot docs that are valuable for us, we do a very good job of finding our opponents’ top 20 to 30 docs.

And for key oral arguments, we will often do multiple moot arguments.

LD: Do you have a favorite book or movie about the justice system?

JS: It’s probably “Anatomy of a Murder.” The book was written by Michigan Supreme Court Justice and fellow U of M Law grad John Voelker, published under the pen name Robert Traver. It was also made into a movie with Jimmy Stewart that was nominated for Best Picture.

FOR BRIEFING, THE TEAM WILL BRAINSTORM ABOUT HOW WE WOULD ATTACK OUR CHOSEN ARGUMENT IF WE WERE ON THE OTHER SIDE. AND WE OFTEN COME UP WITH BETTER ARGUMENTS THAN THEY DO. 82

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Michael Ciresi

Jan Conlin

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Joy Clairmont

Nathan Cook

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

BLOCK & LEVITON WILMINGTON

Deborah Clark-Weintraub

Melinda Coolidge

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mary Louise Cohen

Joseph Cotchett

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

David Colapinto

Patrick Coughlin

KOHN, KOHN & COLAPINTO WASHINGTON, D.C.

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Scott Cole

Eric Cramer

MCKOOL SMITH AUSTIN

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

P. Jason Collins

Gary Cruciani

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

MCKOOL SMITH DALLAS

Todd Collins

Sam Cruse III

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

Erin Green Comite

Andrew Curley

SCOTT + SCOTT COLCHESTER, CONN.

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

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Davida Brook SUSMAN GODFREY (LOS ANGELES)

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DAVIDA BROOK SUSMAN GODFREY LAWYERS HAVE A KNACK for being in the center of the hottest legal issues around. Take powerhouse Los Angeles partner Davida Brook, for instance.

She and the firm made headlines recently for their representation of Dominion Voting Systems in its epic $1.6B defamation lawsuit against Fox regarding its coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election.

That’s just one of the defamation suits she’s handling – a flourishing area in which she’s become something of an expert following her work for #MeToo victims.

She’s also in the midst of a vast legal effort to corral two of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, YouPorn and Pornhub.

Forget the steamy old “Boogie Nights” version of the porn industry, where a studio uses a San Fernando Valley home to produce films that are light on wardrobe and heavy on sex.

While gritty and high-risk, the established porn industry can still make a plausible claim to legitimacy and law-abiding behavior, posting a notice at the start of each film that all performers are over 18, and letting viewers where they can obtain verifying documentation required by federal law since 1995.

These days, the dominance of the established porn industry is rapidly ceding market share to homemade clips uploaded to YouPorn, Pornhub and similar sites that users can watch for free.

In these typically homemade videos, neither producers nor performers are pros and the platforms have little incentive to police content, a situation highlighted in numerous complaints accusing them of hosting videos of sex-trafficking victims, children under 18 and people who were filmed without their knowledge or consent.

The reach of the new world of online porn is staggering – as recently as December, Pornhub was the eighth-most visited website in the world, topping both Wikipedia and Netflix. And while many of the performers chose to be there, a significant number did not. Others may have consented once, but now want the videos removed and feel powerless to achieve that in the widely lawless universe.

That’s where Brook and fellow Susman Godfrey partners Arun Subramanian and Krysta Kauble Pachman come in.

PHOTO BY: AMY CANTRELL

BY KATRINA DEWEY In February, the attorneys filed a proposed classaction suit accusing MindGeek, the parent of YouPorn, Pornhub and RedTube, of violating U.S. sex-trafficking laws by posting and profiting from thousands of videos of minors performing sex acts.

“Over the course of the last decade, Defendants have knowingly benefited financially from thousands – if not millions – of videos posted to their various websites featuring victims who had not yet reached the age of majority,” the complaint states. “Rather than address this horrifying and pervasive trend, for years Defendants took almost no action, refusing to so much as institute any semblance of an age-verification policy that would prevent the uploading of this deeply problematic content.”

The reason for that, according to the complaint is “simple: greed. As Pornhub’s own Senior Community Manager publicly acknowledged via a Reddit post, age verification would be a ‘disaster’ for Pornhub because it ‘costs us money to verify’ and would result in a 50 percent reduction in traffic.”

The case – like many that Brook has handled – is on the cutting edge of technological and legal issues that dominate political debate in the early 21st century, from the power of tech companies to genderbased discrimination and harassment highlighted by the #MeToo movement.

The Trump era brought to a boil long-simmering concerns on both fronts. For much of the past four years, Democrats complained that Facebook and other social media platforms, shielded from liability for user-posted content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, failed to prevent misuse of their sites by foreign operatives trying to sway the 2016 election that put Trump in office.

Republicans, meanwhile, claimed that Silicon Valley was censoring conservative content. Lawmakers on both sides indicated a willingness to curb, if not abolish, Section 230 protections for Internet platforms – and adult-oriented websites were among the first to feel the impact.

In April 2018, the Fight Online Sex-Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, decreed that Section 230 doesn’t limit civil claims or criminal charges for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking or enables prostitution.

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SHE AND THE FIRM MADE HEADLINES RECENTLY FOR THEIR REPRESENTATION OF DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS IN ITS EPIC $1.6B DEFAMATION LAWSUIT AGAINST FOX OVER DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION DEFEAT. THAT’S JUST ONE OF THE DEFAMATION SUITS SHE’S HANDLING. That law opened the door to a series of suits against sites streaming user-generated porn, including the case filed by Brook and her colleagues.

The lead plaintiff in the MindGeek case, identified only as Jane Doe to protect her privacy, claims that an ex-boyfriend posted videos on Pornhub of them having sex – recordings that were made when she was only 16 and sometimes without her knowledge.

for that degree of patience. But I was attracted to the law’s ability to have a quicker impact.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree at Columbia University, Brook took a job with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, helping establish chapters at historically Black colleges, Hispanic-associated schools and Christian campuses.

Intent on earning a law degree, she was accepted at Stanford.

Doe was clearly identifiable in the videos, which began appearing on porn sites in December 2019, according to the suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They distressed Doe so much that she contemplated suicide, ultimately withdrawing from school and seeking therapy.

While a first year law student, she co-founded Building a Better Legal Profession, a nonprofit that ranked law firms based on their commitment to promoting women and people of color to equity partner. The effort gave her a front-row seat to the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

Because many thousands of similar victims exist, the suit seeks certification of a class including any person who was under 18 in a video uploaded to one of the MindGeek sites during the past 10 years.

“It got me really focused on law firms that had actually made some headway in terms of promoting women and people of color,” recalls Brook. Ultimately, she accepted a position at Sidley Austin, which her research showed had the most women and minorities in equity partnership roles in Los Angeles at the time.

“It’s going to be an interesting case,” Brook says. “With more and more tech and media companies taking on ever-enlarging roles in our day to day lives, recognizing the trends is important. How are the laws responding to those trends, and what role do we as lawyers play in helping to define – and enforce – those lines?”

The opportunity to address novel and important issues was a driving force in Brook’s decision to become a lawyer. While most of her family worked in medicine, the Los Angeles native was fascinated by the law as early as the age of 12.

“Medicine always frustrated me because of the oneoff nature of clinical work,” she says. “You help one person, and then you move on and you help the next person. Then you move on and you help the third person. God bless our medical care professionals

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She went on to clerk for 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ray Fisher while her husband, Kevin Scott, was clerking for then-U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer.

As a trial judge, Pfaelzer maintained a full docket and tended to self-select the most complicated cases of the day. Scott would regale Brook – whose clerkship focused more on research and writing – with courtroom tales about the attorneys he saw in action.

One day, he came home a little exasperated and a lot impressed.

“I’ll never forget it,” she recalls. “He put his stuff down on the table, and he was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there were five little Davidas running around my courtroom today, and it was just exhausting.’”

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Patrick Dahlstrom

Nicholas Diamand

POMERANTZ CHICAGO

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Patrick Daniels

Jeffrey W. Dickstein

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

PHILLIPS & COHEN MIAMI

Merrill Davidoff

Kirk Dillman

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

MCKOOL SMITH LOS ANGELES

Stuart Davidson

Kathleen Donovan-Maher

ROBBINS GELLER BOCA RATON

BERMAN TABACCO BOSTON

Mark Dearman

Diane Doolittle

ROBBINS GELLER BOCA RATON

QUINN EMANUEL REDWOOD SHORES, CALIF.

Timothy DeLange

Mike Dowd

WOLLMUTH MAHER CARLSBAD, CALIF.

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Michael Dell’Angelo

Travis Downs III

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Marisa DeMato

Michelle Drake

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

BERGER MONTAGUE MINNEAPOLIS

Lawrence Deutsch

Daniel Drosman

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

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500 “I was, like, ‘Excuse me?’” she says. “And he replied, ‘There’s this firm, Susman Godfrey. It’s your people.

Go check it out.’”

And so she did, meeting Susman Godfrey’s managing par tner Kalpana Srinivasan at Cleo Mediterráneo. The dynamic duo had more than a lit tle in common: both had graduated from Stanford Law School and both had clerked for Judge Fisher.

The firm felt like it would be a perfect fit, Brook recalls.

“I was hard-pressed to find another white-collar office of any type, let alone a trial shop, that had so many women in positions of power. It offered extensive courtroom work, and that’s what it was all about. It had that promise of early opportunity, whether you like it or not, and getting to operate above your pay grade.”

The job lived up to her expectations, says Brook, who joined Susman Godfrey in 2012 and made partner six years later.

From the start, there has been no shortage of adrenalin.

In one of her earliest cases, Brook represented entrepreneur Steven Lamar seeking unpaid royalties from Beats headphones, Dr. Dre, record executive Jimmy Iovine and Apple, which had recently acquired Beats.

About an hour into deposing an Apple executive, the tech giant’s counsel told her they could pack up as the trial judge had just granted Beats’ motion to dismiss.

She barely missed, well, a beat. “We’re going to reverse that decision,” she responded. “So we can either finish the deposition now or we can finish the deposition in eight months.”

The group spent another seven hours on the record, and Brook proved herself correct – she and Lamar’s legal team convinced the California Court of Appeals to overturn summary judgment. Lamar had entrusted Brook, a fourth-year associate at the time, with the appeal. So when the case was sent back to the lower court for trial, she conducted direct examination of the client herself.

It lasted for three days and the trial ended in a $25M victory – not including prejudgment interest, attorney’s fees, and the like.

“This was his big idea and let’s just say it had not played out the way the parties had agreed it would,” she says. “He had been waiting for years to share his story and to have the opportunity to tell a jury of

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his peers what had happened to him and why they should help right the wrong.”

Righting the wrongs has been a mantra for Brook’s career, including suits related to the #MeToo movement and a variety of defamation matters.

One of her earliest #MeToo cases saw her on defense, representing a woman sued over a social media post in which she had made an accusation of sexual misconduct. Brook helped get the suit dropped, and watched as a caseload of #MeToo claims took root.

“We were able to help out these women who had suffered all sorts of wrongs,” Brook says.

She’s also currently part of a Susman Godfrey team representing hedge fund billionaire Louis Bacon, who accused Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard, a longtime neighbor in the Bahamas, of a coordinated smear campaign.

“Defamation is seeing a boom,” Brook says, “for better and for worse. Some of the defamation suits are being brought viciously, with an intent to silence people, but others are 100 precent justified and a reaction to the fact that anyone can go online these days and reach an audience of millions and have a real effect on the state of play and someone’s reputation.”

In the past year, she has worked pro bono on a number of voting rights cases, representing Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. Her team won dismissal of the Arizona and Wisconsin cases. And, following a bench trial in Wisconsin, protected the official vote count there, as well.

Bringing together her voting rights and defamation expertise, she is a member of the Susman Godfrey all-star team representing Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News Network, Sydney Powell, Rudy Giluiani and Mike Lindell/MyPillow. Clare Lock is also representing Dominion.

“These are going to be truly unprecedented cases,” Brook says.

The claims stem from the ongoing and oft-repeated claims by Fox and its personalities that Dominion’s voting machines were faulty, resulting in Joseph Biden Jr. being elected president, rather than Donald Trump.

It is certain the cases will keep her at the heart of the fast-moving conversation about technology, the media and the law for a mighty long time.

She wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Thomas Dubbs

Dennis Ellis

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

BROWNE GEORGE LOS ANGELES

Suzanne Dugan

Deborah Elman

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

GRANT & EISENHOFER NEW YORK

Andrew Dunlap

David Elsberg

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

Karen Dunn

Michael Elsner

PAUL WEISS WASHINGTON, D.C.

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Karen Dyer

Candice Enders

CADWALADER ORLANDO

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

Amy Easton

John Eubanks

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Jay Edelson

Donna Evans

EDELSON CHICAGO

COHEN MILSTEIN NEW YORK

Jay Eisenhofer

Eric Fastiff

GRANT & EISENHOFER NEW YORK

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Robert Eisler

Leonid Feller

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

QUINN EMANUEL CHICAGO

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John Rizio-Hamilton BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ (NEW YORK)

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JOHN RIZIO-HAMILTON

BY ALISON PREECE

JOHN RIZIO-HAMILTON IS A MASTERFUL

An adept litigator with an entrepreneurial mindset, Rizio-Hamilton – a member of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers – has led his firm’s expansion into Canadian markets with outreach to institutional investors with potential fraud claims there, and helps run the firm’s Global Securities and Litigation Monitoring Team.

Even so, he almost didn’t go to law school.

Now, over a year into the global pandemic that’s roiled financial markets, Rizio-Hamilton is keeping watch for fraud that may yet be revealed.

securities litigator, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars for defrauded investors in cases that impact society on a broader scale, shoring up protections for investors battling mammoth corporate interests.

He’s recognized broadly as an effective and unrelenting attorney.

“I wanted to be a writer after college,” he admits. He spent a couple years as a beat reporter in Brooklyn, investigating local government corruption. But the law was in his blood.

His parents were lawyers, and he met his wife in law school, when they were placed together on the same moot court team and traveled together for a competition in constitutional law. “We fell in love – and we won the competition,” he says.

After graduating Brooklyn Law School summa cum laude, Rizio-Hamilton secured clerkships at two of the most sophisticated courts in the country, the Southern District of New York and the 2nd Circuit. He then joined the plaintiff securities litigation powerhouse Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann.

He chose the firm because he thought it would give him the best chance to use his law degree to “make a positive impact on society” while working on highstakes, complex class actions. It did not disappoint: He spent most of his associate years fighting for investors in Bank of America over misstatements surrounding the merger with Merrill Lynch following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, a case which ultimately settled for an eye-popping $2.4B. Having demonstrated his litigation prowess on these highprofile cases, Rizio-Hamilton’s rise to partnership was rapid: He was elected to the firm’s partner ranks five years after joining the firm.

Rizio-Hamilton’s first case as a partner involved the JPMorgan London Whale trading fiasco, in which he helped a team recover $150M for investors. His work made headlines again most recently with the sweeping securities class action against Signet Jewelers, where he was able to set a game-changing precedent in the securities bar by recovering $240M for investors in a case involving alleged misstatements related to sexual harassment at the company.

PHOTO BY: LAURA BARISONZI

“We’ll be ready,” he says. “No matter what comes out, I guarantee you we’ll be ready.”

Lawdragon: Tell me about Signet. A $240M recovery for investors over sexual harassment and gender discrimination claims? That’s pretty incredible.

John Rizio-Hamilton: Well, thank you. It was a really interesting case, and sort of the best of the best when it comes to securities class action law because it was highly complex, extremely difficult to litigate, but when you do it well, and you achieve a successful result, you recover not only a significant amount of money for investors who have been harmed, but you also affect corporate behavior in a way that benefits society more broadly.

LD: It seems like you were up against a lot with that case, to prove fraud over sexual harassment claims or misconduct.

JRH: Signet was really unique because it had these two parts. One was very traditional, concerning misstatements relating to the value of the company’s in-house loan portfolio. The unique part involved claims that were based on misstatements and omissions related to sexual harassment.

Securities class actions based on the statements and omissions relating to sexual harassment at the defendant company have a really, to put it mildly, mixed track record in the courts. They often get dismissed and they often face insurmountable challenges of class certification. It’s just not the kind of thing that judges typically think a securities class action is supposed to remedy. Now, hopefully judicial attitudes about that are changing because this absolutely is the kind of thing that securities class actions can and should be used to address.

We litigated Signet for years and we defeated the motion to dismiss with respect to both kinds of claims.

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HE CHOSE THE FIRM BECAUSE HE THOUGHT IT WOULD GIVE HIM THE BEST CHANCE TO USE HIS LAW DEGREE TO “MAKE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON SOCIETY” WHILE WORKING ON HIGHSTAKES, COMPLEX CLASS ACTIONS. IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT. We’re one of the few cases in the annals to overcome motions to dismiss aimed at claims based on underlying sexual harassment, because many courts hold that the statements that are at issue in those cases are not material, meaning they’re not important to investors. But, we defeated that challenge in this case. We then faced a whole new set of hurdles at the class certification stage because defendants argued that, in order to determine whether the statements were false, you actually have to go and look at each alleged act of sexual discrimination and determine whether it occurred.

We had hundreds of such alleged acts of sexual discrimination in our case, and defendants said it would require a hundred mini trials on each of the alleged harassments. In that kind of scenario, class certification’s not appropriate. We had to overcome those arguments, which we did at the district court level.

LD: How did you overcome that exactly? To not litigate every single incident, did you have to prove it was a systemic issue? I saw that you used statements from the code of conduct, which seems like a novel move.

JRH: It’s very unusual to get code of conduct statements sustained. Defendants have had considerable success in getting cases based on code of conduct statements dismissed. What we did here was argue that in context, the statements were specific enough to be actionable and significant enough to be material because the underlying misconduct was so severe.

Then, to overcome the class certification arguments, we argued that we didn’t have to prove whether each alleged incident was true. We just had to demonstrate that the company wasn’t forthcoming about what it had been accused of. Part of that was wrapped into the fact that the sexual harassment allegations were made in the form of sworn declarations that had been submitted in this underlying employment discrimination arbitration against the company.

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The company had made a litigation disclosure about that arbitration in which they characterized the allegations as simply concerning store-level gender discrimination. We argued that statement was false, because what the underlying arbitration really alleged was severe instances of widespread sexual harassment, all the way up into the company’s high executive ranks. We argued that statement was false, regardless of whether each alleged incident of harassment had occurred, because they misrepresented what they had been accused of.

To my knowledge, it’s the only case involving misstatements related to alleged sexual harassment that has been certified by a federal court in the securities class action context. That made it unique.

LD: That, and the amount of the settlement.

JRH: A large settlement compensates investors for the harm they suffered, and sends a message to corporate boards and executives that there will be a significant price to pay for this behavior. Changing corporate behavior on a wider scale is key.

LD: What cases are you working on these days?

JRH: I’m in active litigation on a really interesting case against Mattel, surrounding the accounting for a deferred tax asset. It’s super interesting because it involves the coverup of a known misstatement by the company and its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

It’s in the Central District of California and the judge recently sustained our complaint, which alleges some pretty appalling behavior that also demonstrates more broadly why auditors are not keeping the public safe from financial misstatements.

The central idea in the case is that, once the company and PwC figured out that the company had materially misstated its financial results, instead of correcting it, they went on to cover it up for years until they got a whistleblower letter that forced them to come clean.

I’m also working on a securities class action case in the District of New Jersey involving misstatements

500

Mark Ferguson

Jason Forge

BARTLIT BECK CHICAGO

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Kenneth Fetterman

Christine Fox

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

Julie Fieber

Frederic Fox

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

Reid Figel

David Frederick

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Edward Filusch

William Fredericks

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

Steven Fineman

Michael Fritz

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

MCKOOL SMITH DALLAS

Rachel Fleishman

Qianwei Fu

REID COLLINS NEW YORK

ZELLE SAN FRANCISCO

Jodi Westbrook Flowers

Benjamin Galdston

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

BERGER MONTAGUE SAN DIEGO

Parker Folse

Reena Gambhir

SUSMAN GODFREY SEATTLE

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

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500 and omissions concerning an international bribery scheme that a company was involved in to secure valuable permits for its business in India. We filed our case and got over a motion to dismiss in part.

While that was on appeal, the Department of Justice indicted the company’s former president and former chief legal officer for engaging in the bribery scheme on which our case was based. So, that criminal prosecution is now proceeding in parallel to our civil case. It’s fascinating to litigate a securities class action based on bribery, particularly when there’s a parallel criminal case that could very well end in convictions.

LD: You’ll have to keep us posted on that one! You also have an interesting niche with your work for investors in Canada. How did that come about?

JRH: I wanted to figure out ways to connect with institutional investors as much as I could, to tell them about what we do. We’re really very good at this work and I knew we could serve their interests in unique ways that other firms couldn’t. This had been on my mind when I wound up taking an accounting fraud case a couple years ago against a company called Penn West. Penn West was a company based in Canada, and its stock was dual listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Our case was in New York, and there was a parallel securities class action against the company in Canada.

When it came time to try and resolve the case, the company wanted global peace, meaning, they wanted to resolve both the Canadian and U.S. securities class actions at the same time. We mediated in Toronto with the law firm that was leading

the Canadian case, working together to come to a resolution that would solve both actions. Then we distributed the funds to investors in the United States and Canada.

Through that case, I got talking to the Canadian firm and the lawyers there about the need among Canadian institutional investors who might be pursuing or interested in pursuing securities fraud class actions in the United States when circumstances warranted it, and needed a connection to the right type of firm to assist them.

The Canadian firm thought it would be a really good idea to partner with us and introduce us to their clients, which they did. It branched out from there, and I also started conducting broader outreach in Canada after that.

LD: That’s such a brilliant way to build business in new markets, really connecting with potential clients who could be in need of your services.

JRH: It’s something I take a lot of pleasure and pride in. I’m introducing our firm and what we do to investors in another part of the world who have significant interest in the integrity of the U.S. securities markets.

I’m so very proud of what we do. It’s always what I’ve wanted to do as a lawyer in private practice. It’s really a pleasure for me to be able to meet with them and tell them about the firm’s accomplishments and how we can serve their interests when their beneficiaries lose money as a result of corporate misconduct.

It’s really a wonderful addition to have as part of my legal career that is separate and apart from actually litigating the cases, because I love to litigate the

I GREW UP IN PHILADELPHIA, AND MY PARENTS WERE PLAINTIFFS’ LAWYERS. GROWING UP IN MY HOME AROUND THE DINNER TABLE, WE TALKED ABOUT WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE A PLAINTIFFS’ LAWYER AND THE IMPORTANCE OF REPRESENTING THE LITTLE GUY AGAINST LARGE CORPORATE INTERESTS. THAT STOKED AN INTEREST IN ME FROM A VERY EARLY AGE. 94

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Jonathan Gardner

Danielle Gilmore

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

Karin Garvey

Emma Gilmore

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

Faith Gay

Maria Ginzburg

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

Paul Geller

Karma Giulianelli

ROBBINS GELLER BOCA RATON

BARTLIT BECK DENVER

Eric George

Brendan Glackin

BROWNE GEORGE LOS ANGELES

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Adam Gerchen

Jacob Goldberg

KELLER LENKNER CHICAGO

THE ROSEN LAW FIRM JENKINTOWN, PA.

Eric Gibbs

Jordan Goldstein

GIBBS LAW GROUP OAKLAND, CALIF.

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

Robin Gibbs

Larry Golston

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Carol Gilden

Benny Goodman III

COHEN MILSTEIN CHICAGO

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

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THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE IN BOTH CHAMBERS THAT I WORKED IN WAS TO GET THE RIGHT ANSWER UNDER THE LAW AND DO THE RIGHT THING. THAT’S A LIFE LESSON THAT I’VE APPLIED TO MY PRACTICE. IT GUIDED MY CAREER CHOICE TO COME TO BERNSTEIN. IT HAS GUIDED HOW I LITIGATE MY CASES. DOING THE RIGHT THING IS PART OF THE DNA OF THIS FIRM. cases. It’s challenging, it’s exciting, it’s fun. It’s really hard because we go up against great lawyers on the other side. I also love the opportunity to do outreach and meet with these investors. I love that just as much as the hand-to-hand combat of litigation.

LD: When you say you always wanted to do this, do you mean securities law specifically? Or, when did you first know you wanted to be a lawyer?

JRH: It goes back a ways. I grew up in Philadelphia, and my parents were plaintiffs’ lawyers. They had their own firm, Rizio and Hamilton, where they handled personal injury cases. Growing up in my home around the dinner table, we talked about what it was like to be a plaintiffs’ lawyer and the importance of representing the little guy against large corporate interests. That stoked an interest in me from a very early age.

As I got older, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go to law school. I really enjoyed writing, so, after graduating from college, I came to Brooklyn and took a job as a local news reporter, covering local community news and politics. I also did a weekly column about Brooklyn politics, which was fascinating at the time because it was dominated by people who have since gone to jail for corruption. All the backroom dealings and sordid affairs were very fun to cover as a young reporter.

My beat stretched all over the borough, down in Coney Island and all the way up to the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights. I saw all these different parts of Brooklyn, and time and again, I would see these lawyers doing interesting, beneficial things in the community. Ultimately, I decided to go to law school, much to my parents’ relief.

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LD: So Brooklyn Law was a natural choice! Then you clerked in SDNY and the 2nd Circuit, which would be incredible training ground.

JRH: Right after graduation, I knew I wanted to clerk for judges. I had thought it would be really interesting to be part of the judicial process. I was very fortunate to clerk for two outstanding judges who were also outstanding human beings. I clerked for a district court judge named Sidney Stein in the Southern District, and then Chester Straub in the Second Circuit. The guiding principle in both chambers that I worked in was to get the right answer under the law and do the right thing. That’s a life lesson that I’ve applied to my practice. It guided my career choice to come to Bernstein. It has guided how I litigate my cases. Doing the right thing is part of the DNA of this firm.

LD: Any other big take-aways from your clerkships?

JRH: Throughout my time with judges Stein and Straub, I developed a real keen interest in complex class litigation. Rule 23 cases were totally fascinating to me and I saw that they were a way to use civil litigation to make a large impact and to do it on behalf of the little person against the big person, and, in particular, the large corporate interest. That really resonated with me. I was also very committed to public interest law, so I wanted to find a way to marry these interests in a complex class litigation with a commitment to doing it in a way that had a positive impact on society.

I also learned how to dig deep and persevere. I once went to Judge Stein and told him that I had looked very thoroughly and there wasn’t a case on point and he very politely told me that I should go look again.

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AS LAWYERS, WE HAVE LOTS OF FIGHTS OVER IMPORTANT SUBSTANTIVE THINGS, BUT IT’S ALSO IMPORTANT TO AVOID UNNECESSARY SKIRMISHES AND TREAT EACH OTHER WITH RESPECT, EVEN WHEN WE’RE AT ODDS. I went and looked again, very thoroughly, and told him again, unfortunately there just wasn’t a case on point. He told me, again very politely, that I should probably look again. I looked at for a third time and dug deeper and deeper and finally found one case that was obscure, but on point. I’ve always taken from that, that you just have to be extremely driven and scrappy as a lawyer and keep digging until you find the helpful case, the helpful fact. It’s kind of like, be like water and find a way. Find a way to the fact or the legal principle that you need. It’s always there.

You just have to look harder to find it.

LD: What a great philosophy.

JRH: That is definitely my philosophy in litigating. The only other guiding light is to treat my adversaries with respect. As lawyers, we have lots of fights over important substantive things, but it’s also important to avoid unnecessary skirmishes and treat each other with respect, even when we’re at odds.

LD: Did you go straight to Bernstein after your clerkships?

JRH: Yes, because it was the one place that I thought really would marry those two desires for me by enabling me to work on really high stakes, complex class actions and to do it in a way that was socially beneficial.

LD: The firm seems like a perfect fi t for you, because it’s filled with really smart, sophisticated attorneys who are just as good as the corporate defense lawyers, yet fighting for the little guy, as you say. Firms like yours are exciting because they’re correcting that long-standing imbalance in the justice system.

JRH: I like to think of it as pound-for-pound, we’re the best firm in the world. Meaning, we may be smaller than these large corporate defense firms, but we take them on in our cases all the time and their teams of lawyers may be double or triple or

quadruple the size of our teams, but it doesn’t matter. We drive results and we achieve great results for our clients, even going up against these Goliaths. It’s really fun. It’s hard, but it’s really fun.

Honestly, it’s exhilarating.

LD: I think that’s where greatness in this field comes from, in part, when you really, really enjoy the work.

And it seems like Bernstein Litowitz is the type of place where even younger associates get real experience.

JRH: It’s a place where you learn by doing, and you learn at the elbow of more experienced lawyers. It’s also very much a meritocracy. We give lawyers all the opportunities that they express to us they want, and that they show they can handle. That allows younger lawyers to develop.

I remember as an associate working on the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger case, all the partners would be in the room with the associates and we would hash out strategy together. There were times when we had to write a brief on short notice, and we would all get together in a conference room, hook up a laptop to the large TV screen, sit and write the brief together.

It was awesome. We taught each other. Not even explicitly, just ordering ideas, designing strategies, putting the brief together. Even on the level of writing the sentence, we worked together. That helped shape my approach to team building, and also my skills as a lawyer.

LD: That’s a testament to the collaborative culture of the place, all these lawyers of different experience levels in one room, writing sentences together.

That’s impressive.

JRH: It was fun. There were a lot of late nights, and a lot of Chinese food was eaten together. Having that kind of culture and team spirit enabled us to really succeed.

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Melissa Goodman

Tor Gronborg

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Sathya Gosselin

Marc Gross

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

David Grable

Stanley Grossman

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

Elise Grace

Michael Grunfeld

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

Nicholas Gravante

Joseph Guglielmo

CADWALADER NEW YORK

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

Salvatore Graziano

Aundrea Gulley

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

Eli Greenstein

Michael Guzman

KESSLER TOPAZ SAN FRANCISCO

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Justin Griffin

Olav Haazen

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

GRANT & EISENHOFER NEW YORK

Joseph Grinstein

Jennifer Duncan Hackett

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

ZELLE WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Serena Hallowell

Dean Harvey

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

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Sean Handler

Stephen Hasegawa

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

PHILLIPS & COHEN SAN FRANCISCO

Michael Hanin

Michael Hausfeld

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

Drew Hansen

Eric Havian

SUSMAN GODFREY SEATTLE

CONSTANTINE CANNON SAN FRANCISCO

Mark Hansen

Lexi Hazam

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Erica Harris

Christopher Heffelfinger

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

BERMAN TABACCO SAN FRANCISCO

Geoffrey Harrison

Richard Heimann

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

James Harrod

Robert Henssler Jr.

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Anne Hayes Hartman

Rick Hess

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Mark Dearman ROBBINS GELLER (BOCA RATON, FLA.)

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MARK DEARMAN MARK DEARMAN KNOWS A THING OR TWO ABOUT THE BIG GUNS. The first part of his career was dedicated to representing Fortune 500 companies in large defense actions, including complex class actions and product liability cases.

Even before that, his life as a young person seemed to circle back time and again to greatness in the law: His father worked for an early-career David Boies when Dearman was a kid, and in college, his roommate was Paul Geller, who would go on to found the knock-out plaintiffs firm Robbins Geller.

After a successful defense practice, Dearman heard a calling from his better angels and decided to put his extensive know-how to use against those large corporate interests that he used to protect. He’s now a partner at Robbins Geller, with his scope aimed at some of the largest companies in the world, seeking justice for those harmed by corporate greed. His practice is focused on MDLs (“multi-district litigation”) where he thrives off the collaborative strategizing.

An early breakout case once he’d moved to the other side of the “V” was the Volkswagen emissions scandal, where the auto maker was caught cheating on smog tests by rigging their diesel engines to appear compliant only during testing, then spewing dirty, toxic emissions when in regular use. The case settled for a colossal $14.7B. Dearman was also part of the team that took on Apple after the infamous “throttling” fiasco, where iPhone were being purposefully slowed down on a wide scale, despite a clear promise to users that it didn’t occur. The case settled recently for $310M. Currently, Dearman’s handling a case against the makers of Zantac, a heartburn pharmaceutical that was the first “blockbuster” drug to reach $1B in sales before being recalled for containing a known carcinogen.

In perhaps his most impactful case to date, Dearman, along with other Robbins Geller attorneys, is spearheading an MDL surrounding the opioid epidemic.

The team is representing state and local government entities who are bringing actions against manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies who marketed highly addictive and damaging opioids to doctors

PHOTO BY: JOSH RITCHIE

BY ALISON PREECE and the American population, spurring on a public health crisis that continues to this day.

Lawdragon: Mark, you switched from a very successful defense practice into a plaintiff practice. How did you make that decision? Do you ever regret it?

Mark Dearman: I haven’t looked back a second. My dad did work for defense lawyers and plaintiffs lawyers alike when I was a kid, he was a private investigator. I didn’t know what we were doing, I just knew we were doing it for lawyers.

As it turned out, I started working at a big defense firm for the first seven years of my practice. Then I went out with one other lawyer from that firm, and the two of us practiced for about 10 years, doing both plaintiffs work and defense work. We took some clients from the big firm with us. Then — well, to back up a bit, Paul Geller was my college roommate.

LD: Oh wow! I didn’t know that. You knew him before he was a legend. What was he like back then?

MD: Always working really hard. What I have learned from him today is that preparation is everything. He’s built an incredible career that way, and he was like that when we were in college. There was no such thing as over preparation for Paul. He worked harder than anybody else, he studied harder than anybody else, he was never satisfied with anything besides an A. LD: Knowing what I know about Paul, he probably got those straight As even though he also partied harder than anyone else too.

MD: That may be the one area where I have him beat.

LD: Ha! And so then that’s how, years later, you came to work for Robbins Geller?

MD: Yes, for years, he and I had been talking about working together. I finally said, “You know what? If I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it.” At that point I was doing about 50/50 plaintiff work and defense work. The plaintiffs work I was doing was more catastrophic personal injury, not much class action.

In 2010, I went to work with Paul exclusively handling huge complex class actions. It’s really the ideal space for me. What we’re doing is important, representing consumers and institutional investors. There’s no question that this is what I was meant to do.

LD: That’s pretty cool, too, that your dad was a private investigator, working for lawyers.

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AFTER A SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE PRACTICE, DEARMAN HEARD A CALLING FROM HIS BETTER ANGELS AND DECIDED TO PUT HIS EXTENSIVE KNOW-HOW TO USE AGAINST THOSE LARGE CORPORATE INTERESTS THAT HE USED TO PROTECT. MD: It was formative for sure. My dad and that work is what led me to become a lawyer myself. One of the lawyers he worked with was actually David Boies.

there are so many people who use Apple iPhones and who were impacted by the slowdown issues. The court recently approved a $310M resolution with Apple.

LD: You’re kidding. You grew up surrounded by star lawyers before they launched into the stratosphere!

LD: Congratulations, that’s excellent. What’s next on your plate?

MD: Yep, and years later I worked with David again in the Volkswagen litigation.

MD: Right now my time is split between the Zantac litigation and the National Prescription Opiate case.

LD: Wow. And you remembered each other?

MD: I certainly remembered him. I was 12 or 13 when I first knew him, then as I became a lawyer I watched his career, I knew what he was doing because it was important to me. Then, once I was at Robbins Geller, we were in talks with some of the early plaintiff lawyers in the Volkswagen emissions case. One of those lawyers was David Boies. The next thing I know I am eating dinner with David, Paul and a group of lawyers.

I’m 48 or 49 years old at this point. We’re sitting at dinner and we look at each other and I say, “I don’t know if my name rings a bell, it’s Dearman.” He says right away, “Larry’s son.”

LD: Oh my gosh. That famous memory of his.

MD: Totally. Paul and David were appointed and I ended up working alongside David and his team.

Things really come full circle, sometimes.

LD: Was Volkswagen a stand-out case for you?

MD: Absolutely. Due to lead counsel Elizabeth Cabraser’s inclusivity, I had the opportunity to be hands on in a huge litigation that resulted in over a $14B recovery.

LD: The Apple “throttling” case must have been another interesting one.

MD: Yes, I was appointed to the Chair of the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in that case. The leadership structure was on the larger side and one of my responsibilities included the implementation, among the plaintiff firms, of the court’s time and expense protocol. That was an experience I will not soon forget. The litigation was also a massive undertaking by the plaintiffs as

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LD: I’d love to hear about both. Can we start with Zantac? I’m not familiar with that one.

MD: Zantac is the brand name for the generic drug ranitidine, which was sold both over the counter and by prescription. In 2019, the drug came off of the market due to the discovery of high levels of the carcinogen, NDMA in the drug.

Lawsuits filed across the country were consolidated and coordinated in an MDL down here in Palm Beach County. It’s a multifaceted case. First, the people who have taken the drug, and now have cancer, so there’s a personal injury component. Second, the class action side of the MDL where consumers are seeking economic losses relating to their purchases. Finally, a medical monitoring component to the litigation. It is the intersection of a mass tort and a class action in an MDL. I was appointed to the leadership structure with a group of very talented lawyers and I am serving as the Chair on the class action side of the case. The mass and class cases are going down the same litigation track as the evidence developed in discovery will be used in the personal injury, economic loss and medical monitoring cases. So Zantac is a huge case because you have all of this going on at the same time.

In addition, ranitidine came to the market over 40 years ago, so discovery goes back a ways. You have the brand manufacturers, the generic manufacturers later on, the distributors and the retailers. There are dozens of defendants in the litigation, and around 80,000 claims in the litigation registry.

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LD: Such an important case, and sounds very interesting to work on, too, with all the moving parts.

Now, the opioid litigation. We’re all familiar with the epidemic of course.

The governmental entities are seeking monetary damages to fund programs for education, drug treatment, mental health counseling – the type of services that will help abate the epidemic.

MD: Yes, this will likely be the most important case of my career. We all know someone who has been impacted, one way or the other, by the opioid epidemic. We all know people who have suffered as a result of opioid abuse. Something had to be done.

The judge has set bellwether trials, some of which were settled on the eve of trial or were delayed by Covid. One of the trials currently scheduled is for our client, the City and County of San Francisco.

In the 1990s, opioids were effectively used to treat short-term, post-surgical related pain and for palliative end-of-life care. The epidemic really started when the opioid manufacturers recognized that the market share for opioids could be exponentially increased if they were prescribed for long-term chronic-type issues.

They put profits over patients. So, they took a play from Big Tobacco and deceptively marketed opioids so they could reverse the previous medical understanding of effective opioid use. They marketed to anyone and everyone – consumers and health care professionals.

LD: And their greedy campaign was successful, right?

Before they knew it, the market was completely flooded.

MD: Exactly. These defendants had a responsibility to know who their customer was and where the pills were going. If you’re delivering millions of pills to a city that’s got several thousand people, that should be a red flag that there’s a problem.

I was on a plane, back before the pandemic when people still flew places, and I got into a conversation with the passenger next to me about my work on the opioids litigation. She said to me, “You’re not going to believe this, but I own a manufacturing plant and I can’t even get people to come work for me because we drug test everybody. And there is so much addiction that I can’t even let them into my plant. I have paying jobs that I can’t give to people because they’re addicted.”

Over the years it has become more difficult to get an opioid prescription and now people are turning to heroin and fentanyl. Statistics confirm that many people who were taking and overdosing on heroin, started on prescription pain pills. And if we thought heroin was killing a lot of people, fentanyl is killing more because nobody knows how to dose it.

LD: It’s really frustrating, scary and so sad. Tell me about the litigation you’re handling?

MD: The litigation that we are involved in is on behalf of governmental entities who have claims against the manufacturers, the distributors and the pharmacies, relating to their marketing, distribution and sale of opioids.

We need to recover as much money as we possibly can and use it toward abatement. The fact of the matter is, there’s really not enough money to get rid of this problem. But we have to start some place.

LD: You have such an incredible career. Do you have advice for younger lawyers starting out who might want to do similar work?

MD: I have to tell you, my son just got into law school.

LD: Mazel tov! That’s great.

MD: My father exposed me to the law, and I guess I’ve introduced him to the law. I was the first one to go to college in my family, followed by my sister. Now my son is going to law school and my daughter is a sophomore in college.

LD: I love that. Also impressive that your dad was doing such high-level work without a college degree.

MD: He was good at what he did, that’s for sure. My best advice to younger lawyers that want to get involved in the MDL arena is to ask the more senior lawyers how they can get involved and when an opportunity is presented, take full advantage of it.

LD: What would you say is your favorite part of this type of practice?

MD: I really enjoy the collaboration of MDL cases.

With these cases, you have the opportunity to work with other law firms who have also been appointed by the court. The lawyers from these different firms function together, work together for the good of the case. You want to be both efficient and effective.

So while I love the legal strategy and, for me, taking a good deposition, there’s nothing like working on these large MDL cases. The ability to work together and to coordinate, not just with my colleague down the hall, but with lawyers all over the country.

LD: What do you like to do when you are not working?

MD: If you ask my wife, you will hear that I’m always working. When I’m not at my desk, I’m either on my paddle board, playing with my dogs, or spending time with family and friends.

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Tamar Weinrib POMERANTZ (NEW YORK)

TAMAR WEINRIB THE LAW HAS BEEN A TRUE CALLING FOR TAMAR

Weinrib, who gravitated towards legal texts as far back as elementary school. Those early instincts carried her to Fordham Law, where a string of achievements in moot court foretold a successful career in the courtroom. In fact, the Pomerantz partner cherishes the creative process of writing briefs in addition to excelling at oral arguments that, for the time being, are happening over the phone or computer screen.

Weinrib draws upon her efficiency and passion to thrive both at complex securities litigation and as a parent raising four children in a pandemic.

Lawdragon: Can you describe the mix of work that you do in your practice?

Tamar Weinrib: At Pomerantz, we predominantly litigate securities fraud cases pursuant to Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act. That’s what I focus my practice on, day to day. What’s interesting is that even though all of my cases fall under that umbrella, each is so distinct. Each involves a different type of com-

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BY JOHN RYAN pany, in a different area, with different complexities and different focuses. So even though the general claim is the same, no two cases are alike. I’ve had the opportunity – and the challenge – to master the protocols of the years-long FDA approval process for drugs, to learn the intricacies of dark pool trading, and to acquire new knowledge of various other subject matters necessary to successfully understand and frame the claims we bring and to enable me to litigate as zealously as possible for our clients.

LD: What are some aspects about your work that you find particularly professionally satisfying?

TW: One aspect is the creativity involved. Most people wouldn’t think law requires creativity, but it does.

When I am drafting a complaint – or even later on in the process, when drafting an opposition to a motion to dismiss, or deposing witnesses – I have to be creative, to think outside the box. What is the claim really about? What am I trying to say to the court? What are the facts and how do they support the claim? Being creative and coming up with novel legal theories is

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very satisfying, particularly because it can influence future cases as well. When you’re drafting briefs, it’s also important to write in a way that’s not only factually accurate, but that holds the reader’s attention. I always think of the judge, and not only try to convince her that my claim has merit, but to hold her interest.

I want her to pick up the brief and actually want to read it through, want to get past paragraph one to see what happens next.

LD: Could you talk about a case that you found particularly rewarding?

TW: I’ve been lucky to have had several. But one that stands out is the litigation a few years back against Barclays plc concerning the way defendants operated the bank’s dark pool. A dark pool is a private trading platform where the size and price of the orders are not revealed to other participants. We alleged, among other things, that Barclays falsely promised investors that it would police the pool to protect its clients from predatory trading. In fact, not only did Barclays allow aggressive traders into its dark pool but wooed them with perks that gave them a competitive edge over traditional traders. This case gave us the opportunity to litigate very important issues for the plaintiffs’ securities bar. At the class certification stage, we argued before the 2nd Circuit on what it takes to establish the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance, what plaintiffs’ burdens are for demonstrating market efficiency and what defendants’ burdens are for negating price impact. The 2nd Circuit, in granting our motion for class certification, handed down important rulings that were beneficial not only for our clients in this case, but for all plaintiffs in all securities cases thereafter. As the lead attorney on that case for Pomerantz, I drafted not only the class certification briefs but the 2nd Circuit appeal brief as well. We zealously pushed the case forward for the class and were in the midst of trial preparation when we reached a settlement.

LD: You mentioned having to learn about the FDA process for drug approval. Can you talk about a case in which that was important?

TW: I’ve had several. One was a case against pharmaceutical company Pain Therapeutics concerning Remoxy, a drug they were trying to get approved.

Remoxy is a painkiller in the opioid family. In order to effectively litigate that case, I had to understand the ins and outs of getting a drug approved, the relevant FDA regulations, the clinical testing process, what a company needs to show in their new drug application

to convince the FDA to grant the company approval to market that drug. That case stands out both because I acquired quite the education about the FDA process, but also because it’s another strong case that we pushed forward up until the very morning of trial. We then effectively negotiated a settlement to the benefit of the class after five years of hard-fought, contentious litigation, which involved the filing of three amended complaints, extensive motion practice – including motions to dismiss, a motion for class certification and a motion for summary judgment – all decided in the plaintiffs’ favor – analysis of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, multiple depositions (including two experts) and comprehensive trial preparation. The $8.5M settlement represented an especially beneficial resolution of the matter, given defendants’ vigorous defenses, the limitation on ultimate recovery due to severely dwindling insurance and the remaining uncertainty with regard to the FDA’s consideration of the company’s third Remoxy new drug application submission.

LD: Can you talk a little bit about the allegations in that case, in terms of what information was not disclosed to investors?

TW: In that case, the class alleged that defendants misled the market into believing that the issues that caused the FDA to issue a Complete Response Letter, or “CRL,” for the company’s first New Drug Application for Remoxy submitted in 2008 had been resolved in the resubmission of the New Drug Application in December 2010. A CRL is the FDA’s way of saying we are not approving your drug at this time, and here’s why. In reality, the issues that led to the first CRL, which concerned the stability of the drug and issues with the manufacturing process, persisted. All the while, defendants were actively speaking about the stability issue, and made public statements saying they’d fixed the problem, though they knew they hadn’t. The FDA once again issued a CRL for Remoxy in June 2011, and once again cited issues with the drug’s stability as the primary obstacle to approval.

As far as I am aware, that drug still hasn’t been approved.

LD: When did you know you wanted to become a lawyer?

TW: I knew from an early age. Even in elementary school, when we had library time, I sought out books on law. I also think that my early interest in drama and acting in school plays helped prepare me for standing in a courtroom, where oral presentation,

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Jay Himes

Shauna Itri

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

SEEGER WEISS PHILADELPHIA

Derek Ho

James Jaconette

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Kathryn Hoek

Geoffrey Jarvis

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

Lester Hooker

Mathew Jasinski

SAXENA WHITE BOCA RATON

MOTLEY RICE HARTFORD, CONN.

Lisa Houssiere

Rachel Jensen

MCKOOL SMITH HOUSTON

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Mary Inman

Brent Johnson

CONSTANTINE CANNON SAN FRANCISCO

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Phil Iovieno

Chad Johnson

CADWALADER ALBANY, N.Y.

ROBBINS GELLER NEW YORK

William Isaacson

Christopher P. Johnson

PAUL WEISS WASHINGTON, D.C.

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

Uri Itkin

Geoffrey Johnson

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

SCOTT + SCOTT CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, OHIO

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WHEN YOU’RE DRAFTING BRIEFS, IT’S ALSO IMPORTANT TO WRITE IN A WAY THAT’S NOT ONLY FACTUALLY ACCURATE, BUT THAT HOLDS THE READER’S ATTENTION. I ALWAYS THINK OF THE JUDGE, AND NOT ONLY TRY TO CONVINCE HER THAT MY CLAIM HAS MERIT, BUT TO HOLD HER INTEREST. I WANT HER TO PICK UP THE BRIEF AND ACTUALLY WANT TO READ IT THROUGH. the ability to convey arguments with the right tone and manner, is highly important. In high school my favorite subject was Talmud. The Talmud is essentially a compilation of legal opinions and debates on just about every aspect of Jewish life, with centuries of intergenerational rabbinic commentaries on those opinions and debates. I loved the back and forth between the rabbis, who argued over the intricacies of various issues and had different points of view and explanations to support their stance on each issue.

It’s strikingly similar to reading cases and the arguments back and forth between attorneys. I was also always drawn to debating. That early draw to conceptualization and argumentation, which persisted as my education progressed, confirmed for me that a future in law made sense.

LD: Did you pursue your interest in debating?

TW: Yes. In law school, I joined Fordham’s moot court team. We took our commitment very seriously.

We dedicated inordinate amounts of time to our craft and making sure that our written work and oral arguments were top notch and beyond reproach.

We competed and won awards for best brief and best team. I coached the following year’s moot court team and again, our team swept all three categories – best argument, best brief and best team. I enjoyed every minute of it. I had friends in law school who thought I must be crazy for taking it on, because it entailed a lot of time and work beyond the normal obligations of law school. You already have a lot on your plate trying to get the best grades you can.

There were many sleepless nights spent in the Fordham moot court office preparing for these competitions that could have been spent studying for a test or doing any one of myriads of other activities. But moot court, maybe more than anything else in my

law school experience, prepared me for the career I have now.

LD: Speaking of having a lot on your plate: You’re a partner at a prestigious law firm. You’re a mother of four young children. You’re working from home during the pandemic. What can you tell me about the challenges that you face now and how you’re dealing with them?

TW: Work/life balance is always a challenge. Particularly when you have four children who range in age from 3 to 12. It’s challenging in normal times, but we’re in the midst of pandemic, so my children aren’t consistently in in-person school. Staying on top of a full case load and participating in oral arguments telephonically or via Zoom present unique challenges when there are three divisions of schooling taking place in the next room. Trying to juggle all of that is certainly a challenge, but it’s a challenge that while arguably unique in the midst of a pandemic, isn’t new.

It’s one I’ve trained for my entire career. That’s not to suggest I saw a pandemic coming. However, it has always been my goal to commit fully to every area of my life: to be the best attorney that I can be and do right by my clients, and to be the best mother I can be and do right by my family. If you’re efficient with your time and are passionate about what you do, you make it happen – no matter the surrounding circumstances.

It’s about adjusting to whatever life throws at you. I say that with full recognition that I am blessed to have wonderful support systems both professionally and personally that enable me to keep performing that juggling act. And that’s what life is about, adjusting to things that are thrown your way. We get thrown curveballs on our legal cases all the time. You learn how to take your bat and swing at them with as much confidence and skill as you can muster.

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James Johnson

Stacey Kaplan

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

KESSLER TOPAZ SAN FRANCISCO

Kristen Johnson

Marc Kasowitz

HAGENS BERMAN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

Randy Johnston

Beth Kaswan

JOHNSTON TOBEY DALLAS

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

Megan Jones

Elana Katcher

HAUSFELD SAN FRANCISCO

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

Jennifer Joost

Ashley Keller

KESSLER TOPAZ SAN FRANCISCO

KELLER LENKNER CHICAGO

Avi Josefson

Christopher Keller

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

Michael Kane

Gregory Keller

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

SHAHMOON KELLER GREAT NECK, N.Y.

David Kaplan

Michael Kellogg

SAXENA WHITE SAN DIEGO

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Robert Kaplan

Cindy Caranella Kelly

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

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Erika Kelton

Michael Kohn

PHILLIPS & COHEN SAN FRANCISCO

KOHN, KOHN & COLAPINTO WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jeannine Kenney

Stephen Kohn

HAUSFELD PHILADELPHIA

KOHN, KOHN & COLAPINTO WASHINGTON, D.C.

David Kessler

Lena Konanova

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

Jean Kim

Sheron Korpus

CONSTANTINE CANNON NEW YORK

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

Phillip Kim

Mathew Korte

THE ROSEN LAW FIRM NEW YORK

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Marlon Kimpson

Marlene Koury

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

CONSTANTINE CANNON NEW YORK

Gayle Klein

Robert Kry

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

MOLOLAMKEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jeffrey Kodroff

Nancy Kulesa

SPECTOR ROSEMAN PHILADELPHIA

BLEICHMAR FONTI NEW YORK

Richard Koffman

Edward Labaton

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

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His successful track record sprouted from an impressive background: After serving as a Merchant Marine Deck Offi cer and in a federal appellate clerkship position, Charest cut his teeth at the storied Susman Godfrey, building a dexterous practice on both the plaintiff and defense sides. Five years ago, Charest hung his own shingle alongside Warren Tavares Burns, forming the Dallas-based Burns Charest – and they’ve been exceptionally busy ever since.

Lawdragon: Will you describe for our readers the mix of work you do within your litigation practice?

Daniel Charest: My practice reaches from oil and gas contract disputes to class actions on behalf of detained immigrants to toxic tort cases for asbestos-exposed workers to international arbitrations over offshore drilling rights to condemnation cases for mass flooding events. The only constant is complex, high-stakes litigation.

LD: Quite the scope! What led you to develop this type of broad litigation practice?

Daniel Charest BURNS CHAREST (DALLAS)

DANIEL CHAREST

BY ALISON PREECE

DANIEL CHAREST IS NO STRANGER TO HIGH-

stakes litigation. Reflecting his adopted home of Texas, his work in oil and gas has been expansive, from royalty matters to contract disputes to offshore drilling rights. He recently achieved a crucial international arbitration award for Kosmos Energy, securing a multimillion-dollar award and deepwater drilling rights for the company off the coast of Africa.

But his oil and gas work presents just one area of large, complex cases in which Charest has built a track record and continues to excel. To name two recent standout examples, Charest also served as co-lead counsel in a $52M settlement on behalf of Facebook’s content moderators, and won a critical trial on behalf of property owners in Houston surrounding damages and relief from Hurricane Harvey, which is reported as the largest takings case in U.S. history.

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DC: As a young lawyer, I joined a successful litigation boutique that focused on developing trial skills while maintaining a generalist perspective with respect to subject matter. We have continued that perspective.

LD: What keeps you excited about the work? What motivates you?

DC: Winning. And the fight. Exposing the flaws of the other side’s argument through cross examination. But also learning about the many subjects of litigation. I enjoy every aspect of the trial practice and try to excel at them all.

LD: Looking back at your career so far, is there a case or matter that stands out as seminal?

DC: As a young partner in my first firm, we tried an oil and gas case that involved many different aspects of the oil and gas world. It was my first trial as a major contributor. I learned so much about the industry, the trial practice and myself. I think of that experience as my dissertation. It helped transform me into the lawyer I am now.

LD: Five years ago, you founded your first firm.

What was that experience like?

DC: Going from a partner position at a successful firm to founding a brand new firm was not a comfortable move. But we have built a vibrant practice and provide excellent service to our clients. It has been an amazing ride!

PHOTO BY: WAYNE FERRARA

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I WORKED AS A DECK OFFICER ON U.S.-FLAG MERCHANT MARINE VESSELS FOR SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE GOING TO LAW SCHOOL…USING MONEY THAT I HAD EARNED WORKING A REAL JOB TO PAY FOR LAW SCHOOL MADE ME FOCUS IN CLASS, WHICH TRANSLATED TO GRADES AND OPPORTUNITIES. THE PATH WAS NONTRADITIONAL. BUT IT WORKED FOR ME. LD: Can you talk about some of the challenges you’ve been tackling in this new leadership position?

DC: I try to encourage all lawyers working for me to take on the challenges themselves. Nothing teaches better than doing. But, at the same time, I know some clients want me to handle issues. Finding that balance has been a challenge.

LD: Did you have any interesting jobs before becoming a lawyer, perhaps which influenced the way you practice or run your firm now?

DC: I worked as a deck officer on U.S.-flag merchant marine vessels for several years before going to law school. The pace and duration of the work made the practice manageable, because I’d had a real job! And using money that I had earned working a real job to pay for law school made me focus in class, which translated to grades and opportunities. The path was nontraditional. But it worked for me.

LD: Do you have any advice for current law school students?

DC: Work hard in school. Work hard at your job.

Nothing does more to advance your clients’ interests than effort.

LD: You “grew up” as a lawyer at Susman Godfrey.

How was your time there?

DC: Steve Susman, both directly and indirectly, helped form me as a lawyer. Working at his firm and becoming a partner there is a source of immense pride for me. I draw on that experience nearly every day.

LD: How has your practice changed since the early part of your career?

DC: More cases have required me to take a much broader view. I have become more of a tactician and less of a generator of work product. But the goal remains the same: prepare the case to win at trial.

LD: How would you describe your style as a lawyer?

DC: Results oriented but principled. Firm but fair.

Efficient and focused on the outcome. And, for business clients in particular, looking to achieve the result that advances the company’s goals. In that regard, the litigation should meet the business objectives and not exist for its own purpose.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office?

DC: I work and I family. But, when I family, I devote my time and attention to them.

LD: Are you involved in any pro bono or public interest activities at the moment?

DC: I work on the Pattern Jury Charge Committee for the Texas Bar. And I’ve worked as a pro bono mediator in small cases. I see both as an honor to serve. That people trust me, whether the litigants in mediation or practitioners in the bar, to handle those jobs gives me great pride and a sense of duty to do the job well.

LD: Do you have a favorite book or movie about the justice system?

DC: “My Cousin Vinny.”

LD: A classic! If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing now?

DC: Sailing. Maybe fishing.

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Brent Landau

Sharon Lee

HAUSFELD PHILADELPHIA

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Chanler Langham

Katie Crosby Lehmann

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Laurie Largent

Michael Lehmann

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

HAUSFELD SAN FRANCISCO

Nicole Lavallee

Sarah Gibbs Leivick

BERMAN TABACCO SAN FRANCISCO

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

Arthur Leahy

Travis Lenkner

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

KELLER LENKNER CHICAGO

Mark Lebovitch

Emmy Levens

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Christopher Lebsock

Richard Levine

HAUSFELD SAN FRANCISCO

LABATON SUCHAROW WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lewis LeClair

Jason Leviton

MCKOOL SMITH DALLAS

BLOCK & LEVITON BOSTON

Lawrence Lederer

Dan Levy

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

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Roberta Liebenberg

Robert Manley

FINE KAPLAN PHILADELPHIA

MCKOOL SMITH DALLAS

Jeremy Lieberman

Neal Manne

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Michael Lifrak

Jeanne Markey

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

COHEN MILSTEIN PHILADELPHIA

Mimi Liu

James Robertson Martin

MOTLEY RICE WASHINGTON, D.C.

ZELLE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Thomas Loeser

Scott Martin

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

HAUSFELD NEW YORK

Kyle Lonergan

Timothy Mathews

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

CHIMICLES HAVERFORD, PA.

Jordan Lurie

Sean Matt

POMERANTZ LOS ANGELES

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

Christine Mackintosh

Colette Matzzie

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Eric Madden

Eric Mayer

REID COLLINS DALLAS

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Jay Edelson EDELSON PC (CHICAGO)

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JAY EDELSON MORE THAN 2,500 YEARS AGO, CHINESE

military strategist Sun Tzu argued that the key to victory on the battlefield is knowing the enemy.

Jay Edelson has taken that ancient wisdom a step further by learning from the enemy.

The Chicago lawyer built his reputation and career suing tech legends – noting on his own Twitter bio that he may be the most hated man in Silicon Valley.

Edelson nonetheless credits the industry for some of his successes.

BY JAMES LANGFORD business models that didn’t exist before and then old statutes, which either applied or didn’t apply,” he says.

“It was the perfect time to start being a class-action lawyer and have my own firm.”

Among the victories he has achieved in the developing frontier since is a $650M verdict in a lawsuit accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook of violating Illinois state biometric law by collecting face templates, which it used to recommend new friends to existing users.

There have also been class-action settlements totaling more than $300M in privacy cases against firms from Netflix to Amazon to Sears.

“One thing – which Silicon Valley gets – is to go where you think society is going and don’t worry immediately about what the financial implications are,” explains Edelson, who opened a new class-action firm just four years after earning his juris doctorate at University of Michigan Law.

“Often, I got to just pick,” he says. “Here’s a case that’s interesting, and there’s no law on it. Let’s go and try to figure it out.”

“We made a decision from the beginning that we were going to make long-term decisions,” Edelson says. “We weren’t going to bring cases where we thought, ‘We’re going to make money within the next 18 months.’ Instead, what we were thinking was, ‘How do we set the law up so the law’s better?’ Then we can have a much more expansive practice. That’s something we stole from Silicon Valley. They understood that much better than I think brick-and-mortar companies did.”

“The idea of not letting them really run with it seems silly,” he says. “They’re the ones who, when Twitter came out, were explaining it to me: ‘This is why Twitter is going to be a huge thing. This is what Twitter’s doing. This is what we’ve got to be careful about.’

They just live in that world in a way that I don’t.”

Timing gave Edelson another advantage. When he and his former partner were forming Blim & Edelson – the predecessor to today’s Edelson PC – in 2000, the Internet was still in its adolescence. The laws that would govern it, with the notable exception of Section 230 shield provisions included in the 1996 Communications Decency Act, had yet to be written.

“A lot of really established plaintiffs’ firms weren’t actually doing a lot of work involving the Internet,” Edelson recalls. “When I started bringing suits, a very successful lawyer who I was friends with was kidding with me and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re the Internet class-action lawyer,’ as if I was practicing on the Internet, as if these weren’t real cases. And I remember just thinking, ‘A lot of people are missing this.’ They weren’t seeing that the Internet was going to be this major place on which our economy would become centered.”

To Edelson, that oversight represented a potential gold mine. “You had these companies that had new

PHOTO BY: MICHELLE NOLAN

If Edelson’s comparative youth once gave him an edge in terms of identifying gaps in the laws governing emerging technology, he recognizes that the next generation of lawyers enjoys a similar advantage today.

Lawdragon: That’s very perceptive. It shows an awareness that senior-level people in a variety of fields sometimes lack. Can you tell me a little more about how the Facebook privacy suit came together?

Jay Edelson: First of all, you need to know that I’m not a techie person. I like ideas, but you don’t want me fixing your car. You first have to explain to me what a car is, and then give me a number for AAA, and then I would probably screw that up, too. So I realized that while I wanted the firm to have a strong focus on tech matters, we needed people smarter than me to do that. So we created what we call our own internal lab, which is a mix of computer forensic engineers and lawyers who are tech-savvy.

They’re the ones who are pitching cases all the time, and the Facebook case was one of two they pitched in the same day. Those cases actually have fundamentally changed the firm’s trajectory. With Facebook, they said, “There’s this statute, and we think Facebook might be violating it. We want to look into that.” The

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500 other was a group of gambling cases where people would go onto apps that functioned like online casinos, basically.

The way that we have these meetings is, when it’s a big case or group of cases, we will have a bunch of lawyers there: people from our appellate group, our litigators, our investigators and our government affairs group. And everybody just dives in. The appellate people are saying, “These are the arguments I’d make if it goes to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.” The government affairs people are saying, “Here’s how they’re going to gut the statute through legislative changes.” We go through everything.

They’re the most fun days that I ever have.

LD: They sound incredible.

JE: It’s tons of fun. And in the end, I said, “Yes, let’s go for it on Facebook and let’s not go for it on gambling.”

I didn’t get that. I said, “People can’t be spending much money on these things. If someone lost $10 or $20, I don’t care.” So that was a veto. We moved forward on Facebook and then people came back to me on gambling and said, “OK, you’re an idiot.

They’re not losing $10 or $20,” and they showed me people were actually losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on these apps.

LD: Really? I wouldn’t have understood that either.

JE: And these aren’t rich people. The apps are set up to be totally addictive and they prey on people who really don’t have money. People were maxing out their credit cards, home equity lines of credit, IRAs, it was destroying people’s lives. We had clients who attempted suicide because of the debt they were in.

Really horrific.

LD: That’s appalling. So what happened next?

JE: Initially, we lost. And we didn’t just lose: Either the trial court or the appellate court said these were fake cases that basically made the plaintiffs’ bar look bad. It’s a quote that I’m going to have on my wall, because we then went to federal court in Washington state, and the 9th Circuit agreed that these weren’t fake cases. We just settled a few of them, and the three settlements that we resolved are for $200M. LD: Congratulations.

JE: We’re excited. What’s really important is we’re going to have class members who are going to get back the majority of what they lost. So people are going to get checks for a half million dollars. And they’re going to be able to repair their lives. What I’m really

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proud of is that I told the firm, “I don’t get it; I don’t get these suits,” and these young associates kept pressing. The fact that I was wrong actually makes me more proud than the cases I’ve been right on, because people just kept pushing for it. They didn’t care that I said, “I don’t get it.” They didn’t care that the initial court didn’t get it. They had that same instinct that I had as a young attorney, which is, “This is really bad stuff; we are going to create the law, even if it doesn’t exist.”

LD: What I love so much about that, and I’m sure you do as well, is that what you’ve created in your firm obviously encourages the inclusion of all different levels of thought and abilities. Lawyers and law firms tend to be slow because there’s the pyramid where the presumption is that the older you get, the more knowledgeable and wiser you are, and that’s really who we should be listening to. And what you’ve done with your firm is make it more organic, ground-level, which is where so much about data and the web and the Internet actually exists.

JE: It was a mix of my own personal value system – which is that an idea is an idea, and I don’t care if it comes from a paralegal, a law student or the managing partner of the firm, the best idea should win – and necessity. We’re bringing a lot of novel cases with emerging technology, and the younger people just frankly have a better handle on it.

LD: Fascinating. Can we go back a little and talk about how you decided to become a lawyer? What were the interests that drove you?

JE: It’s funny. I remember when I was 8 years old, talking to two of my best friends at the time, and we all decided we were going to become lawyers and each of us would have our own law firms.

What’s crazy about it is none of us had families in the law. I don’t think we had any idea what that meant, but we were convinced of it. And what’s even crazier is all three of us actually did graduate law school. One of my friends went to Michigan Law School with me, and the other one went to a school in D.C. And my Michigan friend ended up not liking being a lawyer and he’s now a high school teacher. The other one actually has his own firm.

So our 8-year-old selves were pretty spot-on. Twothirds of us ended up fulfilling the dream. For whatever reason, I always just felt that that was my calling.

LD: Had you guys just seen a movie or read a book about lawyers, or was there something that was

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WE CREATED WHAT WE CALL OUR OWN INTERNAL LAB, WHICH IS A MIX OF COMPUTER FORENSIC ENGINEERS AND LAWYERS WHO ARE TECH-SAVVY. going on in your 8-year-old minds that made you think about it?

LD: Did you like it right away once you got to the plaintiffs’ side?

JE: Honestly, it all came from a discussion about religion and the proof of God. We were weird kids. That’s what we were debating. Of the three of us, one was more religious than the other two. We debated it out and then that led into a discussion about us all becoming lawyers. Of course, I wasn’t attached to being a lawyer the whole time. When I went to college, I majored in philosophy and that was definitely something I was interested in as well, but I ended up going through with what I thought would suit me a little bit better, which was law.

JE: I loved it. I remember that I was given an assignment by John Jacobs in which a client was denied health insurance. The client had been covered, but the company was canceling it. He said to me, “I don’t know if there’s a case here or not. Can you look into it?”

And I said, “Terrific.” And I ended up coming up with a fairly novel argument and we brought a class action.

He was nice enough to let me run with things, and we got an injunction preventing the health insurance company from canceling not just our client’s health insurance, but that of thousands of other people, too.

LD: Did you always know you wanted to do plaintiffs’ law?

Basically, the company had made the decision to cancel the health insurance of the sickest people. And it had the backing of the state Department of Insurance, and we won in court. It was an incredible thing to see that it went from me looking at the statute and trying to come up with an argument to 30 days later, getting a decision that had a huge impact on people’s lives.

JE: Actually, I started at what was then considered a large defense firm, Holleb Coff, with 130 attorneys. I stayed there a little while, and I was defending class actions and that’s how I learned that this was something you could practice in.

LD: Did you like defending class actions?

Our specific client was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, or COPD, and had an air tank that she carried with her and had very real concerns that if she didn’t have access to health care, she wasn’t going to make it. The stakes were really high, and it felt like the most meaningful thing, certainly, I’d done in law.

JE: I did, actually, really enjoy the work. I didn’t enjoy being at a defense firm. I didn’t like how they were structured. I don’t like hierarchical places. I’ve always valued autonomy, and I had a weird arrogance as a young lawyer where I felt like, “Give me the case, and I’ll win it for you.” That’s not how big firms are set up. I was told explicitly, “The goal is to win slowly, not win quickly.” That was awful. And then I looked at the other side and I thought, “These people are fighting for stuff I really believe in. And they’re going for the win. And when they get a win, instead of losing $2M of billing hours, they’re celebrating because that helps them, too.” It was just so clear I was never a defense lawyer.

LD: That’s incredible. Tell me about the leap from John Jacobs questioning whether it was even a case to making it a class action.

I stayed at big firms for two years, and then I said, “I can’t do this.” I was really lucky to find a small plaintiffs’ firm called Plotkin, Jacobs & Orlofsky. My mentor was a guy named John Jacobs, a brilliant guy. He’s the most ethical, smart, creative lawyer you could ever hope to learn from and, luckily, they gave me a job and I spent two years there. And then I started my own firm.

And he was completely supportive of that. He said, “Go, take a week,” and I was there until 11 at night every night, trying to figure it out and he didn’t have any concerns with that.

JE: That was my idea. We were a class-action firm, but I’ve always had the view that you start with what’s right and then you figure out a legal hook to that.

So I looked at it and what they were doing was just dead wrong and so my view was, “I just have to keep thinking hard about this until I figure out a way that we can win this case.”

LD: Are there other cases early in your career as a plaintiffs’ lawyer that you learned particular lessons from?

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Zachary Mazin

Mike McKool

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

MCKOOL SMITH DALLAS

Margaret Mazzeo

Ashley McMillian

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Sean McCaffity

Brian Melton

SOMMERMAN QUESADA DALLAS

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Niall McCarthy

Joseph Meltzer

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

Daniel McCuaig

Tom Methvin

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Christopher McDonald

Michael Miarmi

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Heather McElroy

Christopher Micheletti

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

ZELLE SAN FRANCISCO

Kyle McGee

Donald Migliori

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Sean X. McKessy

Dee Miles

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

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JE: I think I took the lesson I learned on that one with me to almost all of my future cases, which was to not be scared about tackling an issue where there wasn’t any law. That brought me back to the days when I was 8 years old arguing about religion and to my philosophy classes.

LD: In the past month, you’ve brought a very highprofile lawsuit against Los Angeles plaintiffs’ lawyer Tom Girardi triggered by his failure to pay settlements to widows and orphans of a plane crash. Beyond the celebrity of Tom and his wife, there has been much discussion in the plaintiff bar about the lawsuit. Will you share some of your thoughts in deciding to sue?

JE: It was one of the hardest decisions we have had to make. Accusing an attorney of essentially stealing client funds is as serious as you can get and we were getting so much mixed information that we didn’t want to bring the suit without a very high degree of certainty that we were correct. A number of people on the plaintiff’s side asked me not to pursue it at all, because they thought it would lead to reforms of the plaintiff’s bar. Unfortunately, I think this situation demonstrates that reforms are necessary.

LD: Were you surprised as the lawsuit, then bankruptcy and presumed criminal investigation has moved forward?

JE: I have been surprised by the speed of everything. I kept waiting for some explanation from Tom’s side as to how we just misunderstood the facts. When they conceded the money was gone and refused to explain why it didn’t get to the clients, I was stunned. I thought it would take six months to get to this point.

LD: What are some of the lessons you see in the case of Tom Girardi?

JE: There are so many lessons. First, there are way too many attorneys who believe that plaintiff’s work is a game and clients are merely the chess pieces.

I think that there has to be fundamental changes governing our industry to refocus everyone on what plaintiff’s work is really about – reforming industries and serving our clients. I also think that plaintiff’s lawyers have to abandon the notion that it’s bad for business if rotten apples are called out. I think the opposite is true. Tom was one of the most prominent plaintiff’s lawyers in the country. As the facts continue to come out, I think we are going to realize how much damage he did to the public’s faith in our judicial system. I also think that he serves as a stark

reminder that people should live within their means.

If you’re going into plaintiff’s law for the lifestyle, maybe it’s better to pick a different job.

LD: Do you have a favorite philosopher?

JE: Not really. What I like about philosophy is that all the philosophers give you a different way of thinking about the world. The philosopher that I focused on most in college was Immanuel Kant, who I totally disagree with. Almost everything he said, I totally disagree with and, still, his conception of metaphysics and morality, despite my disagreements, have shifted how I think about the world.

LD: Favorite might have been the wrong word. Was he among the ones who influenced you most?

JE: I’d say so. And then also, on the opposite side, ancient Eastern philosophies like Taoism, which are in a completely different world. That’s what I love about philosophy: You just have totally different ways of viewing the world and it has allowed me, when I look at problems, to see them through many different lenses, which I think is a fun thing in law.

LD: I could see that. When you talk about your cases and what the firm’s done and how it operates, there is this philosophical tone.

JE: We think a lot about what it means to have a successful firm. What we realized was that most firms aren’t really set up in a way in which people are terribly happy and so we thought a lot about how we could have a firm where people are able to self-actualize and get the most out of their career.

We’ve done that by focusing on autonomy, letting people choose their own path and also realizing that people have different interests and skills. Typically, firms make everyone do the same types of work. If you’re a litigator, that means you’ve got to investigate the case, do the discovery, argue in court, do the appeals. What we realized was that might be fine for some people but other people, they just love the investigation process. And if that’s the case, let them do that.

Others want to be in court all the time mixing it up, so we let them do that. And that’s been really fun.

So some people’s roles here, at the firm, they’re different than I think at a normal firm. People aren’t required to do a lot of the work that is energy-depleting for them. They get to do work that they find to be energy-generating, and it makes the firm a lot more fun to be around, a higher-energy place, and I think we do better work as a result.

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David Mitchell

Ayesha Najam

ROBBINS GELLE SAN DIEGO

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

Dan Mogin

Hae Sung Nam

MOGINRUBIN SAN DIEGO

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

Steven Molo

William Narwold

MOLOLAMKEN NEW YORK

MOTLEY RICE HARTFORD, CONN.

Mark Molumphy

Robert Nelson

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Laddie Montague Jr.

Isaac Nesser

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

Kristin Moody

Stephen Neuwirth

BERMAN TABACCO SAN FRANCISCO

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

Stephen Morrissey

Joshua Newcomer

SUSMAN GODFREY SEATTLE

MCKOOL SMITH HOUSTON

Anne Marie Murphy

Steven Nicholas

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

Matthew Mustokoff

Luke Nikas

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

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Sharan Nirmul

Meghan S.B. Oliver

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Nanci Nishimura

Johanna Ong

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

Crystal Nix-Hines

Laureen McMillen Ormsbee

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Ellen Noteware

David Orta

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

QUINN EMANUEL WASHINGTON, D.C.

Brian O’Mara

Jennifer Pafiti

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

POMERANTZ LOS ANGELES

Steve Olen

Nathaniel Palmer

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

Harry Olivar Jr.

Aaron Panner

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jennifer Oliver

Phyllis Maza Parker

MOGINRUBIN SAN DIEGO

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

Lance Oliver

Kathy Patrick

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

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Austin Van POMERANTZ (NEW YORK)

AUSTIN VAN MANY EXCELLENT LAWYERS HAVE TURNED TO

representing plaintiffs after gaining their initial experience defending companies in complex cases. Few lawyers, however, can say they cut their chops on historic litigation like that arising out of the financial crisis in 2008 – what Austin Van refers to “the World Series of securities litigation.” Van took the skills he developed at New York institution Cravath to Pomerantz in 2017 and became a partner last year. Among his cases, he is now leading class actions against pharmaceutical company Mylan NV and GSX Techedu, a company based in China.

BY JOHN RYAN there was litigation that arose out of the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, litigation brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency against all the major banks in New York. It was like the World Series of securities litigation. I was put through trial by fire, and I loved it. I became interested in plaintiffs’ side litigation because I wanted to represent the aggrieved parties, rather than defending the parties accused of committing fraud.

LD: What keeps you excited about this kind of work?

Austin Van: My practice focuses on securities class actions on behalf of classes of shareholders who have been damaged through misrepresentations made by publicly traded companies.

AV: It’s intellectually interesting and attracts some of the brightest, most creative legal minds on both sides.

And they are very important matters, with massive classes of investors, often with massive losses. It’s rewarding to earn your living litigating cases where genuine fraud has been committed and you are vindicating the rights of defrauded investors.

LD: How did you first become interested in practicing plaintiffs side securities law?

LD: Could you give an example of a particularly challenging current case?

AV: I worked at Cravath, on the defense side, for six years or so. Some of the most interesting work that I did

AV: I’m leading a securities class action lawsuit against Mylan NV, a pharmaceutical company that

Lawdragon: Can you describe your practice?

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manufactures and sells the EpiPen, among other medical products. The case consists of three alleged frauds, each of which is complex on its own. We are alleging, first, that Mylan was a central participant in one of the largest, if not the largest, cartels in American history. There was a conspiracy among all the major players in the generic drug industry to fix prices. Second, the company, for many years, intentionally misclassified the EpiPen for the purposes of the Medicaid drug rebate program, so that Mylan wound up overcharging Medicaid by over a billion dollars. In essence, Mylan was overcharging the government based on a blatant misreading of the very simple regulations that govern classification of drugs. Mylan ultimately settled this matter with the Department of Justice, which had been fighting its own battles against Mylan’s EpiPen Medicaid scam, for around $500M. A number of senators called it a sweetheart deal, arguing that half a billion dollars did not begin to address the scale of damages suffered by the government.

And the third fraud relates to a scheme by Mylan to exclude Sanofi Aventis, its primary competitor for epinephrine auto injectors, from the market. Mylan offered anti-competitive rebates to pharmaceutical benefit managers in exchange for their either excluding Sanofi’s Auvi-Q from their formularies or for their placing Auvi-Q on a disadvantageous tier in their formularies. That anti-competitive conduct permitted Mylan to increase the price of EpiPen astronomically, to the point where children and others who needed this lifesaving medicine couldn’t afford it. You had parents who couldn’t buy this drug and couldn’t keep enough of it stored to ensure that they would have it if their child went into anaphylactic shock. The underlying conduct in this action is deeply troubling.

LD: What are the challenges of litigating this case?

AV: A tripartite case like In re Mylan does present special challenges in that you’re basically steering and coordinating three matters. Also, the class period here is very long, so there’s an extensive factual background that we’ve had to uncover to prove our case. We’ve received millions of pages of documents. The volume of information for us to filter through, given how extensive each of these underlying cases is, is immense.

Even with a robust document team, it is a large burden.

So we are also using technology-assisted review to help us determine, based on reviewer coding, which documents should be prioritized in our review.

LD: What is the current status of the case?

AV: In April 2020, the court certified a class of investors spanning seven years and, in dismissing the defendants’ third motion to dismiss, permitted our uncommon scheme liability claim against a Mylan VP to proceed.

With few examples of scheme liability in securities litigation, this opinion sets an important precedent.

LD: Are you working on any cases that touch on new areas of law or knowledge?

AV: In August 2020, Pomerantz was appointed lead counsel in a securities fraud class action against GSX Techedu, a Chinese company that purports to provide online education services. We have reason to believe that about 70 percent of the company’s purported user base of enrolled students is actually fake and being generated through bots.

A bot is software designed to run automated tasks much faster than a human ever could. Research analysts looked at, among other things, user login data and recognized unusual patterns. We hired an expert at Berkeley who is an authority on bots. He has looked at this data from users logging into the GSX platform and determined that the patterns that emerge from this login activity could not have arisen from humans actually logging in. It could only reasonably be explained by automated robots logging in, because humans don’t act with the sort of precision that he was seeing.

There are a number of other reasons to think that this company is a massive fraud. Upon the announcement of an SEC investigation into GSX, the company lost a double-digit percentage of its value. The investigation certainly lends credibility to the concerns of research analysts that are questioning the company’s financials, and to Pomerantz’s allegations.

The Chinese legal system governing the trading of securities and representations to the market is still relatively young. We predict a growing trend of cases that will arise as companies from China – where regulation and supervision of corporations is less developed than in the United States – list their securities to be traded on U.S. exchanges, subjecting themselves to more rigorous oversight.

LD: What pointed you in the direction of law?

AV: I knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to be a lawyer. I liked to reason, to set out clear arguments. In undergrad I was a philosophy major focusing on ethics and political philosophy, and then I completed a Master’s degree in the same areas. I think of law as a form of applied ethics. It’s modern society’s way of addressing actual moral problems that arise in individual disputes.

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Stuart Davidson ROBBINS GELLER (BOCA RATON, FLA.)

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STUART DAVIDSON STUART DAVIDSON’S CASE FILES READ LIKE A

resumé of 21st century America’s thorniest social and legal dilemmas, from prescription-drug pricing to digital privacy and professional sports injuries.

The Robbins Geller partner, based in Boca Raton, Fla., recently won a record-breaking $650M, an award approved this past February, in a class action case that argued social media giant Facebook collected and stored biometric identifiers such as faceprints without obtaining informed consent from users.

He’s also leading several aspects of In re: EpiPen Marketing, Sales Practices & Antitrust Litigation, being handled in federal court in Kansas, and previously handled litigation for retired National Hockey League players against the NHL who suffered concussions and repeated head trauma.

In some ways, he says, it’s a natural progression from the Public Defender’s Office in Broward County, home to Fort Lauderdale, where he began his career.

“I loved the idea of representing people who couldn’t afford top-notch and expensive lawyers,” says Davidson, who earned his law degree, summa cum laude, at Nova Southeastern University after undergraduate studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo. “I always wanted to dedicate my professional life to supporting the Constitution and representing the underdog and the underprivileged.”

That had been his dream since high school, and he imagined he’d be a so-called “lifer” at the Public Defender’s Office. While on leave after he and his wife had their first child, however, he received a job offer from a private firm with a much higher salary.

Faced with the likelihood of rising expenses as his family grew, Davidson couldn’t say no. From that role in securities and white-collar criminal defense litigation at a small boutique firm, the husband and father of two moved on to the firm now known as Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, gradually transitioning to a specialty in consumer and privacy class action litigation.

“I always said to myself, even when I was younger, that I would never do a job where I didn’t look forward to going to work every morning when I woke up,” Davidson says. “Representing victimized, defrauded consumers just gave me a new purpose in life.”

PHOTO BY: JOSH RITCHIE

BY JAMES LANGFORD Lawdragon: It definitely seems like a more publicinterest application of your legal skills. When did you realize you wanted to become a lawyer?

Stuart Davidson: Probably when I was in high school; I knew when I went to undergrad that a legal career was the most likely path for me. I always enjoyed debating and arguing with people, and I actually preferred talking with my parents’ friends rather than my friends. I had really stimulating conversations with adults when I was a kid, whether about the law or politics or current events. I was always very liberal, also. I was very much in favor of social justice and opportunities for the underprivileged, the underserved and the underrepresented.

LD: Did you look for ways to emphasize the skill sets you’d need to do that while you were in school?

SD: There were definitely some experiences that helped. I had a business law professor in undergrad who was also the elected Public Defender of Livingston County, New York, and that fascinated me. I also interned for the Public Defender’s Office in Rochester, New York, while I was in undergrad, and I remember working with very senior public defenders there on defending the serial killer Arthur Shawcross, and that absolutely captivated me. I would help interview new clients at the Public Defender’s Office when they had just been arrested and needed to talk to a lawyer for the first time. These people who were accused of committing various criminal offenses, and I saw them not as criminals, but as people and as human beings who had rights under the Constitution that deserve to be protected. “There but for the grace of God, go I.” I’m not a religious person at all, but that phrase resonates with me. It could be you someday or it could be somebody you love, somebody you care for, behind those bars. So fighting for this person’s rights is necessary to protect everyone’s rights.

LD: It sounds like you were clear about your career path from the start. Did you ever consider other options while you were in law school, maybe because of a course or field of practice that intrigued you?

SD: That’s an interesting question. To everybody’s surprise, I think, I was one of the best law students in my class. Out of about 300 students, I graduated ninth and got 4.0s on just about every one of my classes, graded onto the Law Review and was interviewed by all the major law firms here in south

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500 Florida. I told virtually every single one of them, “I appreciate your interest in me, but I have no interest in working for you.” Because I knew where I wanted to go, I knew what I wanted to be. I knew what would give me that fire in the belly to wake up every day looking forward to going to work. And I’m glad I was able to do that. Plus, it gave me tremendous trial and evidentiary skills and that’s something a lot of new lawyers never get.

LD: That’s so true. With the number of trials shrinking, there are fewer ways to build a significant volume of courtroom experience.

SD: I think working for a Prosecutor’s Office or a Public Defender’s Office, whether at the state or federal level, after law school is really important for a lawyer’s growth. You get thrown into the lion’s den as a very young lawyer and you make mistakes. In my first job at the Public Defender’s Office, I worked in the misdemeanor division before Judge Joel Lazarus, who could be somewhat cantankerous and threatened to hold me in contempt and throw me in jail on at least two occasions in my first year of practicing law.

I was new, I was learning and I was making mistakes.

It helped prepare me.

LD: The preparation definitely delivered for you.

You’ve accomplished some amazing things on behalf of consumers with cases like Facebook. I understand it involved a class of users in Illinois, where state law forbids collection of biometric information like retina scans, voiceprints or scans of hand and face geometry without informing users that it’s being gathered and obtaining a written release.

SD: Yes. That statute has been on the books for a while, but it hadn’t really been used in any litigation until we and our co-counsel started filing cases. And it was an absolute odyssey.

LD: I believe it. Going up against a company as large as Facebook, with the resources it can muster, would be a challenge under even ideal conditions.

SD: Absolutely. To say that Facebook and their lawyers, who were exceptional, fought us tooth and nail on every single issue would be an understatement.

And we just kept winning. I think we were on the right side of every one of those issues, and I don’t think the judge ever got anything wrong. And of course I’ll say that, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with us. We literally were weeks away from starting trial when the Appeals Court stayed the case while it was considering whether the judge was right to grant class certification.

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LD: And when Facebook appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take the case. Were you guys ready to go to trial?

SD: We were. And it paid off – to the point that there was a record-breaking settlement that, by any measure, is one of the best consumer-related privacy settlements ever.

LD: I remember class certification was a big hurdle in the case, though it seems obvious from a layman’s perspective that the group of affected people would be Facebook users in Illinois.

SD: I think class certification is always challenging.

When you file an individual case, all you have to do is prove your individual case, but when you ask the court to certify a class action, you have to meet several very stringent requirements and if you – as the plaintiff and proposed class representative – don’t meet any one of them, you lose. So to get a class certified – even in a case that seems as simple as this one – is a hurdle, and Facebook lodged many, many challenges. A lot of them were very technical. One, obviously, was whether there was any standing to sue at all, because there was no evidence of actual harm to the plaintiffs. The harm that we alleged was that Facebook had violated a statute that the Illinois legislature that entitled plaintiffs to seek statutory damages in lieu of showing actual harm. So that was really the challenge: whether plaintiffs can sue a company for a violation of statute, even if they can’t show that they personally suffered any injuries outside of the statute. That’s an ever-evolving area of the law that the Supreme Court seems to take up every single term in one form or another.

LD: When it’s a struggle just to get into the courtroom, the record recovery is all the more impressive.

SD: The judge was also really pleased by the 22 percent claims rate, which is unheard of in our practice.

LD: Really? Tell me more about that.

SD: The claims rate refers to the ratio of people who got notice of the $650M settlement and opted to claim a portion. For reasons I will never understand, there is always a huge percentage of class members who just ignore those notices, no matter how prominently you place them. Here, we had Facebook put the notices in the app and on the Facebook website, so when Illinois users logged in to their accounts, they were told, “We have $650 million to give you. Do you want a share of that?” You’d be shocked at how many people just don’t reply in such cases, no matter how easy you make it.

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I don’t think anybody has ever really figured out why so many people ignore settlement notices to get their share of a class recovery, but there have been studies that show that well under 10 percent of class members will make a claim. Sometimes, it’s 1.5 percent.

Sometimes, it’s three percent. Rarely, does it even approach 10 percent. Here, the plaintiff, the defense and the judge all got together and said, “What can we do to change that dynamic?” And we went above and beyond what we’ve ever done before and got 22 percent of class members to make a claim, way higher than the norm. It’s something we’re very proud of, and hopefully, we can use what we learned in that settlement and notification process to improve upon claims rates in the future.

LD: That’s awesome. People, especially now, can really use that extra money. Plus, digital privacy has become a major concern, as have debilitating injuries from pro sports. That’s an area you’ve been heavily involved in with the NHL case. Tell me more about that.

SD: That case ended nearly two years ago, with a settlement for all our individual clients, who numbered about 300, rather than on a class action basis.

We started the action in 2014 on behalf of several very well-known retired professional hockey players who in their later years started suffering terribly from the effects of repetitive head trauma. Some turned to alcohol and drugs, some couldn’t control their tempers and became violent and some, unfortunately, took their own lives.

It’s a cause that I’ll forever be proud to be associated with, but unfortunately, after many years of litigation, millions of documents and hundreds of depositions, the judge denied class action status. While that blocked the broader group of retired hockey players from participating, it left a window of opportunity to resolve the case on behalf of our individual clients, which we did. They were all very thankful, but I’ll always be disappointed that we couldn’t do better for them. We tried, we had excellent lawyers on our team who worked really hard and we gathered, I thought, sufficient evidence to show that the NHL knew about the long-term neurological effects of getting your head bashed in, whether that’s through fighting, which the NHL fostered for years, or just getting checked against the board or getting struck by a hockey stick. We felt that we had marshaled enough evidence to prove that they knew and should have done something more to protect the brain health of their players. But at the end of the day, the judge

made a legal determination that the case was not appropriate as a class action.

LD: The EpiPen case, which involves an emergency treatment device for life-threatening allergic reactions, is another one that’s garnered a huge amount of attention. That’s ongoing, right?

SD: Yes, it is. That one was certified as a class-action, and the trial is scheduled for September. One of the things I’m focused on now is helping get the team and our special trial counsel, Mark Lanier, ready for that September trial, which we have every expectation will actually go forward. That will be, I think, watched by millions of people around the world because that’s just how ubiquitous the EpiPen is, and the outrage over how the price just skyrocketed, becoming unaffordable for many people.

LD: Last question. Do you have a favorite book, TV show or movie about the legal profession?

SD: This may surprise you, but I don’t read or watch TV shows about the law, because that’s my life, eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

I do like history, though, and the closest I come to reading about the law and the legal industry would be books about the founding of this country and the incredible human beings who were involved in leading it over the years, from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They certainly all had flaws, but they nonetheless rose to a moment that comes around once or twice in a millennia to create this country of ours and, with respect to Lincoln, keep it together.

One book that was just unbelievably good was “Destiny of the Republic,” about James Garfield, who died from an assassin’s bullet fairly early into his presidency. He probably would have gone down as one of the four greatest presidents but for that and the medical mistakes afterward that caused him to die.

Right now, I’m finishing up a book called “Storm of Steel,” which is a firsthand account of a German solider on the front lines of World War I. He kept a diary, and it was translated into 40-odd languages. Reading it, you feel like you’re right there in the trenches of World War I. Of course, I battle every day in my own trenches fighting for defrauded consumers against the country’s largest corporations and their exceptionally talented lawyers, but when compared with the horrors experienced in the Great War, my fight is much more enjoyable and rewarding.

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C. Cary Patterson

Janine Pollack

NIX PATTERSON TEXARKANA, TEXAS

CALCATERRA POLLACK NEW YORK

Russell Paul

Christopher Porter

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

QUINN EMANUEL HOUSTON

Trey Peacock

Laura Posner

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

COHEN MILSTEIN NEW YORK

Michael Pendell

Warren Postman

MOTLEY RICE HARTFORD, CONN.

KELLER LENKNER WASHINGTON, D.C.

John Phillips

John Quinn

PHILLIPS & COHEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

Jonathan Pickhardt

Shawn Rabin

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

Kit Pierson

Willow Radcliffe

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

ROBBINS GELLER SAN FRANCISCO

Frank Pitre

Sascha Rand

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

Barbara Podell

Sami Rashid

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

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Brian Ratner

John Rizio-Hamilton

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Shawn Raymond

Darren Robbins

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Barrett Reasoner

Robert Robbins

GIBBS & BRUNS HOUSTON

ROBBINS GELLER BOCA RATON

William T. Reid IV

Sharon Robertson

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

COHEN MILSTEIN NEW YORK

Julie Goldsmith Reiser

Jeremy Robinson

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Jack Reise

Valerie Roddy

ROBBINS GELLER BOCA RATON

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

Justin Reliford

Laurence Rosen

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

THE ROSEN LAW FIRM NEW YORK

Joseph Rice

Hannah Ross

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Robert Rivera Jr.

Peter Ross

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

BROWNE GEORGE LOS ANGELES

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cities had standing under the Fair Housing Act and could therefore sue over discriminatory mortgage lending practices, became a template for other cities to bring similar suits.

Savett also handled a ground-breaking class action case over the 2007 data breach of TJX Companies, the parent of stalwart retail brands such as TJ Maxx, HomeSense and Marshalls, which was the largest data breach at the time with 45 million customers’ credit and debit card numbers stolen. The settlement, valued at over $200M, contained various forms of relief for class members, including credit monitoring insurance, injunctive relief, and cash compensation for provable losses and time spent attempting to mitigate the harm caused by the breach. It continues to serve as a road map for resolution of other data breach class actions.

Sherrie Savett BERGER MONTAGUE (PHILADELPHIA)

SHERRIE SAVETT

BY ALISON PREECE

IT’S TEMPTING TO CALL SHERRIE SAVETT A

natural-born leader. First female chair of top-rated litigation firm, lead litigator in a slew of high-profile cases that shaped the law in the securities and qui tam spaces, and a celebrated community leader with extensive philanthropic efforts. She’s a mother of three and grandmother of six, and continues to play competitive tennis.

But as the wise adage goes, leaders aren’t born; they’re made. While Savett had the raw materials of intelligence, vision and drive, she also had formative experiences as a young professional that empowered her towards leadership, including key mentors who gave her early courtroom experience and being handpicked for a specialized leadership program by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

And lead, she has. Her work for the City of Miami in a mortgage discrimination case against several national banks, in which the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that 130

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Her securities litigation work over several decades includes a slew of high-altitude wins, including the $334M settlements with Rite Aid, its accounting firm and former officers; $94M for shareholders of Fleming Companies, the largest food wholesaler in the U.S.; $70M for a class of investors in a disclosure case against Sotheby’s; and $93M for a class of bond and stock purchasers against insurance behemoth Cigna.

Like any true leader, her own success is only part of the story. Savett is an incredibly active member of her community, serving as a leader in various organizations, including continued work with the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, at which she served as president and board chair for several years. She is a frequent lecturer, having taught classes at Stanford Law School and at Penn Law for the past four years.

Savett also remains dedicated to fostering young talent at her firm, Berger Montague. Berger enables young lawyers to get meaningful experience to build their skillsets and careers early on, as Savett experienced herself while a young associate at the firm back in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.

Lawdragon: Sherrie, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. From your vantage point at the forefront of securities litigation these days, are there any trends in the practice that you’re seeing as a result of the pandemic?

Sherrie Savett: There have been a few cases against companies that are alleged to have made misrepresentations about how advanced they were on their development of the vaccine.

LD: How about in the qui tam space?

SS: In the area of qui tam, because trillions of dollars were given out to the public by the government, there

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is probably a great deal of fraud involved in the receipt of some of these payments where entities made misrepresentations in their applications for obtaining PPP funds. I have not myself had one of those cases, but I’m informed by various U.S. attorney’s offices that they’re looking for such cases. That’s a hot area in qui tam right now.

Healthcare fraud is always prominent in qui tam litigation. Probably at least 80 percent of the qui tam cases filed are in the healthcare space and involve Medicare and Medicaid funds. Our national health care system is helped by some of the recoveries in this area, but the frauds are varied and prevalent.

LD: That’s a high percentage just in healthcare.

SS: Healthcare fraud in general is a raging problem in America. There are frauds of every nature involving manufacturing companies, drug companies, drug distribution companies, medical practices and hospitals.

In my practice I have seen sophisticated pricing frauds and unlawful kickbacks of many types.

LD: What has kept you busy this past year in the qui tam space?

SS: I’ve been involved in a qui tam case involving grant fraud where a research institution that received large NIH grants for medical research paid a settlement to the United States because the amount of work effort that the scientists put in and charged the government was misrepresented. The government did not get the amount of research it bargained for.

Another case involved a major chain of hospitals, which violated the Medicare standards for admissions and length of stay in these hospitals. That settlement was national in scope because the hospital entity had hospitals all over the country.

LD: Tell me about the case you handled for the City of Miami, and the precedent that was set.

Berger Montague’s approach to equal representation?

SS: I think our firm is completely gender blind, race blind, sexual preference blind. We evaluate individuals based on their talent, drive and character, not race or gender. I’m proud to say we have about 39 percent women and many of them are our shareholders. We have a diverse firm and are very conscious of maintaining and increasing our diversity.

LD: How about you personally? Where or how did you develop an interest in mentoring others – did you have good mentors when you were coming up?

Or a lack of them?

SS: I had a very strong mentor is the founding partner of our firm, David Berger, and that started when I got out of law school. He always gave me tremendous opportunities to excel. Then another founder, H. Laddie Montague Jr, was the chairman of the firm for a long time and also served as a mentor to me. I was very fortunate to have grown up in a firm that nurtured all its lawyers. We worked very hard, but it was a familylike environment. I believe that is a recipe for success.

Of course there were bows and slings along the way, such as men making inappropriate comments to a young woman, coming up in a fierce litigation world, but I was lucky because I had these strong mentors and I was strong-willed myself.

LD: So you’ve been at Berger since you finished law school?

SS: Except for my very first year when I was with another firm. Then I came to Berger my second year and have been there ever since.

LD: So you have a major role in building the firm to what it is today.

SS: I can tell you a story, a vignette of empowerment.

It’s a true story from when I was at the firm two or three years, still a very young lawyer.

SS: The principle that was established in the Supreme Court was that the Fair Housing Act is quite broad. The decision holds that a city could have standing under it if they could prove that the discrimination proximately caused damage to the city. The decision was significant because it clarified how broad the reach of the Fair Housing Act was and that it could go beyond relief just for borrowers who were discriminated against.

We had a securities class action against a company called Magic Marker, if you can remember that company, back in the late ‘70s. It involved a pump and dump scheme where a group of fraudsters arranged false transactions to make it appear as if it was a very hot stock. The tremendous volume bloated up the stock price. Then those who were in the scheme dumped it, and the price collapsed.

LD: You’re a big advocate for gender parity in the law, and supporting female attorneys. You were the first female chair of your firm and continue to serve on the management committee. Can you tell us about

My senior partner David Berger was to argue the two critical motions, the opposition to a motion to dismiss

It was a very unique case and it was before a very tough, excellent judge named Alfred Luongo.

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I’M PROUD TO SAY WE HAVE ABOUT 39 PERCENT WOMEN AND MANY OF THEM ARE OUR SHAREHOLDERS. and the class certification motion. I was assisting him to get ready for the hearing. I prepared intensively, I knew every case. I worked with Mr. Berger over two days. On the morning of the hearing, he said to me, “You argue one and I’ll argue the other.” I had never argued in federal court before, especially a dispositive motion.

I did it, I was petrified, but I did it. And I won, and he won, and the case went forward. In the end, we got a very good settlement, large for that time. For me, that was the most empowering experience. I still remember it to this day. The fact that he had so much confidence in me that he let me argue a critical motion shows what a good mentor can do for somebody.

LD: Yes those early experiences can really set a person up for a long, successful career. Does Berger have a formal mentoring program in place to make sure the talented young associates are getting those same sorts of early opportunities? Or what does that structure look like?

SS: Yes, we now have a formal mentoring program and a wonderful team approach to our lengthy, complex cases which normally last several years.

LD: You’re also a very active philanthropist. Can you tell us about some of the groups you’re working with currently?

SS: Thank you, yes, I have nonprofit involvements that are very deep and important to me. The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia is an important organization that I’ve been involved with for many years. I was the president and chairman of the board from 2011 to 2014, and I continue to be involved with that organization on a high level. I’m currently the campaign chair.

I’m on the national board of a university in Israel, BenGurion University of the Negev, and I’m chairwoman of the local chapter and on the national board of its American Associates. I also serve on the board of the National Liberty Museum, a treasure in Philadelphia, which teaches children and young adults character building and heroism through the telling of stories of heroes, both famous and ordinary.

I’m also involved in an organization called PJ Library that sends Jewish-themed children’s books to children

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all over the world. Right now they’re sending 650,000 books every month to teach children, and these books emphasize Jewish customs, traditions and universal values. That’s a really fantastic organization. I visited Russia a year and a half ago because they opened a branch in Russia and now publish books in the Russian language. That was very exciting. These high quality children’s books are now being distributed in 21 countries in five continents. I am part of the PJ Library Alliance, which is a group of substantial funders to the organization.

LD: When did you start your philanthropic work? Was it something you did as a younger lawyer or did that come later?

SS: When I was 28 or 29 years old I received a letter from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia that said they had identified me as a future leader, and they invited me on a leadership development trip to Israel.

That really changed my life. I fell in love with Israel and I’ve maintained a very close connection to the Jewish people and Jewish community here in America. It was another experience that empowered me to lead.

Years later I became the Federation’s president and board chair.

LD: That program sounds formative. How about your family, growing up? Did your parents encourage you towards being a leader in your community, and pursuing a career?

SS: My mother was a pillar of strength growing up.

She is now 95 years old, healthy and vibrant, and very inspiring to me. My father, a war hero who owned a grocery store and worked as a butcher before becoming a lawyer later in life, also always encouraged me to follow my dreams. He told me I could do anything that I desired. That positivity is what I grew up with.

LD: That’s just especially extraordinary for women of that generation for them to be telling their little girls and for your dad, especially, to say, “The sky’s the limit, there’s nothing to hold you back.”

SS: Yes. And I’ve always trained my girls that way and my son, too. One of my daughters is now a lawyer at the firm, and my daughter-in-law, is too. I’m very proud of all of them.

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Jonathan Rubin

Katie Sammons

MOGINRUBIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Samuel Rudman

Ex Kano Sams II

ROBBINS GELLER MELVILLE, N.Y.

GLANCY PRONGAY LOS ANGELES

David Rudolph

Joseph Saveri

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

SAVERI LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

Lee Rudy

Sherrie Savett

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

Joseph Russello

Maya Saxena

ROBBINS GELLER MELVILLE, N.Y.

SAXENA WHITE BOCA RATON

Taline Sahakian

Shana Scarlett

CONSTANTINE CANNON NEW YORK

HAGENS BERMAN BERKELEY, CALIF.

Scott Saham

Robert Scheef

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

Daniel Salinas-Serrano

Irving Scher

QUINN EMANUEL WASHINGTON, D.C.

HAUSFELD NEW YORK

Hollis Salzman

Hilary Scherrer

ROBINS KAPLAN NEW YORK

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Gregory Schwegmann

Daniel Seltz

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Judy Scolnick

Marc Seltzer

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

Daryl Scott

Maaren Shah

SCOTT + SCOTT COLCHESTER, CONN.

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

David Scott

Carol Shahmoon

SCOTT + SCOTT COLCHESTER, CONN.

SHAHMOON KELLER GREAT NECK, N.Y.

Jennifer Scullion

Anthony Shapiro

SEEGER WEISS RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

Todd Seaver

Allison Sheedy

BERMAN TABACCO SAN FRANCISCO

CONSTANTINE CANNON WASHINGTON, D.C.

Christopher Seeger

Stephen Sheller

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

SHELLER PHILADELPHIA

Jennifer Selendy

Steven Shepard

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

Philippe Selendy

Manisha Sheth

SELENDY GAY NEW YORK

QUINN EMANUEL NEW YORK

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Jessica Shinnefield

Elizabeth Smith

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

MOTLEY RICE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Roman Silberfeld

Thomas Sobol

ROBINS KAPLAN LOS ANGELES

HAGENS BERMAN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Gerald Silk

Aliki Sofis

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

QUINN EMANUEL BOSTON

Joshua Silverman

Sylvia Sokol

POMERANTZ CHICAGO

SCOTT + SCOTT NEW YORK

Katherine Sinderson

Mark Solomon

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Linda Singer

David Sorensen

MOTLEY RICE WASHINGTON, D.C.

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

Steven Singer

John Sparacino

SAXENA WHITE WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.

MCKOOL SMITH HOUSTON

Steven Sklaver

Ronnie Seidel Spiegel

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

Daniel Small

Kalpana Srinivasan

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

SUSMAN GODFREY LOS ANGELES

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Appeals for the 10th Circuit before joining legendary plaintiffs’ firm Susman Godfrey. His early mentorship by those titans of the trial bar, Steve Susman and Lee Godfrey, shaped Burns’ ethos and work ethic as a lawyer.

He opened his own firm with Daniel Charest, Burns Charest, in 2015.

Lawdragon: What’s your mix of cases like these days?

Warren Tavares Burns: I would say that about 40 percent of my practice is devoted to antitrust cases, where I generally serve as lead or co-lead counsel. The rest of my practice varies between significant mass tort cases and complex commercial cases.

LD: How did you become interested this type of work?

WTB: As a lawyer, I grew up representing plaintiffs and defendants in complex commercial cases. From the outset, I enjoyed practicing in the antitrust bar and forming relationships with folks on either side of the aisle. I was fortunate to have great mentors who allowed me the freedom to grow and take on leadership roles.

Warren Tavares Burns BURNS CHAREST (DALLAS)

WARREN TAVARES BURNS

BY ALISON PREECE

WARREN TAVARES BURNS VIEWS THE LEGAL

profession as a crucial corrector in society. A plaintiffs’ lawyer with a particular specialty in antitrust cases, he’s tuned in to cases that have a broad impact, and believes in the importance of authenticity to connect with juries and judges. The highly effective litigator has a long track record of wins and favorable settlements for individuals and groups against major companies, including an investor’s patent infringement case against Apple and a contract and royalty case for minority and women-owned business enterprises against gas behemoth Chesapeake.

Burns grew up in a small Mississippi town where his family lived for six generations, and the sense of community involvement always stuck with him. Before law school, he worked in non-profits, including as a fundraiser for a large Catholic church and for an organization helping people with developmental disabilities.

After securing top honors at Tulane Law School, Burns clerked for the Hon. Paul J. Kelly Jr. on the U.S. Court of 136

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LD: What do you love most about being a lawyer?

WTB: I love cases that are intellectually challenging. The best part of my job involves challenging myself to learn new industries, immersing myself in unfamiliar science, and developing close relationships with my clients.

LD: Who were your mentors as a young lawyer?

WTB: I was so incredibly fortunate to have Steve Susman and Lee Godfrey as mentors. They were both incredible lawyers whose command of the practice was nothing short of inspiring. I will always be grateful to them.

LD: Can you share a lawyer you have come up against in a negotiation or case whom you admire, and why?

WTB: There have been many – Don Barrett, Mark Lanier, Ken Feinberg, Rex Sharp, John Majoras – they all exhibit a principled, practical and thoughtful approach to the matters they are working on.

LD: How would you describe your style as a lawyer?

WTB: I treat everyone with respect – parties, witnesses, opposing counsel, no exceptions. Juries hate mean people.

LD: For recruits who might be considering your firm, what would you say differentiates Burns Charest?

WTB: We are young, aggressive, pedigreed like few other plaintiffs’ firms, and have a commitment to making a difference in our nation and individual communities.

Burns Charest recruits will get unparalleled experience.

LD: If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing?

WTB: I like to think I would be an archeologist.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

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Courtney Statfeld

Lawrence Sucharow

MCKOOL SMITH NEW YORK

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

Karl Stern

Jason Sultzer

QUINN EMANUEL HOUSTON

THE SULTZER LAW GROUP POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.

Leslie Stern

Harry Susman

BERMAN TABACCO BOSTON

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

Murielle Steven Walsh

Lynn Swanson

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

JONES SWANSON NEW ORLEANS

Michael Stevenson

Stephen Swedlow

LABATON SUCHAROW WASHINGTON, D.C.

QUINN EMANUEL CHICAGO

David Straite

Bonny Sweeney

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

HAUSFELD SAN FRANCISCO

Joel Strauss

Claire Sylvia

KAPLAN FOX NEW YORK

PHILLIPS & COHEN SAN FRANCISCO

Silvija Strikis

Joseph Tabacco Jr.

KELLOGG HANSEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BERMAN TABACCO SAN FRANCISCO

Arun Subramanian

Ariana Tadler

SUSMAN GODFREY NEW YORK

TADLER LAW NEW YORK

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Michael Grunfeld POMERANTZ (NEW YORK)

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MICHAEL GRUNFELD THE BENEFITS OF PRACTICING AT AN ACCLAIMED

law firm like Pomerantz include the chance to litigate the most important legal issues of the day. As New York partner Michael Grunfeld explains, that often includes cases that provide key insights into recent “newsworthy events” – including his successful representation of investors in the class action over the Yahoo! data breach, the largest in history. When it comes to class actions, Grunfeld, who became a partner in 2019, also showcases the firm’s strength in consumer class actions. In fact, the Columbia Law grad has made his mark in high-profile pro bono work by representing plaintiffs opposing New York City’s now-disbanded Stop-and-Frisk policy.

Lawdragon: Can you describe for our readers the mix of work you do within your practice?

Michael Grunfeld: As a partner at Pomerantz, I specialize in plaintiffs’ side class action work. I practice mostly in the firm’s main area of securities class actions and also work on consumer class actions.

LD: How did you first become interested in developing this type of practice?

MG: I became interested in securities class actions during my very first job out of law school. I was at one of the big defense firms, and I worked on one of the most significant securities class actions – arising out of the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger that came about during the financial crisis. It was a fascinating case for several reasons, including that it was so enmeshed in the headlines of the day and raised interesting legal issues. Since I moved to plaintiffs’ side at Pomerantz, the work has been even more rewarding because now it also involves helping investors recover losses that they suffered as a result of corporate fraud and wrongdoing.

LD: And you also work on consumer class actions? How does that compare to the area of securities litigation?

MG: Yes, I am currently leading a consumer class action against Apple in which the court recently certified a class of iPhone owners that downloaded the iOS 9 operating system onto their devices. This is essentially a false advertising case involving statements made in connection with an iPhone update, rather than claims that securities investors were harmed. The underlying corporate conduct is similar to what might arise in a securities case, particularly because it involves alleg-

PHOTO BY: LAURA BARISONZI

BY JOHN RYAN edly deceptive statements by the company. But there are also important differences in terms of the class certification process for consumer claims where each plaintiff has their own product and uses it in their own ways, as opposed to securities claims, where the securities are not something that the plaintiffs actually hold in their hands. In the larger sense, all litigation follows the same process, and it is valuable for litigators to be generalists who can handle any dispute, to be able to do the research necessary for any type of matter and to follow the process wherever it might lead.

LD: Out of all the work you’ve done in your career, what would you say is the most interesting matter you’ve handled?

MG: The securities litigation related to data breaches at Yahoo! was particularly interesting. Pomerantz was representing Yahoo! investors who suffered losses after it was revealed that Yahoo! was the victim of the two largest data breaches in history to date but had not told investors about these incidents until sometime after they took place. That matter was especially interesting because it was the first securities class action that was able to successfully bring claims arising out of a data breach. One of the challenges for us was showing how the statements that Yahoo! made related to its data privacy and data security practices were significant to its investors because they misrepresented and concealed the fact that Yahoo! had suffered these breaches. The case also involved interesting factual issues about “who knew what, when” that were important for the intent element of our claims.

More generally, I have found that securities litigation, as a species of business-related litigation, more or less follows what is going on in the world at the time and in the recent past because it takes time for cases to run through the system. By the time we get to work on a matter, after much has been reported in the news and we have done our own independent investigation, we have a much better understanding of these major newsworthy events. Just like the cases earlier in my career were related to the financial crisis, this Yahoo! litigation was related to data breaches, which have become an increasingly significant issue that we need to deal with in our society.

LD: How would you describe your style as a lawyer?

MG: One of the things that I find most engaging about practicing securities law is the room for cre-

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500 ativity. Someone not well versed in what we do might think that corporate-related law or securities litigation is not the most creative of fields, but actually, there is a lot of room for novel arguments. Firstly, the law itself is very complicated. There are a lot of different elements that need to be proven and that are constantly changing as the courts develop them. And secondly, each case is different because the facts of each case stand on their own. The facts of any given case will often be somewhat different from the controlling precedent in either direction, particularly because we are constantly dealing with new issues that prior cases did not consider. That leaves a lot of room for making arguments about how the law applies to those different facts. After all, if there is no case that is directly on point, that also means that there is no case directly on point from the defendant’s perspective. At the end of the day, judges are receptive to applying the law to the facts before them in a common-sense way. So, it is important to remember that there is room for us to make creative arguments that make sense if they are good arguments and are backed up by the controlling legal principles. It is our job to explain why our situation is more similar to one set of governing precedents than another.

LD: Is there a specific reason why you chose your law school over another law school? Is this the type of practice you imagined yourself practicing while in law school? And was there a course, professor, or experience that was particularly memorable or important in what practice you chose?

MG: I was always very interested in law-related topics, and I had considered it all along in college. I majored in political science and, even more specifically, as an undergraduate, I was interested in legal theory and legal philosophy. So, it was a natural step to go to law school, although obviously, there’s a bit of a remove between what we do day-to-day and the abstractions of legal philosophy. But I was also pre-med for a couple of years in college. I specifically remember when I finally made the decision to go to law school, I decided to take a philosophy class instead of taking another physics or biology class. That was the moment when I felt like I made the right decision.

LD: What advice do you have now for current law school students?

MG: Probably the most important thing is to pursue what you are interested in. When you’re in school, you have the luxury after your first year to study what you

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choose. I remember, when I was in law school, being very worried about whether the specific classes that I took were going to show law firms that I knew enough about business or the areas of law that they practiced.

But the fact is that most law students, no matter what classes they take, are equally unqualified to start practicing as a lawyer. So, the best thing you can do, I think, is to seriously pursue what you’re interested in. And that will also probably help you do better, which will be the most important stepping stone to pave the way for a career.

LD: Are you involved in any pro bono or public interest activities? Please tell us what you find meaningful about your time serving them.

MG: I am proud to say that I have done a lot of pro bono in my career. Probably the most significant pro bono work that I did was working on one of the Stopand-Frisk cases on behalf of the plaintiffs who were suing the New York City Police Department. In that case, I got to take the depositions of two New York City police officers involved in some of the stops at the center of the case. That was an amazing case to work on because it was such significant litigation that ended up making a real difference in policing practices. And, on the other end of the spectrum from that case involving very high-profile impact litigation, was one in which I represented an individual who was at risk of being kicked out of her public housing for technical, unfair reasons. She had trouble navigating the housing system’s administrative process, and we were able to step in and help her. It was very rewarding to be able to help a specific individual who was up against the system. It makes you realize how hard it is for individuals to navigate and have access to the legal process if they’re not lucky enough to get a lawyer working pro bono or from one of the public interest organizations.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office?

MG: By far, the most significant thing I do outside the office is spending time with my family. We have a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old, and they’re a lot of fun.

As they get older, I get to do things with them that they’re becoming interested in, whether it is going sledding when a storm drops a foot of snow on New York or playing games at home. These are activities that I haven’t done in many years myself, and it’s a great excuse do them again. It turns out that I still find them very fun myself.

500

Kevin Teruya

Melissa Troutner

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

Jordan Thomas

Lisa Tsai

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

REID COLLINS AUSTIN

Ed Timlin

Matthew Tuccillo

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

Robert Tobey

Martin Twersky

JOHNSTON TOBEY DALLAS

BERGER MONTAGUE PHILADELPHIA

Marc Topaz

Jonathan Uslaner

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ LOS ANGELES

Catherine Torell

Austin Van

COHEN MILSTEIN NEW YORK

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

Hector Torres

Jeroen van Kwawegen

KASOWITZ NEW YORK

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Joseph Trautwein

Gregory Varallo

SHELLER PHILADELPHIA

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ WILMINGTON

Max Tribble

Irina Vasilchenko

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

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Carol Villegas

Lexie White

LABATON SUCHAROW NEW YORK

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

David Wales

Joseph White III

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

SAXENA WHITE BOCA RATON

Genevieve Wallace

Conlee Whiteley

SUSMAN GODFREY SEATTLE

KANNER & WHITELEY NEW ORLEANS

Timothy Warren

Tyler Whitmer

LABATON SUCHAROW CHICAGO

QUINN EMANUEL WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mark Wawro

Adam Wierzbowski

SUSMAN GODFREY HOUSTON

BERNSTEIN LITOWITZ NEW YORK

Tamar Weinrib

K. Craig Wildfang

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

ROBINS KAPLAN MINNEAPOLIS

Stephen Weiss

David Williams

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

Michael Wernke

Shawn Williams

POMERANTZ NEW YORK

ROBBINS GELLER SAN FRANCISCO

Keith Wesley

Steven Williams

BROWNE GEORGE LOS ANGELES

SAVERI LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

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Mark Willis

Harvey Wolkoff

LABATON SUCHAROW WASHINGTON, D.C.

QUINN EMANUEL BOSTON

Mary Jane Wilmoth

William Wood

KOHN, KOHN & COLAPINTO WASHINGTON, D.C.

MCKOOL SMITH HOUSTON

Randy Wilson

Debra Wyman

TEXAS COURT OF APPEALS HOUSTON

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

Robert Wilson

Michael Yoder

LABATON SUCHAROW WASHINGTON, D.C.

REID COLLINS DALLAS

Robin Winchester

Eric Young

KESSLER TOPAZ RADNOR, PA.

MCELDREW YOUNG PHILADELPHIA

David Wissbroecker

Steve Zack

ROBBINS GELLER SAN DIEGO

BOIES SCHILLER MIAMI

Terry Wit

Judith Zahid

QUINN EMANUEL SAN FRANCISCO

ZELLE SAN FRANCISCO

Adam Wolfson

Adam Zapala

QUINN EMANUEL LOS ANGELES

COTCHETT BURLINGAME, CALIF.

Kara Wolke

Jessica Zeldin

GLANCY PRONGAY LOS ANGELES

ANDREWS & SPRINGER WILMINGTON

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Over the years, lawyers who represent people who have been injured, killed or abused are dismissed.

Belittled. Ambulance chasers.

Until tragedy befalls someone.

And then, yes, then, they are the most important person in your life.

Each and every member of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers in America is remarkable. (On these pages, those with an asterisk are also Lawdragon Hall of Fame members.) They face the longest odds every day to stand up for what they believe in. Much is made of their victories – when a merchant of toxic chemicals, for example, is held accountable against all odds. Sparse notice is given to the cases that get away, where an overwhelming defense or impossible case leaves them alone.

The Plaintiff Consumer 500 range from coast to coast, counseling grieving family members, finding pathways to justice for those who have been harmed or killed. Among them are lawyers who have won billions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies and other purveyors of dangerous products.

Fearless counsel who take on the toughest sexual abuse cases. An attorney who is at this moment advising someone who mourns a brother lost to the pandemic, a mother fallen ill.

Today, we are all that someone.

We lock arms, march forward and believe. And regard as perhaps never before the 500 warriors on this guide who will fight for your loved ones as you would.

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Rosalyn “Sia” Baker-Barnes PHOTO BY JOSH RITCHIE

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The Ethos of

ADVOCACY

at Searcy Denney

BY ALISON PREECE

The storied Florida trial firm brings an uncommon level of personal commitment to clients facing the most challenging times of their lives.

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500 If an individual has been severely harmed or lost a family member from some form of wrongdoing, they know they need a good lawyer. That might be reason enough to call Searcy Denney, the leading plaintiff injury firm based in Florida which has, to date, obtained over $5B in verdicts and settlements.

What they might not know when they approach the highly effective firm, however, is the level of passionate advocacy and personal concern the firm commits to providing every one of its clients.

“Becoming a lawyer was, for me, a good blend of both advocacy and service,” says Rosalyn “Sia” Baker-Barnes, a member of the firm’s executive committee and a fierce and loyal advocate for clients.

“I’m motivated by the fact that my job is to help this person, to try to put them in a better position than they’re in when they come to my office on day one.”

The ethos is echoed by other top lawyers at the firm, including Jack Scarola, a former prosecutor, and Brenda Fulmer, who focuses on medical device mass torts and pharmaceutical litigation.

Each partner, like others in the storied firm, are fueled by a hunger for justice for clients who have had their lives altered by happenstance, ending up at the mercy of moneyed, powerful interests they cannot fight on their own.

“Although a trial can’t bring somebody back, it can give your client a measure of justice, a feeling that they fought for their loved one, that they made every effort to hold folks responsible,” says Baker-Barnes, whose practice in medical negligence and product liability includes a $20M verdict against tobacco conglomerate RJ Reynolds on behalf of a woman whose mother died of lung cancer.

“It’s a great feeling as a lawyer when you can do something to help,” Baker-Barnes continues. “No, I couldn’t bring her mother back, but that sense of gratitude, that sense of relief, that sense of redemption that she had from knowing that she fought for her mother, I think, made the many, many years of working this case and almost four weeks of trial worth it.”

Baker-Barnes, who has spent her entire career at Searcy Denney, obtained her law degree at Florida State University after earning an undergraduate degree in communications there and interning in the communications office of then-Gov. Lawton Chiles.

The firm – full name, Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley – specializes in plaintiffs’ litigation including personal injury, products liability, commercial 148

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Jack Scarola. Photo provided by the firm.

litigation and professional negligence cases, and is the latest iteration of a firm that traces its roots to 1901. The firm developed its current focus under the leadership of Chris Searcy, a legend in the Florida trial bar who became the youngest attorney in the state to win a $1M jury verdict.

Scarola, a graduate of Georgetown Law Center, arrived at the firm in 1978, after serving as chief felony prosecutor in the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office.

“It was a job with a lot of discretion and authority that enabled me to be in the courtroom almost every day, and I love to be in the courtroom,” Scarola says. “There is no better training ground from my perspective for someone who wants to be a trial lawyer because there’s not likely a better opportunity to get into the courtroom than when you are prosecuting cases.”

As a plaintiffs’ attorney, Scarola has taken on high-profile cases including sex-trafficking claims against disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a Manhattan prison in August 2019, and an excessive force claim against the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office over a 2013 shooting that left 19-year-old Dontrell Stephens paralyzed from the waist down.

While a state jury awarded Stephens $22.5M, the Sheriff’s Office was required to pay only a statutory cap of $200,000. Under state law, any larger claim must be approved by Florida’s legislature, which

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holds a series of hearings in both chambers to consider its decision.

“The legislature is not bound by the jury’s determination,” Scarola says. “So the case is in effect retried before both the Florida House and the Florida Senate. It is not only an extremely cumbersome and expensive process, it is an extremely political one.”

momentum around the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the shooting itself predated those events by years.

In other cases handled by Searcy Denney, national and even global trends are litigation drivers, along with the ever-present desire to correct the wrongs done to individuals and families.

In mid-2020, four years after the jury’s verdict, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill approving the payment of $6M. While amounting to a little more than a fourth of the original award, the payout represented a significant victory since very few claims bills are successfully pursued.

Fulmer, for instance, is leading an investigation into potential lawsuits over contaminated versions of a hair-loss drug from New York-based MasterPharm that left users with symptoms from heart palpitations to dizziness and nausea, which some believed were indications they had contracted Covid-19.

“Most claims bills never pass,” says Scarola, who is the firm’s vice president. “You need to hire lobbyists.

You need to make the rounds within the legislature to garner support for the bill, and it makes obtaining any amount over and above $200,000 extremely difficult.”

About 70 people in the Boca Raton area of south Florida were affected by the tainted 1.25-milligrams of Finasteride Plus, a generic form of Propecia, that MasterPharm subsequently recalled.

Scarola recognized in the beginning the challenges of taking on the case and winning payment under Florida’s sovereign-immunity cap. As a former prosecutor, though, he believed the officer should be held accountable. As Scarola puts it, “Bad cops make the already difficult and dangerous job of law enforcement that much harder.”

Stephens had been riding a bicycle and talking on a phone when the officer pulled him over, Scarola says. The two then walked toward each other, just out of range of the patrol car’s dash camera, and four shots were fired.

While the officer said afterward that Stephens had reached behind his back and pulled out an object that he believed to be a gun, investigators found only a cell phone, and the jury quickly rejected the officer’s version of the events.

Local prosecutors nonetheless declined to file charges in the case, and the Sheriff’s Office never acknowledged any wrongdoing, eventually promoting the officer to the rank of sergeant and assigning him to train newer hires.

“When something like that happens, it cries out for an effort to correct the injustice,” Scarola says. “There was a young man whose life had been absolutely devastated, government agents who refused to accept any responsibility for what was done to him, and something had to be done. It’s cases like this that motivated me many years ago to go to law school.”

While DeSantis, the governor, approved the payout to Scarola’s client as racial-justice protests were gaining

Patients started calling Fulmer with questions about the recall and what it implied. Fulmer leads the firm’s Mass Tort Unit, focused on complex litigation for defective drugs, medical devices and consumer products.

“We find cases in many different ways,” Fulmer explains. “Sometimes you figure it out because you start to get phone calls, and you start putting the pieces together. I’m very hands-on with the intake for our department because it’s the best way to spot patterns. What seems like a random issue might not be random.”

Fulmer’s path to mass torts was far from linear, beginning when she was a 17-year-old college student working as a runner for a law firm, delivering documents to the courthouse and answering phones as needed.

As she worked her way through college, she became a legal secretary and later, a paralegal.

“At some point, I thought, ‘You know, I could do this,’” recalls Fulmer. Married at 18, she and her husband took turns putting each other through college, and she worked at law firms throughout.

When she graduated from Stetson College of Law, she returned to the firm where she had previously worked as a legal secretary and paralegal before moving to Searcy Denney.

Her practice in mass torts has been less affected by the Covid-19 pandemic that interrupted the rhythm of personal and professional lives nationwide than others, partly because many of the cases take years to prepare and are often settled before trial.

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“It’s not like you can just put a computer in front of them and say, ‘OK, go to school,’” she says. “You have to log in, find out what they’re supposed to be doing, print papers and upload files. It’s a little chaotic.”

Outside of the classroom, meanwhile, racial justice protests over the summer afforded her and her husband the opportunity to reinforce lessons they had already begun teaching their children.

“I’m Black, so my husband and I have emphasized the importance of them being proud of who they are, of their heritage, their ethnicity, from day one,” she says. “We’ve consciously chosen not to shield them from reality, and more importantly to equip them and prepare them for what we unfortunately know they and their friends and their cohorts are going to face.”

Brenda Fulmer. Photo provided by the firm.

Scheduling trial dates is more challenging now, Fulmer says, with Covid-19 infection rates fluctuating in different parts of the country, prompting some states to curtail activities even as others move toward a broader economic reopening from prior lockdowns.

The widespread adoption of video-conferencing tools like Zoom, on the other hand, has facilitated hearings and may permanently streamline the litigation process, Fulmer notes.

“A phone conference doesn’t really work, partly because one of the participants invariably puts the call on hold and everyone else is subjected to hold music or ads,” she says, “but it’s amazing how well Zoom has worked. You can control who you hear, who you see, and share information.”

Because of that, the couple talked with their children about the deaths of George Floyd, who was being restrained by an officer, in late May as well as those of Ahmaud Arbery, shot after he was pursued by three white men while jogging near Brunswick, Ga.; and Breonna Taylor, a former paramedic shot to death during a botched police raid in Louisville, Ky. “You’re not going to be able to keep them in a bubble and make them think that it’s not happening,” she says. “And so we chose to engage them. We actually organized a few protests ourselves here in Palm Beach County and then participated in others that were organized. Our kids helped make signs for the protest, and then we took them, masks, gloves and everything else, and they protested with us.”

The drive for justice evidenced in the protests has also motivated Baker-Barnes in the medical malpractice cases she handles, which include catastrophic brain damage to infants and children.

As for office operations, Fulmer’s unit operates on a hybrid model, with some attorneys working from home and others spending much of their time in the office. She has split her own schedule between the two options.

Personal-injury attorneys must become more than lawyers, Baker-Barnes says, reflecting a sentiment that all Searcy Denney attorneys seem to embody. They become counselors for clients, many of whom are overwhelmed. Parents of a child with a severe brain injury don’t have a health-care worker running to their door, offering to help coordinate interaction with social service agencies or balance the responsibilities of daily life with caregiving, Baker-Barnes notes.

Baker-Barnes readily concedes that the pandemic has dissolved the typical boundaries between her personal and professional lives. Her three children, the oldest of whom is 12, are all doing remote-schooling because of the pandemic.

“You are who they go to for advice,” Baker-Barnes says. “You are who they call when they encounter a problem. You are their shoulder when they are at their wit’s end. You are always available. You have to be. They depend on you.”

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Stephen Zack BOIES SCHILLER (MIAMI)

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STEPHEN ZACK “WHAT IS THE SOCIETAL BENEFIT OF THIS LITIGATION?” As head of the Pro Bono Committee at Boies Schiller Flexner, this is one of the core questions Steve Zack asks associates and partners who are proposing a new matter.

It could also stand as the underlying philosophy of Zack’s life and work.

A Cuban-American who fled the communist regime with his family as a teenager, Zack had a deep-rooted sense of injustice before he even started college. Law school, he says, was a way to “change the world for the better, to correct the wrongs I was seeing.”

His career, which has been a mix of government service and private practice, never strayed from that singular vision. He’s always been active with think groups and organizing efforts in the legal industry around diversity and inclusion, and the cases currently on his plate involve some of the most crucial issues for Americans right now, such the question of insurance coverage for Covid-related shutdowns, and a challenge to the electoral college system that has put a couple of un-popular presidents in power.

After attending law school at the height of the civl rights movement in the U.S., Zack worked for Senator Claude Pepper, known for his progressive Liberalism, and later worked as general counsel to Bob Graham, the long-time Florida governor who pushed social and environmental reform while appealing to a working-class base.

Zack, a Lawdragon Hall of Fame member in the Leadership category, has been an impactful leader in his own right. He was appointed by President Obama as the Alternate U.S. Representative to the 68th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. He’s an invited member of the Council of Foreign Relations, regularly discussing crucial matters of international importance with world leaders. He was the youngest and first Hispanic president of the Florida Bar, one of the early members of the Cuban American Bar Association, which has since grown exponentially, and, of national importance, as the President of the American Bar Association.

At the ABA, as with much of his career, Zack was focused on promoting diversity in the legal profes-

PHOTO BY: JOSH RITCHIE

BY ALISON PREECE sion, and increasing access to justice for indigent and underprivileged Americans. He remains involved with the group, weighing in on issues that could shape the legal landscape for generations to come, such as increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices beyond nine, and whether that appointment process should be modified.

As part of the leadership at Boies Schiller, Zack is always looking for cases that have broad societal impact, and is proud of the firm’s reputation as aggressively progressive. The firm’s history of representation includes representing Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and advancing the legalization of same-sex marriage.

LGBTQ+ discrimination remains a focus. “We spend a major portion of our revenues on diversity initiatives and pro bono work in the diversity area,” he says. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Lawdragon: Tell me about the case you’re handling for IT Italy, the South Florida restaurant that’s being denied insurance coverage from the Covid shutdowns.

Steve Zack: It’s one of several cases we’ve filed on business interruption for restaurants and other companies. It’s very interesting because various insurance companies have different policy language. Sometimes they differ quite greatly, which of course makes a difference in the coverage.

I have to take you back a little. During the SARS epidemic, an institute that represents a lot of the insurance carriers recommended certain language that some in the industry put into place, and some didn’t. Coverage all comes down to the language in the policies.

LD: Can you give me an example?

SZ: Some policies require physical damage to the property. Well, how do you define that? If somebody can’t come into work to maintain the property, isn’t that by definition going to cause physical damage?

Then there’s government actions, which some policies include. But a lot of these policies are titled “all-risk policies.” As a layperson, that seems to be pretty broad coverage. Yet some policies try to have exclusions that you would not expect.

The overarching principle in insurance cases everywhere, but particularly in Florida, is that any ambiguity is interpreted against the insurance company.

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500 LD: That makes sense, since they wrote the policy.

SZ: Right. And if it’s ambiguous, it should create the maximum coverage possible.

LD: Litigation like this can be so protracted, but people and companies are really suffering now. Do you think there’s any chance of a timely resolution to some of these cases?

SZ: One of the things we try to emphasize before the multi-district litigation panel is how urgent resolutions are. A lot of cases can take their time, but this is not one. People’s lives are hanging in the balance.

LD: I’m glad you’re handling these cases, Steve, because I know you have a long history of supporting access to justice, making sure the “little guy” gets represented just as robustly as large corporate entities and government bodies.

SZ: It’s tremendously important. It’s the reason I became a lawyer.

LD: Can you tell us about your work with the American Bar Endowment?

SZ: Yes, the ABE is a terrific organization that offers a $120M endowment for people and groups in need.

The money comes from their sale of insurance policies, and the profit goes into a trust fund. Every year we distribute $8M, with $4M to the Fund for Justice and Education and $4M to the American Bar Foundation. The Foundation is a gathering of intellectuals who write papers and study issues affecting the rule of law. The Fund for Justice and Education sponsors a lot of different legal programs. In addition to that, we give away $300,000 in opportunity grants. Each grant is for between $10-20,000, to be used as seed money.

LD: What sorts of things are the grants used for?

SZ: I’ll give you a perfect example. In Kentucky, there’s some wonderful courts, but often not in the rural areas, which means people in the rural areas don’t have access to the court system. With money from the fund, the State Bar bought a bus and outfitted it like a courtroom. Called the Justice Bus, it travels around the entire state, so that even people in remote areas can access the justice system.

LD: What an incredible initiative!

SZ: The biggest problem with our legal system frankly is a lack of access for indigent populations, which disproportionately impacts women and minorities.

Groups like this are working to correct the imbalance, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

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LD: I know that you’ve spoken internationally for years about the rule of law and the importance of a robust and transparent justice system like we have in the U.S. I’m curious, from your vantage point, do you think the past four years, under Trump, exposed weaknesses in our system, or even eroded the rule of law in this country? Or do you see it more as a stress test that proved how strong our system really is?

SZ: That’s still an open issue, isn’t it?

LD: Right.

SZ: We’re learning how strong our system is. And in some ways, how weak it is. A significant number of Americans feel disenfranchised. That has to change.

When I was a United States delegate to the United Nations, I addressed the General Assembly on the rule of law. I said it then and it still holds: The rule of law is the basis for liberty and justice. There’s two kinds of law that people talk about: the rule by law and the rule of law. There’s a real distinction there.

Under the rule by law, certain people in power declare something to be law, and that’s often not in the favor of many others. So the rule of law is essential, because that way it is applied fairly to all people in the community. That has historically not been the case in many countries.

LD: How do you think the Biden administration will do?

SZ: I think he is exactly what our country needs at this time. I was very active in the election of President Biden. He is thoughtful, respected, and is seen as someone who’s a genuinely good person. People can disagree with his politics, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find people saying he’s not a good person. That sort of morality is very important for our system to function.

LD: I think you’re right, but it almost sounds a little revolutionary.

SZ: Historically, when I’d interview lawyers, I’d ask questions about their education and the type of practice they want. Over time I’ve learned the most important question to start off with is, are they a good person? I once wrote an article when I was president of the Florida Bar, that to be a good lawyer you had to be a good person. And I thought that was pretty uncontentious.

Well, when it was reported in the paper, I cannot tell you how many letters I got from people who balked at that statement. For me it continues to be fundamental to any person I hire or that I want to work with. Or that I want to elect in a leadership position.

LD: That makes so much sense. Leaders who are bad people can cause a lot of damage.

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SZ: As you know, I’m a Cuban American and I have, in my lifetime, experienced the loss of liberty. It’s not a theoretical exercise, I saw it happen in Cuba.

I thought it would never happen here. For the first time, with the attack on the U.S. Capital on January 6th, I thought maybe I wouldn’t soon be as optimistic as I’ve always been.

LD: Wow. SZ: When I was president of the American Bar, I set up a commission on Hispanic legal rights and responsibilities. I also lectured extensively about civics education. One of the real problems we have in America is that people graduate today from high school and have had no opportunity to understand the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

There was an edition of Newsweek four or five years ago that talked about civics education and how lacking it was. More people knew about Judge Judy than who was on the United States Supreme Court. When they were asked what the three branches of government were, they would say Republican, Democrat and Independent.

LD: That’s scary.

SZ: That’s very, very scary. Since that time, Sandra Day O’Connor emphasized her concern about this issue all during her tenure and afterwards. She still talks today about the importance of civics education for the next generation. Sometimes kids are aware of their rights, but not their responsibilities. We have to understand that we’re all responsible for maintaining the principles of the United States Constitution and the rule of law. This is the only way to protect the poor and disenfranchised against the rich and powerful.

LD: I know you’re doing a lot of work within the legal industry as well, in terms of equal representation. A lot of law firms are still struggling with diversity and inclusion, although I think we’re moving in the right direction. If you could talk to all the law firm leaders in the country, what would you say we need to do to create the kind of change we want to see?

SZ: I would say, be careful about diversity fatigue.

We’ve been talking about diversity for so long and we’ve come a long way but we have a long way to go.

Some people are ready to stop, and they were at the beginning of the process. I don’t even think we’re at the middle. We have to continue to set goals and set metrics that we expect law firms to honor.

This is not only the right thing to do, it’s a good thing to do from a business perspective. Because the

board rooms of America today look very carefully at how your firm and how the profession is becoming more diverse.

I continue to believe that’s one of the fundamental obligations of our profession. The profession has to look like our society. If it doesn’t, then the respect for law will clearly end one day.

When I was Governor [of Florida Bob] Graham’s general counsel, he had a process he went through to make judicial appointments. If there was a superstar, that person would be appointed. If it was somebody who was not qualified, it didn’t make any difference what their political connection was. If neither was the case, then he focused on getting the bench to look like the community that it served. And it really made a difference. There were counties in Florida that had a large Black population without a single Black judge. That’s just unacceptable, and he changed that through an active focus on it.

LD: Talk to me about the work you’re doing as the head of BSF’s Diversity Initiatives.

SZ: We’re very active in that area. We spend a major portion of our revenues on diversity initiatives and pro bono work in the diversity area. We don’t make any decision without considering the impact on diversity. We have a staff person who is solely responsible for diversity efforts, working alongside our lawyers.

There are various programs that we have signed onto that have made commitments to enhance diversity.

We look at diversity at all levels, not just the young lawyers but our most senior lawyers and those who are in leadership roles. We’re a trial firm, and we make sure that diverse lawyers take significant roles on our trial teams, so that they have every opportunity that everyone else has.

I live in Miami, and it is truly a melting pot. If it doesn’t work in Miami, it’s not going to work anywhere. Because in Miami, the average juror will be a combination of Hispanics and Black people and Haitians and Anglos, transplants from other states, old time Floridians. And it is essential for a jury deliberation that they have these different perspectives, which are best delivered by a diverse group of lawyers.

LD: What are some of the groups you’re working with?

SZ: LCLD is a big one, that’s the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity. The initiative trains young, diverse lawyers on how to take leadership roles in their communities and offices.

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Patrick Barry

Nadeem Bezar

DECOF BARRY MEGA & QUINN PROVIDENCE, R.I.

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

Vincent Bartolotta

David Bianchi

THORSNES BARTOLOTTA SAN DIEGO

STEWART TILGHMAN MIAMI

June Bashant

Andy Birchfield

ROUDA FEDER SAN FRANCISCO

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Michael Baum

Roy Black*

BAUM HEDLUND LOS ANGELES

BLACK SREBNICK MIAMI

Jere Beasley*

Gayle Blatt

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

Bradley Beckworth

Bryan Blevins Jr.

NIX PATTERSON AUSTIN

PROVOST UMPHREY BEAUMONT, TEXAS

David Benninger

Alexander Blewett*

LUVERA LAW FIRM SEATTLE

HOYT & BLEWETT GREAT FALLS, MONT.

Esther Berezofsky

Jerome Block

MOTLEY RICE CHERRY HILL, N.J.

LEVY KONIGSBERG NEW YORK

Steve Berman

Michael Block

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

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LD: Training attorneys on the business side is so important for that demographic. Especially client relations.

SZ: Absolutely. And it’s beneficial all around. If you want to know how not to get a new client, bring a group of lawyers who all look the same. Talking to clients today, without exception, they have to see that you have a diverse group of lawyers and that those lawyers will be working on their matters, and in decision-making roles.

Clients don’t always want a first-year lawyer handling their case. But there is no client that I’m aware of today that doesn’t want to see diversity in the lawyers that represent them.

LD: That’s very encouraging. Speaking of positive change in the world – tell us about the electoral college litigation you’re handling?

SZ: The basis of the electoral college system, as you know, comes down to the fact that the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian philosophies are so different. Jefferson wanted everyone to vote, and he wanted each vote to count equally. The Hamiltonian philosophy was that, well, you couldn’t really trust the people.

You had to have an elected official who cast the vote.

That’s how we got the electoral college originally.

Now, on a number of occasions, the popular vote has been greater than the electoral vote, and yet the electoral vote controls the win. There’s an argument that in many states, the winner of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes. So if you win by one vote, it could be 14 electoral votes, even though maybe you should get seven for one and maybe six for the other. That would be more in line with the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. So we’re challenging the electoral college way of electing a president. Which is of course so fundamental. We’ve seen what happened in recent years.

LD: Yes, this conversation is freshly relevant right now, with Trump’s election and all the political gerrymandering, but you also have the long view of it, with your representation of Al Gore in the Florida recount.

SZ: Right, and whether you agree or disagree with the United States Supreme Court’s decision there, there’s one thing that everybody should agree on: More people went to the polls thinking they voted for Al Gore. They should’ve been able to actually vote for him. Same with Hillary Clinton. In the future, that has got to be protected, so that people know when they go to vote, that their vote counts.

LD: Can you tell us a bit about your approach with these cases? It seems like a thorny issue that a lot of people would like solved, but we seem to have trouble figuring out how.

SZ: The biggest issue is going to be reapportionment.

Everything that happens in our country is based on reapportionment. Reapportionment decides who your elected officials will be.

The term seems to make people’s eyes roll back in their head, but everything, everything is based on reapportionment. It comes down to how the Senate seats will be divided in the 50 states, how districts are drawn. This is essential because, depending on how you draw districts, you get different legislators, different parties, different philosophies.

You can divide a state many different ways. Some will benefit one party, others will benefit another party.

The Voting Rights Act of 1982 said that wherever possible you have to create what’s called majorityminority districts, where the majority of voters are racial or ethnic minorities.

One of the reasons we’re so divided in Congress and have so much difficulty passing legislation is that historically one of the principles of reapportionment is compactness. Compactness in simple terms is a district that looks like a perfect square, two by two by two, with the same number of voters in each district. That’s easy to paint. But when they throw out compactness in order to establish minority-majority districts, what does that mean? That means that I actually had to draw a district that went through 12 counties to string together enough minority voters to create a minority district. But by doing that, it changed the whole nature of the legislature. This happened in every state.

Today, it’s gotten incredibly sophisticated with what’s called TIGER (“Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing database”) maps, which are maps of your population. When I tried Johnson v.

De Grandy representing the Florida Senate almost 30 years ago, you had to have million-dollar computers to draw these maps, and it would take days.

Today, anybody with a laptop can draw the map in like an hour. One of the cases we’re handling right now is about making sure that the Census counts everybody, that it’s not cut off too soon, because that’s going to determine what the maps ultimately look like. Read the full Q&A at www.lawdragon.com/2021/04/20/ hall-of-fame-lawyer-limelight-steve-zack.

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Jeffrey Bloom

Margaret Moses Branch

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

BRANCH LAW FIRM ALBUQUERQUE

Patricia Bobb

Thomas Brandi

PATRICIA BOBB CHICAGO

BRANDI LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

Shoshana Bookson

Debbie Dudley Branson

TOLMAGE PESKIN NEW YORK

LAW OFFICE OF FRANK L. BRANSON DALLAS

LaBarron Boone

Frank Branson

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

LAW OFFICE OF FRANK L. BRANSON DALLAS

Rainey Booth

Gregory Breedlove

LITTLEPAGE BOOTH HOUSTON

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

James Bostwick

E. Drew Britcher

BOSTWICK & PETERSON SAN FRANCISCO

BRITCHER LEONE GLEN ROCK, N.J.

Raymond Boucher

Anne Marie Brockland

BOUCHER LLP WOODLAND HILLS, CALIF.

CASEY DEVOTI ST. LOUIS

Beverly Bove

Quentin Brogdon

LAW OFFICE WILMINGTON

CRAIN BROGDON ROGERS DALLAS

Kevin Boyle

Bruce Broillet*

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

GREENE BROILLET SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

name name FIRM FIRM FIRM (CITY) 160

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Alex Brown

Kenneth Byrd

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

LIEFF CABRASER NASHVILLE

Joseph M. “Buddy” Brown

Elizabeth Cabraser

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Thomas Brown

David Cain Jr.

THE BROWN LAW FIRM HOUSTON

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

Toby Brown

Clair Campbell

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

CAMPBELL & ASSOCIATES CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Devon Bruce

Robert Carey

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

HAGENS BERMAN PHOENIX

David Buchanan

Diana Carnemolla

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

Virginia Buchanan

Tom Carse

LEVIN PAPANTONIO PENSACOLA, FLA.

CARSE LAW FIRM DALLAS

Richard F. Burke Jr.

David Casey

CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES CHICAGO

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

Michael Burrage

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WHITTEN BURRAGE OKLAHOMA CITY

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Victor George LAW OFFICES OF VICTOR L. GEORGE (TORRANCE, CALIF.)

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VICTOR GEORGE GROWING UP IN WEST VIRGINIA’S CAPITAL

in the 1970s, Victor George observed firsthand the never-ending class struggles and racial challenges faced by citizens of color striving to attain equal rights and coal miners contending with disease and dangerous working conditions.

It showed him the law’s power to make a difference in people’s lives.

“I gravitated toward the profession at a young age, primarily through empathy for people,” says the Pepperdine University Law graduate who went on to build a plaintiffs’ firm in Los Angeles known for winning multimillion-dollar jury verdicts in againstthe-odds cases involving both catastrophic personal injury and employment discrimination.

BY KATRINA DEWEY Weinstein, who has since been convicted of criminal offenses in New York and charged in California.

“I met with so many women who share their story, and I’d explain: ‘You have a strong case. You certainly should do something about it,’” George recalls. “And they would be reluctant, worrying that they would be ostracized in their industry. I definitely understood, but it was such a shame. Now, hopefully, women aren’t going to be necessarily precluded from potential employment because they brought a prior action.”

Lawdragon: You’ve built a career taking on difficult cases, often when the moral calculus of right versus wrong that was very clear to you didn’t match the social mores of the time. You’ve been willing to buck the system. Were you always interested in plaintiffs’ law?

“My mom was a very liberal Democrat, I too was always a liberal Democrat as well, and I realized early on that the law can do so many helpful things to protect the people that need a hand,” he says.

Victor George: I began in defense law. After Pepperdine, I worked for two firms and defended corporations and insurance companies, and I was beginning to get some jury verdicts.

George – who went for 10 years without losing a single jury trial – won the 2005 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award from the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles and has been nominated for that honor in 11 of the past 17 years. Among his jury successes was the wrongful death case of Mason Zisette, who died in a tragic party bus accident for which George won $26M – the largest wrongful death jury verdict awarded in United States history in a minor’s death.

VG: You know, there was a kind of emptiness, and I thought, “Gosh, if I could help real people, humans that are really victims, whether it’s of discrimination or severe personal injury, that would be much more impactful.” I knew I would get a lot of secondary gain from that because I would pull so passionately for my clients and be truly inspired to work non-stop for them. So I founded my plaintiffs’ firm and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

“Any time a plaintiff gets a terrific verdict, it lifts everyone’s boat a bit higher, making corporate entities, insurance companies, government agencies, whomever, more aware that you can’t put people at risk,” he says. “As lawyers and trial attorneys, we can really help make the world a better place. Certainly, a safer, more equitable place.”

In his own practice, George has taken on many gender discrimination cases, attributing his passion on the issue partly to four of his five children being daughters.

“I did all these #MeToo types of cases way before #MeToo was ever imagined,” he says, “which is why I was so pleased when the movement arose.”

That viral social movement, which has brought to light claims against powerful politicians, corporate executives and entertainers, was born in 2017 out of sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey

PHOTO BY: AMY CANTRELL

LD: How did you feel about that?

LD: That takes courage. Tell me about that decision.

VG: I always knew I’d like someday to be my own boss. My dad was an entrepreneur, and I was concerned that my trajectory would be limited if a boss was telling me what I could or could not do. I’m a self-starter. I was always self-motivated. So I advised the defense firm I was with that I was going to switch sides of the aisle, and I sold my house so I suddenly had some money. This was the early ‘90s.

Before I began my new firm, I wanted to take a trip around the world, just myself. I took some profit from the house, put everything I owned in storage, and then I bought an “around-the-world” airplane ticket through Pan Am, which used to offer this amazing deal where you could get an around the world air travel ticket for $2,800, and as long as you flew in one direction, it was good for 12 months.

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500 Once I returned to L.A, I was refreshed and decided, “Now, it’s time. My mind’s very clear. I’m done with defense. I’m ready to focus and work really hard in a new arena.” So I sent out one thousand announcements to all my friends and contacts from everywhere, and people would send over the cases they didn’t want.

And when you’re brand new, you’re like, “Oh, sure. I’ll take that case,” if it had real damages and I thought maybe there was some liability angle that I could show.

LD: Did you ever envision reaching the level that you have?

VG: Well, I was very competitive growing up – academically, extracurricular, sports-wise, really wanting to do well. I knew I would bring those traits into my jury trial career. Also, I greatly enjoyed people and was always very curious and greatly enjoyed learning and reading.

LD: While you were growing up in West Virginia?

VG: Yes. I lived in Charleston, which was the state capital and had the largest population, about 80,000 people. I thought that was big, but when I moved to Los Angeles, I learned that it was, in relation, very small. I had four other siblings, and my dad owned a hotel. He eventually became an entrepreneur who imported and exported toys from different countries, traveling a lot. My mom was a stay-at-home mom with us five kids, but she was exceptionally active in the Democratic Party, the Junior League, March of Dimes and with Catholic Church women. Her volunteer activities were non-stop.

LD: No lawyers in the family?

VG: Plenty of arguing, but no lawyers.

LD: Interesting. So how did you make the transition from West Virginia to California?

VG: After my sophomore year in college, my best West Virginia buddy and I took a trip across the United States. We drove.

LD: You drove?

VG: We did and picked up odd jobs along the way.

We worked in Reno, Nev., doing the swing shift – from 6:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. – at “Harrah’s” as “Jackpot Payoff” boys, where we wore big belts full of money paying off slot machines. Being on the swing shift meant we could go to Lake Tahoe during the day because our shift didn’t start until 6:30 in the evening. And Reno is one of those towns that’s open all night, so after work, you could go out, party, hang out with your coworkers, or whatever. We built up some money, went to Mount Rushmore, the Great Lakes, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone National Park. After going out to San Francisco, we got a job selling vacuum cleaners for Kirby, going door-to-door in Monterey, Calif. Then we worked our way down the coast to Los Angeles, where we got a gig serving food and building props on the set of a movie called “Com-tac 303,” with Billy Dee Williams and Henry Fonda.

Then, while I was in Southern California, I saw Pepperdine. It’s a gorgeous, breathtaking campus. I remem-

BEFORE I BEGAN MY NEW FIRM, I WANTED TO TAKE A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD, JUST MYSELF. I TOOK SOME PROFIT FROM THE HOUSE, PUT EVERYTHING I OWNED IN STORAGE, AND THEN I BOUGHT AN “AROUND-THE-WORLD” AIRPLANE TICKET THROUGH PAN AM, WHICH USED TO OFFER THIS AMAZING DEAL WHERE YOU COULD GET AN AROUND THE WORLD AIR TRAVEL TICKET FOR $2,800, AND AS LONG AS YOU FLEW IN ONE DIRECTION, IT WAS GOOD FOR 12 MONTHS. 164

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ber thinking, “If I can get into Stanford, that’s superb.

If I can’t, but I get into Pepperdine, that’ll be great!”

LD: That’s amazing. So once you were out here, settled into plaintiffs’ litigation with your own firm, what were some of your early victories?

VG: The ones that made my reputation initially were employment discrimination cases. An early 2000s trial was one named Bruce Hope v. California. Bruce Hope worked as a cook in the California prison system and he contracted HIV, which at the time frequently caused ostracizing by coworkers. His bosses didn’t know what to do with him when the word of his HIV got out, and the youth detention center population was really hard on Bruce. His bosses finally said, “Should we put you on some kind of disability?

Should we let you go? Do you want to find another job?” And he said, “No, this job is close to my home. I rented my apartment because I work here. Nothing’s wrong with me. I have HIV, but it’s not contagious.”

When he was eventually forced out, he came to me and said, “The state wasn’t going to offer me any money because they said, ‘Oh, it’s fine what we did.’” So I tried the case downtown for a few weeks.

He was making $22,000 a year at the time, and the final award on the discrimination jury verdict was $3.4M. This was back when $3.4 million was still a lot of money, a huge jury verdict. And then the state lost on appeal and paid.

One interesting thing that happened during that trial was when my mom came to visit. She frequently visited L.A. from West Virginia, and when I’m in trial during her visits, she enjoys watching, and so she saw part of the Hope trial. It was probably a month long or so, but the first day that she was there, she saw me carrying in my trial boxes and setting them up in the courtroom. Afterwards Mom said, “Gosh, that is such a good idea, what you’re doing, subliminally.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and she said, “You’re carrying in all these boxes in front of the jury with the word ‘H-O-P-E’ on them in big black letters.

That’s so smart.” I told her, “Mom, I wish I was that smart, but that’s my client’s name.”

LD: Funny how the universe works sometimes. What was his reaction when you got the verdict?

VG: He just cried. He fell on the table, crying, in shock.

Because back then, you remember, a lot of people thought that HIV was a death sentence, and that if someone had it, their life was ruined. There was still a tremendous amount of prejudice against gay people, too. Even during jury selection for that case,

prospective jurors would say, “No, I can’t be neutral.

The Bible says homosexuality is bad, and you said your plaintiff is a homosexual. I think, unfortunately, his lifestyle has brought this on.” We saw that from a lot of jurors back then.

LD: It was such a different world, in many ways. And the change in attitudes on LGBTQ+ have been wonderful – and long overdue.

VG: Now, we have gay marriage approved by the Supreme Court in 2015. But 20 years ago, for a gay person with HIV, it was absolutely a tough row to hoe.

I don’t think many attorneys back then would have taken Bruce’s case.

LD: You’re really going up against not just the system, but against the culture as a whole, in a case like that.

VG: So true. I also handled a case for Tarik Omari, a Palestinian Muslim who had a really good kidney dialysis business equipment contract with Kindred Healthcare. A couple of years after 9/11, he traveled to Palestine on vacation, and the corporation basically usurped his equipment while he was away and gave the contract to a contact of one of the local Kindred executives. Tarik came back to L.A. and realized, “Gosh, I’ve lost my job and business, I’ve lost all my dialysis machines, which were worth a lot of money.”

We sent letters warning Kindred there was no justifiable reason for what they had done, and before trial, we obtained correspondence between executives, with my letters attached, that said, “More fan mail from Omari and his attorney.” So we put that in front of the jury. I had the CFO on the witness stand and asked questions like, “You think you’re a funny guy?”

“No.” “You think you’re a comedian? You entertain the big CEO with your smart-ass comments?” He said, “What do you mean?” And I put up those “more fan mail” exhibits, so the jury crushed them. Kindred hadn’t offered any settlement money in the case. The verdict was $7M, and they appealed. And of course, they lost and paid.

LD: That really goes to show how much of a difference the law and juries can make for people who are at the mercy of powerful individuals or businesses.

VG: That is so true. As time went on, I continued facing very powerful entities. I recently finished a big sexual harassment case involving a third-party vendor with a helicopter contract for the FBI. The FBI contact for the business was a very high-level FBI manager, living in Quantico, Va., who was married with three kids, but he started hitting on this sales

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NO ONE’S REALLY CALLING ME WITH EASY ONES. BUT, YOU KNOW, YOU LOOK AT THE CASES AND YOU TRY TO DO AN ANALYSIS. AND IT’S VERY INSPIRATIONAL KNOWING THAT YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT SIDE. IN ALL OF THESE CASES, I KNOW MY CLIENT WAS TOTALLY WRONGED, OFTEN BECAUSE THE DEFENDANTS THOUGHT THAT THE VICTIM WAS SOMEONE WHO COULDN’T FIGHT BACK. rep at conventions. They had a relationship, and she broke up with him after finding out he was married.

This FBI executive was a unit chief for the Hostage Rescue Team and he could go online and find out the manifest of any person on an airplane, traveling anywhere. He could (and would) often show up, unannounced, when she got off a plane, flashed his badge to the Transportation Security Administration and take her away. She was petrified, and when she threatened to report him, he would ask, “Who are you going to tell? I’m the FBI. Are you going to the local police?”

LD: That’s terrifying.

VG: She asked her employer, Helinet Aviation Services, to take her off the FBI account, but the harasser didn’t want that, so they refused. So we took them on, and (after a $300,000 settlement offer was refused) our jury returned a $4.25M verdict!

LD: Hard cases are evidently your specialty.

VG: Certainly not by choice! No one’s really calling me with easy ones. But, you know, you look at the cases and you try to do an analysis. And it’s very inspirational knowing that you’re on the right side.

In all of these cases, I know my client was totally wronged, often because the defendants thought that the victim was someone who couldn’t fight back.

For instance, Doreen Mackey, the client in the FBI case, is a single mom of two kids, one of whom has special needs. I can’t imagine the FBI honcho ever thought she would say, “Don’t touch me. You can’t touch me,” and then aggressively pursuing justice.

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LD: And now, you’ve taken on the Malibu shooter case, which is also such a tough one.

VG: That’s such a tragic case. The family of Tristan Beaudette, who was shot to death at Malibu Creek State Park while on a camping trip, sleeping between his 2- and 4-year-old daughters, is seeking $90M from Los Angeles County and the state of California. The alleged shooter had seven separate shootings near the site within a 16-month period, and neither the county nor the state publicized it because they didn’t want people to get upset or anxious. Of course the moment Tristan was killed, they instantly closed down the park and notified the public of all the prior shootings.

So many times it takes a horrific tragedy to have the people in charge decide, “Oh, we’d better do better.” But if you had told Tristan of the unsolved shootings before, he would never have brought his 2-year-old and 4-year-old there. That’s the last thing he would have done.

LD: And, of course, no matter how large the verdict is now, it doesn’t bring him back.

VG: Exactly. It’s like the Starline Tours case, where Mason Zisette died during a friend’s Sweet 16 party on the bus. I don’t know if you can have a much sadder situation: Thirty 16-year-olds get on a doubledecker bus, there was some alcohol distributed, and kids were on the top level of the open-air bus, standing and dancing, not using seat belts, just enjoying themselves.

LD: Doing what kids do.

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VG: Exactly. And the bus driver kept driving, jumped on the 405 freeway and as he’s traveling south, Mason, who was the tallest kid, was looking toward Malibu as the bus traveled southbound. His head hit a low freeway overpass, he lost consciousness and never awoke.

So we took it to jury trial. His parents could only seek damages for what’s called “loss of love,” as Mason was only 16, so he had no lost earnings because he wasn’t working. He had no hospital bills. He was just alive long enough to allow all of his organs to be harvested so someone else could use them. That jury verdict came in at $26M, the highest verdict in U.S. history for the death of a minor. But his loving parents, in a heartbeat, would a thousand times rather just have Mason home alive.

LD: Of course.

VG: They were in their late 40s, and he could easily have been part of their lives for another 35 years.

You know, jurors often ask me in wrongful death cases how money will cure the problem. I have to explain that it’s the only remedy we have. No one’s going to go to prison. It wasn’t an intentional act. But it’s a way to somehow, in a tiny way, alleviate some of the pain, and hopefully the jurors can feel all the things you lose with a child’s death: love, relationship, potential support. It’s not just a loss at one moment in time, because the child arguably would have been with you the rest of your life. When you become older, that child would have been there to help you, as life comes full circle.

LD: In March 2020, as the pandemic was unfolding, you won another against-all-odds case for Patricia Samson, who was terminated from Wells Fargo in 2015 after taking a medical leave. You won that literally as courtrooms were shutting down because of coronavirus.

VG: I told our jurors that justice delayed is justice denied and my client had already waited far too long. Her case had been dismissed, then reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The jury awarded her not only compensatory damages but also made a finding of punitive damages against Wells Fargo.

She went on medical leave for endometriosis, and within a week of her going on leave, management decided to displace her. They did not tell her she was terminated until she returned from leave. I showed the jury an email with the subject line “Samson Displacement Conversation” where her supervi-

sor told his boss he wanted to “run an idea by you re: Patricia Samson.”

I told the jury she was like her biblical warrior namesake “Samson” and discussed the story of David versus Goliath to help the jury understand how brave she was in standing up to Wells Fargo. We sent a powerful message to employers thinking they can terminate workers who must take medical leave for whatever reason, including coronavirus and its effect on employees and the repercussions to their families. You can’t fire them just because they are sick, and it’s highly likely a jury will say your behavior is malicious if you do.

LD: What kind of cases are you seeing arising from the pandemic? It must be tragic.

VG: Since my practice is both personal injury and employment issues, the Covid cases are sadly nonstop. Employers are using Covid as an excuse to discriminate against workers by firing and blaming the virus. Regarding personal injury, so many people are sick and dying with inefficient protection or care in the workplace, putting profits over safety.

LD: This might sound like an odd question, but you really do convey an innate goodness. Do you think that’s one of your strengths with jurors?

VG: I hope so. I have always loved people. I’m an eternal optimist. I don’t think anyone has ever perceived me as slick or deceitful. I try to be entirely honest and transparent with my jurors. During jury selection, I share all the bad facts and warts with the jurors. I want to make sure they know everything negative that they’re going to hear during trial and give them the opportunity to say whether they can still be neutral with that set of facts.

I think it’s essential for the plaintiffs’ attorney to get in front of the process with absolute truth and credibility. It’s the best thing I can do because what I really want is for the jury to understand that I’m trying to shepherd them through this entire trial with pure integrity. We get to speak first. There is only one chance to make a first impression. When they hear me speaking or asking questions, I want them to understand that I am really seeking the truth through cross-examination and showing them the way. And by the time we reach the closing arguments, hopefully, they understand, “OK, this is the trial attorney who’s been honest with us every step of the trial.”

For me, that’s essential. Integrity is everything.

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Stacey Cavanagh

Robert Clifford

CAVANAGH LAW GROUP CHICAGO

CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES CHICAGO

Timothy Cavanagh

Eleni Coffinas

CAVANAGH LAW GROUP CHICAGO

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

Mark Chalos

Gary Cohen

LIEFF CABRASER NASHVILLE

GROSSMAN ROTH CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Deborah Chang

Howard Coker

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

COKER LAW JACKSONVILLE, FLA.

Doris Cheng

John Coletti

WALKUP MELODIA SAN FRANCISCO

PAULSON COLETTI PORTLAND, ORE.

Cynthia Chihak

Dean Colson

CHIHAK & MARTEL SAN DIEGO

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Michael Ciresi*

Jan Conlin*

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Denyse Clancy

Roxanne Barton Conlin*

KAZAN MCCLAIN OAKLAND, CALIF.

CONLIN & ASSOCIATES DES MOINES

Robert Clayton

Jayne Conroy

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

SIMMONS HANLY NEW YORK

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Ralph Cook*

Michael Danko

HARE WYNN BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

DANKO MEREDITH REDWOOD CITY, CALIF.

Monica A. Cooper

Frank Darras

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

DARRASLAW ONTARIO, CALIF.

Erin Copeland

Mark Davis*

FIBICH LEEBRON HOUSTON

DAVIS LEVIN HONOLULU

Leto Copeley

David Dean*

WHITE STRADLEY DURHAM, N.C.

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

Philip Harnett Corboy Jr.

Jessica Dean

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

DEAN OMAR DALLAS

Joseph Cotchett*

Kevin Dean

COTCHETT PITRE BURLINGAME, CALIF.

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Fred Cunningham

A. Roy DeCaro

DOMNICK CUNNINGHAM PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

RAYNES MCCARTY PHILADELPHIA

Katie Curry

Mark Decof

MCGINN MONTOYA ALBUQUERQUE

DECOF BARRY MEGA & QUINN PROVIDENCE, R.I.

Lisa Dagostino

Michael Demetrio

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

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Parvin Aminolroaya SEEGER WEISS (RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.)

PARVIN AMINOLROAYA THE ELITE CORPS OF LAWDRAGON 500

plaintiff lawyers becomes ever more rarefied in the area of mass tort and class action cases, in which lawyers are called upon to win justice for thousands of victims across multiple jurisdictions. The stakes could not be higher, and the claims are often heartwrenching, whether from faulty pharmaceuticals or other defective products.

Among the niche’s emerging leaders is Seeger Weiss’ Parvin Aminolroaya, who has played a critical role in high-profile matters, including the ongoing litigation over the opioid epidemic. The talented Seeger Weiss partner has risen through the ranks quickly since graduating from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 2008 – a feat she credits to a firm culture created by name partners Chris Seeger and Stephen Weiss, who have built one of the nation’s most successful litigation firms. In her extra-practice work, Aminolroaya has focused on improving diversity in the profession.

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BY JOHN RYAN Lawdragon: Can you describe for our readers the mix of work you do within your practice?

Parvin Aminolroaya: Over the last several years, I’ve worked on both class action and mass tort cases, representing plaintiffs who’ve been injured by corporate misconduct. The case In re National Prescription Opiate Litigation, addressing the decades-old public health crisis, is a great example. Both practices offer interesting and important work, though mass tort cases tend to go to trial more often. Trial is a really unique, and satisfying, challenge. It requires so much learning, strategizing, preparation and dexterity. But to go through that process and come out on the other side with a win is immensely satisfying. Whether it’s a mass tort or a class action, it’s ultimately about remedying injury and ensuring that justice is served.

LD: What are some aspects about class action and mass tort work that you find professionally satisfying?

What keeps you excited about it?

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A MORE DIVERSE BAR IS A MORE EFFECTIVE BAR, AND MUCH OF MY VOLUNTEER EFFORTS HAVE BEEN FOCUSED ON THIS ISSUE. PA: The cases I work on are high stakes and incredibly complex. With each case, I have to absorb a new subject and tackle a new field. I’m digging into the science behind an injury, the workings and standards in a particular industry, marshalling the evidence and working with experts to explain it all before a jury.

It’s interesting, it’s difficult, but also very gratifying.

LD: Is there a recent professional achievement of which you’re particularly proud?

PA: This January, I was appointed co-lead counsel in the In re Elmiron (Pentosan Polysulfate Sodium) Products Liability Litigation. Most of the plaintiffs in this litigation are women; they were prescribed Elmiron for interstitial cystitis, a chronic painful bladder condition, and suffered major eye injuries as a result.

I’m looking forward to working to obtain justice for our clients and to be part of a leadership team that reflects the people we’re representing: 18 out of 25 of us are women.

LD: Tell me about your career path. Also, what do you like about where you currently practice in terms of culture or other characteristics?

PA: Attorneys don’t just become ready for MDL leadership positions on their own. Firms have to cultivate them. Junior lawyers need to be given work, given opportunities to develop skills in a variety of areas in a case so that they’re prepared to tackle whatever a case throws at them. I credit Chris Seeger, Steve Weiss and Dave Buchanan at Seeger Weiss for investing that time and energy in me.

Chris and Steve have always looked for new opportunities for me. For example, Chris brought me into a trial in In re Testosterone Replacement Therapy Products Liability Litigation several years ago, which was my first real mass tort trial experience. He also invited me to argue before the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. He supported my application for a leadership position in the Elmiron case. I’ve been able to step up to these opportunities because of the work I’ve put in and the years of experience I’ve had, but that door needed to be open for me to step through it. Dave, too, is a great teacher to the

younger litigators at the firm. He’s incredibly busy, but always finds time to think through issues or help more junior attorneys prepare for a first depo or witness examination.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office?

PA: When I’m at work, I’m there 100 percent. So when I can, it’s great to disconnect. For me that means travel and hiking. I love to go places where I’m immersed in different languages, different cultures, and where there’s lots of good food. Hiking works the same way, it gets me out of my day to day and into a different mode. Before the pandemic, my husband and I would combine the two. We went on a challenging hike through the tropical rainforest El Yunque in Puerto Rico, trekking along creek beds, up through trees, and across the rainforest in the mud. We also hiked Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica, which is still active! All our hikes have been local this past year. One of our favorite nearby spots is Surprise Lake in New Jersey.

LD: Are you involved in any pro bono or public interest activities? Please tell us what you find meaningful about your time serving them.

PA: A more diverse bar is a more effective bar, and much of my volunteer efforts have been focused on this issue. After graduating from law school, I served as vice chair for the Black Asian & Latino Law Students Association (“BALLSA”) Alumni Group for many years.

During that time, Seeger Weiss became the primary supporter of BALLSA’s merit-based scholarship. I’ve worked with the Benjamin N. Cardozo Summer Law Institute, which introduces students from underserved New York City public junior high schools to a criminal justice and trial process curriculum.

At Seeger Weiss, I’ve helped launch the firm’s Diversity Fellowship, which, in addition to a salary, awards recipients with a charitable contribution to a nonprofit organization of their choice in consultation with the firm. I think we’re the first plaintiffs’ firm to offer a program like this one, and I’m excited to welcome this new generation of attorneys to Seeger Weiss this summer.

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Thomas Demetrio

Dennis Donnelly

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

THE DONNELLY LAW FIRM SUMMIT, N.J.

Victoria deToledo

Gary Dordick

CASPER & DE TOLEDO STAMFORD, CONN.

DORDICK LAW BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Tara Devine

Micah Dortch

SALVI SCHOSTOK WAUKEGAN, ILL.

POTTS LAW FIRM DALLAS

David Dickens

Kimberly Dougherty

THE MILLER FIRM ORANGE, VA.

ANDRUS WAGSTAFF BOSTON

David Dickey

Carl Douglas

YERRID LAW FIRM TAMPA, FLA.

DOUGLAS HICKS LOS ANGELES

Paulina do Amaral

Daniel Dunbar

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

Christopher Dolan

Kendall Dunson

DOLAN LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Michael Dolce

Kevin Durkin

COHEN MILSTEIN PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES CHICAGO

Sean Domnick

Emmanuel Edem

DOMNICK CUNNINGHAM PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

NORMAN & EDEM OKLAHOMA CITY

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Brad Edwards

Elizabeth Faiella

EDWARDS POTTINGER FT. LAUDERDALE

FAIELLA & GULDEN WINTER PARK, FLA.

Robert Eglet

Thomas J. Farmer

EGLET ADAMS LAS VEGAS

LAW OFFICE OF FRANK L. BRANSON DALLAS

Tracy Eglet

John Feder

EGLET ADAMS LAS VEGAS

ROUDA FEDER SAN FRANCISCO

Lewis “Mike” Eidson

Elizabeth Fegan

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

FEGAN SCOTT CHICAGO

Michael Elsner

Alan Feldman

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

FELDMAN SHEPHERD PHILADELPHIA

Mike Ermert

Bibianne Fell

HARE WYNN BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

FELL LAW SAN DIEGO

Regina Etherton

James Ferguson*

ETHERTON & ASSOCIATES CHICAGO

FERGUSON CHAMBERS CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Ingrid Evans

Steven Fineman

EVANS LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Karen Evans

George Finkbohner III

THE COCHRAN FIRM WASHINGTON, D.C.

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

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Frank Branson THE LAW OFFICES OF FRANK L. BRANSON (DALLAS)

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FRANK BRANSON HUMANKIND GROWS MORE WISE AS THE YEARS

pass – think of Apostle Paul writing of speaking as a child before putting away childish things or Robert Frost penning, “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” That truism also applies to successful attorneys.

There’s a beauty in discussing the value of experience with Dallas’ top plaintiff lawyer, Frank Branson. At the end of his junior year at Texas Christian University, he was accepted into Southern Methodist University Law School. At the end of his first year in law school at SMU, TCU sent him his degree. He has since won every award there is, while continuing to belt monster verdicts out of the jury box every year.

As a young and ambitious attorney, the Dallas trial lawyer took a more calculated and singularly focused view regarding the value of prospective cases. He was less inclined to take on catastrophic injury or wrongful death cases involving elderly victims because, typically, as plaintiffs they had lower earning capacity which combined with a diminished life expectancy to make it more difficult to win higher damage awards.

After running his own practice for four decades, “I realized that sometimes a candle burns brighter at the end than it does in the beginning,” says Branson, whose victories in personal injury cases range from a $242M verdict against Toyota over defective car seats that resulted in devastating injuries to two children to a $7M verdict for a college soccer player whose leg injury in an SUV rollover ended his sports career.

A little over a decade ago, in 2007, Branson persuaded a Texas jury to award nearly $21M to the 83-year-old widow of a 76-year-old man killed when the couple’s vehicle was struck by an 18-wheeler whose driver tested positive for cocaine afterward and had a history of crack abuse.

“I have enjoyed representing clients in their late 70s and 80s when bad things happen to them,” Branson says. “I believe it becomes a compelling story.”

The key, he learned, was relating that story to a jury, making clear that the value in an individual’s life is more than net worth, that it encompasses less tangible activities such as caring for family members, volunteering in community groups and artistic creations.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

BY KATRINA DEWEY “You understand it when you begin to lose loved ones, your mother, your father,” Branson says. “It begins to dawn on you at that time.”

Lawdragon: With the population aging and health issues posing an increasing concern, to be able to tell an older person’s story - which by necessity incorporates their whole life - and negotiate monetary value based on that is a tremendous skill. It’s inspiring that you’ve found a way to get justice for older people.

Frank Branson: You can’t always. But when you listen to their case on the front end, and you follow things, it’s easier. With the 18-wheeler case, the impact of the crash pushed Robert Bohne’s car off to the side and it broke his back and several ribs, causing him to have some mild traumatic brain damage. He was laid up at Parkland Hospital for about six months and died at the age of 76.

Kathleen and Robert had a storybook romance. She was British and had married an American GI during World War II; he died in his late 30s of an aneurysm.

When she remarried, it was to Robert, a truck driver in his late 30s who had never married. After he retired, he got up every morning, drew her a bath, cooked her breakfast, drove her any place she wanted to go, and built a porch on the back of their house so that she could sit out and have coffee in the morning and watch the birds.

LD: That’s lovely.

FB: As we started digging into the case and ordered his funeral bills, we found out he was a decorated soldier from the Korean War. LD: She hadn’t known?

FB: No, she hadn’t. It was fascinating. She had this beautiful British accent and a real sense of humor.

He was her life. And when the accident took his life…

LD: In a sense, it took hers.

FB: Before we got to trial, the defense called in a million-dollar offer, which we didn’t respond to. A day or two into trial they raised it, and then asked for a meeting in our office one night and offered her $3M, which they said was the most they would ever pay. We made a counter-offer, and they said, “Never happening.” Ultimately, the jury gave her $21M. LD: And that’s why you do this, right? When you can help people like Kathleen, you show others that if you

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INSTEAD OF JUST LOOKING IN THE FRONT END AT WHAT HAPPENED, WHAT THE SPECIAL DAMAGES ARE, YOU LOOK AT DIFFERENT THINGS AS YOU GROW IN EXPERIENCE. WHAT IS THE STORY, WHAT ARE THE REAL FACTS GOING TO SHOW THIS JURY? IS IT GOING TO BE A COMPELLING STORY? ARE THEY GOING TO FEEL LIKE I DO ABOUT THE CLIENT WHEN IT’S OVER? fight, you can get justice. It’s wonderful to see value put on the lives of the elderly. You see that there’s more to a life than the value of a person’s earning capacity; these are parents, grandparents, they make coffee in the morning for their spouses, volunteer in the community.

FB: Right. It took me a while as a lawyer to understand that. And it took me a while as a person to understand that.

LD: And partly, that’s because economic analysis has become such a focal point in the law. It’s easy to forget that a value should be ascribed to humanity and to what you do with your community and your family, even if it’s not that you would have earned $10M from working over your next 30 years. It’s wonderful that you’ve taken on those kinds of cases amid what was already an inspiring career. What interested you in becoming a lawyer in the first place? Was it your parents?

FB: In a way, though neither of them were lawyers.

My dad was a high school coach and my mother was a high school tennis coach, so competition came naturally. My favorite subjects were history, government and speech. My mother also wanted me to be a lawyer, and that had an impact.

LD: Where did she get that idea?

FB: I have no idea.

LD: No lawyers in her family?

FB: No. I assume it had something to do with how well I did in speech courses.

LD: Did you ever think about becoming a teacher like your folks?

FB: No, I really didn’t. I was proud of both of them, but coaching would have been what I was interested

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in. I decided I’d rather do something else. My younger brother became a coach. I knew when I went to college I wanted to be a lawyer.

I didn’t know any lawyers and didn’t have any idea, really, what lawyers did. I liked the concept of becoming a lawyer, though, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the profession.

LD: At what point did you develop the notion of being a courtroom lawyer, a plaintiff lawyer?

FB: When I was in college. At the end of my junior year at Texas Christian, Southern Methodist University offered me a scholarship and allowed me to enter law school and get a degree from TCU after my first year of law school. I got a job in my second year as a waiter, and I waited on tables at a steak restaurant for a while.

LD: Here in Dallas?

FB: Yes. Steak & Ale. So if you can wait on a table for six people who have been waiting in the bar for an hour drinking and are hungry, you can do just about anything that involves people. It provided great experience in selecting juries and getting along with people. And after about a year of that, I took a job as an independent insurance adjuster. And in adjusting claims for insurance companies, I became disenchanted with the way insurance companies treated the kind of people I had grown up with. They investigated cases early and slanted the testimony toward the defendant, then tried to starve the plaintiff out by drawing out the case as well as the payments to the plaintiff even after a settlement.

At that time, the insurance companies would pay the plaintiff without a lawyer “X” amount. Eventually, a long time after the accident, they would pay them “X”+5 if they got a lawyer who they knew was going

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to settle the case. And they’d pay “X”+10 if they got a lawyer who was going to do some work on it, try to settle it after some work, and then refer it to a trial lawyer if it didn’t settle. At that time, the late 1960s in Dallas, there were very few law firms that were truly plaintiffs’ lawyers who could afford to pay for preparing the case and trying it – and had lawyers capable of taking it to trial. The insurers paid those two or three firms whatever it took to get the case settled at the courthouse if they were worried about it. I decided I wanted to be in that group of lawyers.

LD: Good call.

FB: I thought I could change the dynamics. Even with the really good lawyers, the insurers would wait until they were on the courthouse steps to try to settle the case. So I tried to turn the dynamics around in the following ways. First, I went back after law school and got a master’s of law in legal medicine at SMU. And then I tried to move the decision-making point from the courthouse steps back further, using video. So I’d take video statements of everything that I thought was injurious to the defendant, or positive to my client, then invite the defense to my office, serve them a nice dinner and a nice bottle of wine, and show them the video, give them a demand that they could pay within 30 days. And if they didn’t pay it, I’d raise the demand. And that worked. I had to try the first half a dozen lawsuits, though. You can’t just say that and not do it.

LD: How long did you work as an insurance adjuster?

FB: For about a year and a half.

LD: So you saw that playbook.

FB: Yes. And I felt like Gen. George Patton in the movie “Patton,” where he says to the Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, “I read your book, you son of a bitch.”

LD: It sounds like you were able to relate to the insureds early on, in part because of your background.

FB: Yes. We were just average folks.

LD: What was your first job as an attorney?

FB: I started out with a two-person firm in Grand Prairie because I knew, by that time, I wanted to be a trial lawyer, and they told me I could try whatever I wanted. A lot of the firms I interviewed with were going to put me in the books for two or three years and let me deal in the Justice of the Peace courts and the county courts. And I wanted to get in the courtroom and learn how it worked.

The first year I was with them, I tried a capital murder case, some other criminal cases and a truck wreck here in Fort Worth. Among others, I also handled a divorce, which showed me enough to know I never wanted to try a divorce case again.

LD: What other lessons did you learn from that assortment of cases?

FB: That the client and the justness of the client’s cause made all the difference. And the lawyer is no better than the justness of their client’s cause, no matter how hard you work.

I also learned that I really didn’t want to be a criminal lawyer and that I enjoyed the civil side. After about a year, a larger plaintiffs’ firm, Bader Wilson, offered me a job and brought me downtown. John B. Wilson, a workers’ comp lawyer, was my mentor. I carried his bag for a long time, tried a lawsuit or two with him, and then tried other cases.

Like any law firm, manure flows downhill and the new kid on the block is at the bottom of the hill. So I tried a whole lot of lawsuits that in later years I wouldn’t have taken. Over the roughly eight years I was with that firm, and became a partner in it, I got hit with cow patties thrown from virtually any direction in a courtroom. It was great. I won some and lost some, but I tried a lot of cases. And the result is that you feel comfortable when you walk into a courtroom.

Probably the most nervous I’ve ever been was the first case I tried, which was the capital murder case. When I went to the courthouse, I didn’t know I was going to try it. I had done the investigation on the case, and an older lawyer, a highly experienced criminal lawyer, was with me and was supposed to try the case. Our client had participated in an armed robbery where the service attendant was stabbed 37 times. Both defendants were young people, and the older lawyer kept saying our client was going to get off because he was testifying against the other suspect. Then, at what I thought was going to be an arraignment hearing, the other suspect pleaded guilty to nine life sentences stacked. The older lawyer came to me and said, “Son, it’s time for you to try your first case. I’ll sit with you and keep you out of trouble.”

LD: What a way to get your first trial.

FB: His position was that the client had already admitted to going along with the armed robbery. He had confessed to that, and said he stabbed the deceased a couple of times at the insistence of the other defendant. Participating in the armed robbery made it a

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Ed Fisher

Gary Fox*

PROVOST UMPHREY BEAUMONT, TEXAS

STEWART TILGHMAN MIAMI

Joe Fisher II

Jan Woodward Fox

PROVOST UMPHREY BEAUMONT, TEXAS

LAW OFFICES OF JAN WOODWARD FOX HOUSTON

Fidelma Fitzpatrick

Robert Francavilla

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

Wendy Fleishman

Carrie Frank

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

KLEIN FRANK BOULDER, COLO.

Frank Floriani

Aaron Freiwald

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

FREIWALD LAW PHILADELPHIA

Jodi Flowers

David Fried

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

BLUME FORTE CHATHAM, N.J.

Kathryn Forgie

Agnieszka Fryszman

ANDRUS WAGSTAFF OAKLAND, CALIF.

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Keith Forman

Brenda Fulmer

WAIS VOGELSTEIN BALTIMORE

SEARCY DENNEY WEST PALM, FLA.

Carol Forte

Simone Fulmer

BLUME FORTE CHATHAM, N.J.

FULMER SILL OKLAHOMA CITY

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felony murder, so all we could do is try to keep him from getting the death penalty. I think he put on one character witness, and I put on the rest of the case.

I would go home at night and read black-letter murder law, and it worked out that the jury stayed out a long time and came back with a life sentence, which was a total victory. I’ve never walked into any courtroom since feeling nearly as anxious as I did every day in that case. It did make it a lot easier to try many of these other lawsuits, though.

LD: It gives you context for what’s at stake. So after those nine years learning to be a trial lawyer, did you start your firm?

FB: I started it in 1978. I took cases that I liked, where I liked the facts and I liked the clients. I thought I could help them. That’s what I’ve been doing since.

LD: Is there much of a difference between the cases you liked then, and now? Or are they still largely the same kinds of cases?

FB: Cases today share some of the characteristics as my earlier cases. Things change. Your breadth of experience changes and the size and complexity of the cases that are referred to you change. Your understanding of what’s happening in a courtroom changes. They call it practice for a reason. You really do get better as you do it more.

Instead of just looking in the front end at what happened, what the special damages are, you look at different things as you grow in experience. What is the story, what are the real facts going to show this jury? Is it going to be a compelling story? Are they going to feel like I do about the client when it’s over?

LD: What would you say is the most important aspect of being a trial lawyer?

FB: It’s real simple: It’s hard work. And generally, those who work the hardest win the case. That’s not always true, but it’s a real high percentage. Credibility matters, too. And generally hard work produces credibility, but you have to be credible with the court and with the jury, and that takes time. It may take five years, it may take 10, it may take 50 to gain the respect of courts and juries. But you need to be credible. And you stay credible with both by telling them the truth.

I see more than you should is the court asking a lawyer, “We’ve got a break coming up, Mr. Johnson, in five minutes. How much longer do you need?”

And Mr. Johnson says, “I can finish, judge.” And 15 minutes later, he’s still talking. And then what do you say to the jury? “Not only am I not credible, I’m keeping you here over break.”

LD: And the jurors may need to use the restroom or be hungry. And every time that happens, it’s such a clear signal that the lawyer thinks that his or her needs are more important than those of the judge and the jury.

FB: Right, and it’s not a good thing. The other thing that I think is critical is watching the witness. A lot of lawyers have a list of questions, and they go over the list and go to the next question without fully taking in what the witness is saying. And when you can get a witness on the witness stand and begin to follow their thought processes, sometimes you get the witness to agree with your position.

LD: Right. But that, too, ties to the hard work. And it’s so important to communicate these lessons.

There’s no shortcut to knowing your witness and knowing how they think, not just how they’re going to respond to questions. And to know that you have to engage with them, and to really know where they’re coming from.

FB: The other thing I think is important in trial lawsuits is imagination. You have to look for things that jurors are familiar with and link them to the case. In one trial, I got an expert witness retained by the other side to testify that he had made more money in a certain period of time testifying for defendants than it cost to run the National Guard or the fire department of Tucson, Ariz., where we were in trial.

They were just some things that when the jury has the comparative size of what was paid to the expert witness, it makes a difference.

LD: Is that one of the techniques that helps when you get to the point of trying to resolve a case?

What’s the most important item in your toolbox at that stage?

FB: That the defendant knows you will be ready for trial and have years of successful verdicts under your belt.

LD: They know when you’re not.

LD: Well, you seem to be a master of the telling detail, like talking about the gentleman who was killed in the car crash building his wife a porch so she could drink coffee and watch her birds.

FB: That’s right. If you say, “I’m going to prove this,” and then don’t prove it, they know. The one that

FB: It’s the difference in reading an outline of the book and reading the book.

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Anthony Gair

Robert Gellatly

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

LUVERA LAW FIRM SEATTLE

Reena Gambhir

Rachel Geman

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

Deborah Gander

Victor George

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

LAW OFFICE OF VICTOR GEORGE TORRANCE, CALIF.

Alicia Garcia

Eric Gibbs

ABOUREZK & GARCIA RAPID CITY, S.D.

GIBBS LAW GROUP OAKLAND, CALIF.

Stephen Garcia

William T. Gibbs

GARCIA ARTIGLIERE LONG BEACH, CALIF.

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

Sekou Gary

Scott Gilmore

GARY WILLIAMS STUART, FLA.

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

Willie Gary

Thomas Giuffra

GARY WILLIAMS STUART, FLA.

RHEINGOLD GIUFFRA NEW YORK

Jonathan Gdanski

Chris Glover

SCHLESINGER LAW OFFICES FT. LAUDERDALE

BEASLEY ALLEN ATLANTA

Laura Benitez Geisler

John Goetz

SOMMERMAN MCCAFFITY DALLAS

SCHWEBEL GOETZ MINNEAPOLIS

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500 Sistrunk, who joined the firm at Cochran’s invitation in 2000, was attracted by the celebrated attorney’s vision of a minority-controlled firm with lawyers who had the education, expertise and experience to offer “the same or better services as any similarly situated majority firm in America,” he explains. “Having grown up as a lawyer in a majority firm, obviously I thought that that was an admirable goal, and agreed with him on that.”

During Sistrunk’s two decades at the Cochran firm, it has won victories that prompted an overhaul of Atlanta’s drug-policing practices and helped transform attitudes toward racial justice and equality in a Louisiana town that had never returned a verdict in favor of a Black plaintiff.

Hezekiah Sistrunk THE COCHRAN FIRM (ATLANTA)

HEZEKIAH SISTRUNK

BY KATRINA DEWEY

JOHNNIE COCHRAN BECAME A HOUSEHOLD

name across the U.S. when he won an acquittal for former football star O.J. Simpson in the killing of his ex-wife.

Hour-by-hour television coverage of what mid-90s newscasters dubbed the “trial of the century” made sure of that.

But Cochran had been a legend in Los Angeles courtrooms years before he joined Simpson’s “dream team,” known for his powerful courtroom presence and his willingness to not only take on police brutality cases other lawyers wouldn’t touch, but his ability to get results.

“That’s our legacy, the emanation of him,” says Hezekiah Sistrunk, the Atlanta-based plaintiffs’ trial lawyer who serves as president of the eponymous Cochran Firm, which has offices across the country, in cities from Los Angeles to Atlanta, 15 years after its founder’s death. “We’re going to continue to do what we can to protect and grow that legacy as much as we can until we can no longer do it.”

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

A native of Orangeburg, S.C., a small city home to two historically Black colleges, Sistrunk spent his youth in and around the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

He recalls the “Orangeburg Massacre,” when three people were killed and more than 25 injured after police officers opened fire during an anti-segregation protest at South Carolina State University.

“I grew up watching people I knew and respected, friends, family members, involved in the civil rights movement getting arrested, going to jail, and there being no lawyers of color in my town or my county to protect them, to get them out of jail,” Sistrunk says.

“The only way you could get out of prison or out of jail during that timeframe was lawyers from other places, mostly white lawyers, involved with the NAACP.” It didn’t feel right to Sistrunk, and he realized he could either involve himself in the process and try to change it or watch on the sidelines and complain.

“At that point, as a young man of 16 or 17, I decided I was going to try to become a lawyer and force a change in the civil rights arena, and I ended up being a lawyer,” says Sistrunk, whose professional accolades include the Clarence Darrow Award, the Maynard H. Jackson Jr. Legacy Award from the National Bar Association and induction into The National Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. “I didn’t start out doing civil rights, but I ended up practicing civil rights law.”

A graduate of North Carolina State University, Sistrunk earned his juris doctorate at Duke Law before becoming an associate at Atlanta-based Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy in 1982.

“Initially, I was the only lawyer of color in the firm, which wasn’t unusual in those days,” Sistrunk says.

“Many law firms were beginning to add one or two lawyers of color, and it was considered progress.”

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500 Lawdragon: It was. As you went through college and law school, were there particular mentors who shaped you as a young lawyer?

based firm to your own firm. And they all moved with me, without hesitation. I practiced in that firm from 1994 until 2000, then joined with The Cochran Firm.

Hezekiah Sistrunk: Like many young students I admired Thurgood Marshall. My initial mentor in the firm was the son of the founder, Elliott Goldstein, who told me he would give me every opportunity humanly possible to see success from the firm, and he did. I worked for a couple of partners in that firm who gave me the opportunity to become a fairly decent trial lawyer by sending me to court to try cases, which is what every young lawyer wants to do.

LD: Tell me more about that decision. Was that the first time you and Johnnie Cochran met?

The majority firms had significant corporate clients and you didn’t typically get the opportunity to do that as first chair. Powell Goldstein gave me that opportunity, and, as a young associate lawyer I appreciated those guys for that.

LD: Was there a particular kind of litigation you were working on at Powell Goldstein?

HS: Initially, I did product liability defense, medical malpractice defense and ended up defending environmental claims as well. As a young trial lawyer I also handled any kind of general corporate, business, insurance law matter assigned by the firm.

LD: Did you become a plaintiffs’ lawyer when you left Powell Goldstein?

HS: I did not. I left Powell Goldstein with a group of lawyers with whom I practiced, to form a boutique practice in Atlanta, where we literally took our business practice, picked it up from Powell Goldstein, and transplanted it into a small firm where we represented the same group of clients but gave them the benefit of scale and economy. We could do the same work and charge them less.

Our firm was called Love & Willingham; Daryll Love had been my first partner mentor at Powell Goldstein; he was the first partner I actually worked for directly.

He was a litigator, a trial lawyer. Great lawyer; he’s deceased now. I practiced with them for six or seven years, then left to create my own practice, Sistrunk & Associates. As you develop as a lawyer, you go back to your genesis, and I was feeling like I could do more for my community and develop my own initial notions of law practice by doing something different.

It was basically a move of my clients from Love & Willingham to my own firm, initially doing defense work, basically the same clients that I had before. In those days, as a lawyer of color, it was significant to be able to take your corporate clients and move them from a majority-

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HS: It was the first time I met him personally; I had seen him before. Before he became the Johnnie Cochran everybody knows, from the O.J. Simpson trial, he was already a relatively famous lawyer. I had seen him through my involvement in National Bar Association activities. He was always a big advocate for the NBA and had spoken at national conventions, so I met him in a group setting.

I never had the opportunity to sit down and actually talk to him about what he thought about the law, my aspirations for the law, his aspirations for a national law firm. In fact, when I first met him, he was still practicing in his Los Angeles office. So that’s before there were any notions, of which I was aware, that he wanted to develop a national law practice.

LD: I’m trying to envision the two of you meeting, which seems like it would have been a very special moment.

HS: It was, for a lot of reasons. At that point, everybody in the world knew who Johnnie Cochran was.

But people respected him for a lot of different reasons. One of the things that Johnnie Cochran did for me as a young lawyer who was literally fighting the battles, out in the field, was give lawyers of color a national platform. For a long time, a lot of people in America – whether you want to admit it or not – would look at lawyers of color and not want to recognize them in the same fashion that they recognized other lawyers, because quite frankly they had seen them on a national platform. So to see Johnnie Cochran doing the best job that a lawyer could possibly do for an entire year, trying a case with expertise as he did in the Simpson case, changed the mass, national perspective on lawyers of color.

Many of us relatively young lawyers of color, like Johnnie, who really enjoyed and still do enjoy trying cases, were proud to see him and his success.

LD: He was masterful, and he owned the courtroom.

HS: He confirmed in my head, and in the heads of many young lawyers, that what we were doing was the right thing. Trying to protect other folks, to be the best I could be and be like him, was the right thing.

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YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO PUT YOUR FOOT IN THE WATER. WHAT I MEAN BY THAT IS IF YOU SEE SOMETHING AND YOU THINK IT NEEDS TO CHANGE, YOU AS A LAWYER HAVE A UNIQUE POSITION IN AMERICA WHERE YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. YOU REALLY CAN. It was a pleasure, an honor to meet him for the first time, and to sit down and talk to him about the law, about his picture of the law, and my long-term views of what the law practice should look and be like and to recognize that so much of what he wanted to do, was the same as what I wanted.

Among the people who influenced me before I met Johnnie was the mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, who was a friend and a client. One of the things he and I talked about for years was creating a national minority majority-based firm. That’s what Johnnie offered me: The first opportunity, I think, in America to do that. We’re still doing that, and it’s one of the pride points that I have. I’m proud of the partners in my firm, who helped Johnnie create The Cochran Firm, a number of whom are still here practicing with us, and kept it rolling. We came up with the method to develop this nationwide practice and we continue to hold down the battlefield with it.

LD: What are some of the cases the Cochran Firm has handled that are particularly meaningful to you?

HS: There are cases that we’ve handled that have generated a lot of money for people, which can be a great thing, but what’s more important is fostering positive change in people’s lives. Some of our cases have effectively changed legislation, policies and communities, and that’s a good thing. We’ve tried cases where no lawyer of color had ever tried a case and won verdicts for people of color that had never been obtained before.

For example, my partner Shean Williams and I prosecuted a case in Atlanta involving Kathryn Johnston, an African-American senior citizen who was shot and killed by Atlanta police officers executing a no-knock warrant in 2006. They came in, thinking her house was some sort of a drug den, and it was not. She was a 92-year-old woman. Afterward, the police lied

and made up some excuse about why they raided her home. They even planted drugs on her property.

We prosecuted the case, and for the first time in our city, we ended up getting a no-knock warrant wrongful death case resolved. We figured out that Atlanta had a quota system that officers were required to comply with and, as a result, they had to have a certain number of arrests during specified time frames to meet their goal.

We convinced a court that the process was improper, and we got around the immunity provisions that so often prevent you from winning cases involving police. What happened in that case is we got help for the client and changed the landscape in Atlanta with respect to policing. The Atlanta Police Department, which was in charge of that drug policing division, abolished it, rewrote all the rules, reestablished the division. As a result of this case Atlanta established a citizen’s review board that reviews police shootings and cases of police brutality.

It’s not just about getting money; clients also want change. That’s what we did, and I’m proud of that.

LD: You should be. We know all too well how difficult it is to create meaningful and lasting change in the intersection of law enforcement and civil rights.

HS: That same partner, Shean Williams, and Jeff Mitchell and I tried a wrongful death trucking case in Coushatta, La. It’s one of those little towns where folks who were no longer in power after the Civil War formed their own militia to recreate the system of justice and to recapture their pre-Civil War authority over the local, newly freed population. This town had a long history where folks were massacred and hurt and most of the freed men and women and their allies were run out of the town or killed. It’s a town where there had never been, in modern history, a positive result for any Black civil client, ever.

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Larry Golston

Vincent L. Green IV

BEASLEY ALLEN ATLANTA

MOTLEY RICE PROVIDENCE, R.I.

Ralph Gonzalez

Browne Greene*

YERRID LAW FIRM TAMPA, FLA.

GREENE BROILLET SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

Jeffrey Gordon

David Greenstone

LESSER LESSER BOCA RATON

SIMON GREENSTONE PANATIER DALLAS

James Gotz

Dicky Grigg*

HAUSFELD BOSTON

SPIVEY & GRIGG AUSTIN

Brent Goudarzi

Stuart Grossman

GOUDARZI & YOUNG GILMER, TEXAS

GROSSMAN ROTH CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Elizabeth Graham

Amy Guth

GRANT & EISENHOFER WILMINGTON

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

Jeffrey Grand

Michael Haggard

SEEGER WEISS RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.

THE HAGGARD FIRM CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Mark Gray

Chris Hamilton

GRAY & WHITE LOUISVILLE, KY.

HAMILTON WINGO DALLAS

Justin Green

Paul Hanly Jr.

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

SIMMONS HANLY NEW YORK

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Nobody that we knew thought we would ever get a good result. We tried the case before a local jury and got a significant seven-figure jury verdict as well as a seven-figure settlement of another part of the case. But more importantly, we got results for our client that, at the time, we thought changed the landscape of that community, how it viewed its own citizens and how they viewed each other. When we left the city, we felt pretty good about what we had done, because some of the folks in the community felt pretty good about what they had done. That’s the kind of thing I am talking about, where you can use your practice as an opportunity to do good, do well and create positive change in the community moving forward.

LD: You’ve really come full circle with that young man you started out as, wanting to change things, and to contribute. Today, with so many parts of society focused on social justice, it has become common for majority law firms to put out position papers on embracing social justice. From your perspective, what can lawyers do now to make the law more fair, more equal?

HS: What you can do is actually live the oath that you take. It’s nice to put out position papers, and I applaud them for doing that. People deal with what they see, and what they hear, so if majority firms aren’t doing that, taking a position, taking a stance, then the impact, societal impact that we desire can never be achieved. But, at the same time, you actually have to put your foot in the water. What I mean by that is if you see something and you think it needs to change, you as a lawyer have a unique position in America where you can do something about it. You really can.

One of the biggest problems we have in social justice, with police confrontations, is that the laws surrounding qualified immunity are so entrenched that basically police can do what they want without fear of any kind of ramifications at all. It takes lawyers to sit down and figure out how to address that issue. And it’s going to be a process. There is not going to be, I think, one case that can fix that. You’ll need to do what the lawyers did back when the NCAAP Legal Defense Fund was trying to figure out how to deal with Plessy v. Ferguson: Take a series of cases that literally chip away at the process one step at a time.

In the police-community situation, nobody wants to stop the police from doing their job, but if you do something that really hurts people, in a gross way, there needs to be some sort of recourse for citizens that allows for fairness in how the system applies

justice, for both the police officer and for the citizens who have been hurt. The way it seems to work now, that fairness, that equation, is out of balance.

LD: What will it take for change to come?

HS: If that’s going to change, it will take a concerted effort by a lot of different parts of our community: legislatures, citizens in the community and lawyers.

And I think lawyers have as significant a role as anybody because we can work to change the law.

You know you can’t always change how people think, or how they act, but you can control the results of that through the law. If you’re going to act crazy, there should be a result for your acting crazy. If you create that result, then you can change people’s conduct.

People will change if they know there’s a bad result that will come from certain types of conduct, but that won’t happen unless you change the laws to make it happen. The laws have to catch up to the society.

That happens oftentimes in our culture: The law is a little bit behind where the people are. And when that happens, it’s up to lawyers and folks involved in the legal process to try to see if we can create a meeting of the minds or a meeting of the interests in that regard.

And that’s part of Johnnie Cochran’s legacy with this firm, the goal of having talent that was comparable to the other kind of law firms that we all grew up in.

That’s what this is about. We don’t want to just be some law firm that can get in front of a television camera, and look and sound good. If you can’t try a case, if you’re not going to be a trial lawyer, you don’t belong in The Cochran Firm. We are a trial law firm, have been from the beginning, and we still are.

We pride ourselves on being able to go to court and try a case with anybody in the country and win. We take pride in that.

LD: You have excellent lawyers, and Johnnie Cochran was always known in the L.A. County courtrooms as the best lawyer in town. He was so powerful and the lawyers that he worked with were just excellent lawyers. And then, he became famous, right? But, he was known first and always as a great courtroom lawyer.

HS: He tried all these cases that no one had tried in America, and he got results. He was doing police brutality cases back when they weren’t very popular to do.

People don’t know that. He was a great trial lawyer before he became famous. Some of his early trials are legendary. He was always the people’s lawyer, protecting the least fortunate. He left us with that mandate and The Cochran Firm seeks to uphold it every day.

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Christian Hartley

Steve Herman

MAUNE RAICHLE ST. LOUIS, MO.

HERMAN HERMAN NEW ORLEANS

Michael Hausfeld

Frank Herrera Jr.

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE HERRERA LAW FIRM SAN ANTONIO

Edward Havas

John Herrick

DEWSNUP KING SALT LAKE CITY

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Lexi Hazam

Charles Herrmann

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

HERRMANN LAW GROUP SEATTLE

Denman Heard

Lara Herrmann

HEARD LAW FIRM HOUSTON

HERRMANN LAW GROUP SEATTLE

Dara Hegar

Nancy Hersh

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

HERSH & HERSH SAN FRANCISCO

Charles Hehmeyer

Howard Hershenhorn

RAYNES MCCARTY PHILADELPHIA

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

Richard Heimann*

Arash Homampour

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

THE HOMAMPOUR FIRM SHERMAN OAKS, CALIF.

Russ Herman*

Jim Horwitz

HERMAN HERMAN NEW ORLEANS

KOSKOFF KOSKOFF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

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Kenneth Hovermale

Steven Kazan

HOVERMALE LAW PORTLAND, MAINE

KAZAN MCCLAIN OAKLAND, CALIF.

Daniel Iracki

Christopher Keane

COKER LAW JACKSONVILLE, FLA.

KEANE LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

Cory Itkin

Anne McGinness Kearse

ARNOLD & ITKIN HOUSTON

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Jason Itkin

Don Keenan

ARNOLD & ITKIN HOUSTON

KEENAN LAW FIRM ATLANTA

Evan Janush

Diogenes Kekatos

LANIER LAW FIRM NEW YORK

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

Rhon Jones

Michael Kelly

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

WALKUP MELODIA SAN FRANCISCO

Joseph Kalbac Jr.

Leslie Kelmachter

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

SILVER & KELMACHTER NEW YORK

Julie Braman Kane

Keith Kessler

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

STRITMATTER KESSLER SEATTLE

Brian Katz

Marlon Kimpson

HERMAN HERMAN NEW ORLEANS

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

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Joseph Balesteri POWER ROGERS (CHICAGO)

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JOSEPH BALESTERI THE SON OF A CARDIOLOGIST, JOSEPH

Balesteri has always had a special interest in the medical profession. He was also a natural at the art of discourse, and relished the responsibility and potential impact he could have as an advocate. Combining these passions and talents led him to the field of medical malpractice and negligence.

He originally worked on the defense side, but found his true calling representing catastrophically injured plaintiffs. Two decades later, he has recovered nearly a billion dollars for his clients and their families, including many record-breaking verdicts and settlements. Balesteri is a partner at Power Rogers, based in Illinois.

Lawdragon: Can you describe for our readers the focus of your practice?

Joseph Balesteri: My concentration in the practice of law has been in the medical field. When medical care and treatment causes catastrophic life-altering consequences to the patient and/or family, I will determine if there was medical negligence. Experts from all over the United States will provide opinions and a civil lawsuit will be filed to obtain redress if appropriate. This focus has permitted me to obtain knowledge in all areas of medicine that parallel a medical school education, which instead of lasting four years, continues today – now for 25 years.

LD: Did you consider medical school originally?

JB: I always wanted to be a lawyer only because there is nothing comparable to being responsible for another person other than parenting. Being a lawyer is an unbelievable privilege that requires trust. Advocacy, arguing, and talking are oddly enjoyable to me, sometimes to the annoyance of my family.

My father is a cardiologist. Medicine was always interesting to me, but I didn’t want to answer the phone at all hours of the night and make sleep-interrupted decisions. I gravitated towards defending healthcare providers because of my dad. That lasted five years.

LD: Then you moved to the plaintiff side. What are some aspects about the work that you find professionally satisfying? What keeps you excited about it?

JB: The best part of my career choice is a lawyer must master medicine to talk about it. You have to be comfortable to ask complicated questions and smart enough to listen and follow-up without getting

PHOTO BY: DAVID DUROCHIK

BY ALISON PREECE misled or off-track. You have to study every day or you will fail. That’s pressure I relish.

Our system isn’t eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. A patient client can’t possibly understand, advocate, argue and discuss medicine in a recorded session with doctors in their arena, their medical specialty. In a room of lawyers, it’s me versus the entire defense team. Unlike other injury cases, in medical malpractice it’s one against many.

I treat the occurrence like it happened to my family. I love the challenge of proving the merit of the case to the room. It’s an exhilarating adrenaline rush similar to success in sport. The David versus Goliath fight makes the work even more rewarding.

LD: Out of all the work you’ve done in your career, what would you say is the most interesting matter you’ve handled?

JB: Nguyen v. Bradley Allen, M.D. Dr. Allen was a world famous cardiovascular surgeon. He was married to Jaclyn Smith from the TV series “Charlie’s Angels.” He did a mitral valve repair in Chicago on a college student who had shortness of breath on exertion. He tried a new approach to the valve from a lateral incision so he consented her for permission to videotape the procedure. After the procedure, she suffered “lockedin-syndrome.” Records and videotapes were requested.

Records were provided. No tapes. A lawsuit followed alleging failure to properly de-air the heart’s chambers before releasing the aortic cross-clamp permitting air embolus and devastating neurologic damage in a 19-year old.

An order of preservation was entered for all video footage. Dr. Allen had both a camera over the operating table and he had a camera on his head. Tapes were produced without sound. One of the tapes went black for hours and showed very little of the surgery.

I watched the black tape for hours thinking that it was strange that there wasn’t static but rather blackness. Then, quickly and almost eerily, parts of two commercials appeared for 10 seconds. The first was “More Great Escapes of World War II.” The second, a commercial for Santa Monica BMW. All on a tape of a surgery done in Chicago. The commercials were run four days after the court ordered no modifications to the tapes and required their production.

I was in my early 30s. I brought the evidence to the partners. I wanted some advice on how to handle the depo-

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500 sition. One of the partners tried to take the deposition, instead of me, after hearing what was there. Joe Power overruled him. Joe told me to videotape the deposition and to scatter the relevant questions throughout the deposition so not to tip my hand. Dr. Allen admitted to living in Bel Air near Santa Monica. He acknowledged the court order and that he produced all tapes to defense counsel without difficulty. He admitted that the tapes were intact and without modification. The tapes were found at his office in Chicago. They never went on an airplane. He denied that his entire surgery was ever captured on video. He denied that there was audio. He testified that his de-airing technique was not captured nor the release of the cross-clamp on purpose and all recording had been stopped long before.

He was confronted with the commercials. He had no explanation. Later he produced more footage with audio. The tapes exposed the release of the cross-clamp while the patient’s head was level with her heart — not in Trendelenburg position as it should have been — shortly after a TEE image showed “a lot of air” in the heart chambers per the audio. I watched a real valve surgery to prepare. There were 10 defense experts defending everything done in the case including the current president and vice-president of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons who went to bat for Dr. Allen. I did all of the depositions of all experts for both sides except one. The case settled at trial for $20M. My attention to detail paid big dividends for the client who could not speak. My expert, who is now a life-long friend, was brought up on charges for his testimony in front of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. He refused their request to share all future depositions with the Society for their evaluation to escape censure. He and I spoke for someone who couldn’t. It was like a Hollywood movie from start to end.

removed. Doctors next decided to lay her flat to get feeding access “comfortably.” No sedation assessment was done. The results were a cardiopulmonary arrest leading to catastrophic brain injury. No one identified the abscess in her neck even after the tube coiled due to obstruction. They couldn’t intubate. The case resolved for $40M, a record for brain injury to a minor.

LD: Wow. What challenges did you face in representing this young woman?

JB: Trying to provide for her future was the main challenge. Her parents obviously wanted her to have the best-of-the best to promote recovery. A hyperbaric chamber was purchased. Flights to intensive rehabilitation sessions outside Illinois have been occurring. An entire home has been modified for care and therapy to be provided daily. She needs the care for the rest of her life. Annuities were acquired as part of the settlement to pay for care guaranteed for her entire life.

Both sides – lawyers, doctors and a hospital – figured out a way to get this beautiful young lady what she needed within two years of the occurrence in an adversarial legal system. It was a big relief to her parents who needed to work and help with 24-hour care needs for a growing young lady.

LD: Aside from the incredible result, is there something about this case that you will find especially memorable?

JB: I give a lot of credit to defense counsel Mike Slovis of Cunnigham Meyer & Vedrine, and his clients and their multiple excess insurers. They did what was right without unnecessary delay and treated my clients with dignity and respect. That says a lot about them. It is refreshing for all sides to move to help quickly and is forever memorable.

LD: That’s incredible. How about recent matters, any standouts?

LD: It is always impressive and inspiring when both sides of the “v” are working together. Any other cases from your career that stand out? I’m sure there are many…

JB: A young lady, a minor, who got great grades and was a cheerleader, had a sore throat and problems with painful swallowing. Her labs showed she was dehydrated. She was admitted for days. No one imaged her neck. She had high fevers and was growing more and more tired by the day. Her labs showed a worsening infection. A decision was made not to transfer her to a Children’s Hospital. Thereafter, feeding her became the focus of her attendings. A nasogastric tube was placed in a very painful effort. An x-ray showed the tube remained coiled in her neck — it had not reached anywhere near her stomach. It was

JB: Here’s one more. William Rooney was in his 70s when I tried to prove that a cervical epidural injection and delayed response to his post-injection symptoms left him a quadriplegic due to negligence. He lived alone in a bed in the center of his living room. He had a mastery of Chicago history and the lessons it taught.

He shared stories about his family and upbringing. He had an interest in mine as a lawyer and a husband without a family of my own yet. We talked about life and family seemingly weekly. Partly it helped him pass the time. For me, I learned tons as we together tried to right the wrongs done to his life. We were friends

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during and following his lawsuit until he passed. No one witnessed that friendship but I spoke of it often to my friends, colleagues and family.

LD: That’s beautiful. Backing up a bit if we may, what was your path to your current position at Power Rogers?

JB: I wanted to work for the best plaintiffs’ medical negligence firm in Chicago. I worked as a law clerk while attending law school to prepare me to be a defense lawyer. Joe Power was the top lawyer in the field in 1996 and remains so today. I got lucky getting hired as a clerk after my first year. Five years later I got luckier when the firm asked if I would return as a lawyer. I will always be loyal to this law firm.

of physicians. I still use his case law system today. He taught me about respect. About paying compliments forward. He was, and is, an example of hard work and perseverance. Luckily for him what his arms and legs didn’t permit, his brain and mouth did. He is one of the smartest and kindest people I have ever met. His remains inspirational and motivational to me. He was ultimately deprived of the practice of law through a disease he did not contribute to, but his practice of law does in fact still occur today, through those he taught and mentored. Definitely through me!

LD: I love that. He sounds like a real inspiration. How would you describe your style as a lawyer, Joe? Or, how do you think others see you?

LD: No doubt that makes you a strong advocate for the firm, when it comes to potential clients.

JB: I would say I’m ready to challenge the defendant and his or her defenses as if the injury occurred to my family.

JB: The best advertisement are case results. I keep a list on the firm website of every successful case with a description of facts and court details from my first year at Power Rogers in 2000 until today. I don’t talk bad about our competitors, as there are many great lawyers.

I just want the client to pick a lawyer they are conformable with, as this is the biggest decision of their lives.

Being aggressive and over-selling are not honest and credible. If I don’t get the case, while disappointed, it’s not about me. The client is all that matters.

Others would say, I think, that I’m prepared, challenging, aggressive, condescending and mocking.

LD: Does your firm provide any professional development opportunities that you have found particularly valuable?

JB: My partner, Joe Power, invited all firm lawyers to attend conferences with the Inner Circle of Advocates during his two-year presidency. I watched the nation’s top plaintiff trial lawyers present cases and strategies for cases over each multi-day conference. This inclusion of what I call “The Outer Circle” at the meeting has had a major impact on my practice and focus. I have made friends and connections with some of the best of the best because of Joe’s generosity and guidance.

LD: Very cool. Did you have an early mentor who helped shape the course of your professional life?

JB: Robert E. Nora from Hinshaw & Culbertson when I was a defense lawyer, for those five years. He had advanced multiple sclerosis that was late onset. He took the train to work. He taught a group of us literally everything. He prepped with me for depositions, and watched me take them. He made me do so the first day I was licensed, totally solo. He read my depositions and gave feedback. He taught me the relevant case law and the medicine, as he came from a family

LD: Do you have any advice for current law school students?

JB: Plan to work hard. Make your parents proud. Don’t expect to be catered to; do the catering to your clients and your law firm. Grind every day. Outwork your adversary. Don’t fight every battle. Get along with the other side. While trying to win is important, don’t scorch the earth with bickering and pettiness along the way. The world is round for a reason.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office?

JB: I watch my sixth grader and high school freshman play and/or practice hockey which is like a full-time job.

My wife and the boys enjoy attending sporting events, mostly Bears and Blackhawks games. We sneak away to Lake Geneva, Wisc. in the summer weekends and at night enjoy Cabernet and Bourbon drinking.

LD: Do you have a favorite book or movie about the justice system?

JB: The 1982 movie “The Verdict” with Paul Newman.

Reminds me of the stresses of law and how fighting for the underdog makes the stresses worth it. Great med-mal trial scenes makes it my favorite movie about the justice system.

LD: If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing now?

JB: I would be unmarried, without kids, friendless and unemployed as I don’t have any other skills except advocacy, arguing and talking.

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Colin King

Alison Kohler

DEWSNUP KING SALT LAKE CITY

DUGAN BABIJ TIMONIUM, MD.

Robert J. King Jr.

Michelle Kohut

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

Aimee Kirby

Robert Komitor

DOLAN LAW FIRM LOS ANGELES

LEVY KONIGSBERG NEW YORK

David Kirby

Josh Koskoff

EDWARDS KIRBY RALEIGH, N.C.

KOSKOFF KOSKOFF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

Daniel Kirschner

James Kreindler

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

Beth Klein

Scott Krist

KLEIN FRANK BOULDER, COLO.

KRIST LAW FIRM HOUSTON

Thomas Kline

Leslie Kroeger

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

COHEN MILSTEIN PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

Mary Koch

Noah Kushlefsky

WAIS VOGELSTEIN BALTIMORE

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

Karen Koehler

David Kuttles

STRITMATTER KESSLER SEATTLE

LANIER LAW FIRM NEW YORK

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Walter Lack

Stephan LeClainche

ENGSTROM LIPSCOMB LOS ANGELES

COHEN MILSTEIN PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

Frank LaMothe

James Ledlie

LAMOTHE LAW FIRM NEW ORLEANS

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Joseph Landy

Scott Leeds

LESSER LESSER WEST PALM, FLA.

THE COCHRAN FIRM PLANTATION, FLA.

W. Mark Lanier

Katie Crosby Lehmann

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Timothy Lawn

Theodore Leopold

RAYNES MCCARTY PHILADELPHIA

COHEN MILSTEIN PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

Jennifer Lawrence

Gary Lesser

THE LAWRENCE FIRM COVINGTON, KY.

LESSER LESSER WEST PALM, FLA.

Richard Lawrence

Zarah Levin-Fragasso

THE LAWRENCE FIRM COVINGTON, KY.

LANIER LAW FIRM NEW YORK

Marianne LeBlanc

James Lewis

SUGARMAN BOSTON

TAYLOR RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

Matt Leckman

Jeannete Lewis

LITTLEPAGE BOOTH HOUSTON

LEWIS LEGAL GROUP PLANTATION, FLA.

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Brent Goudarzi and Marty Young GOUDARZI & YOUNG (GILMER, TEXAS)

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MARTY YOUNG GOUDARZI & YOUNG HAS EARNED A HUGE

and well-deserved reputation for its results – winning more than $1B for injured individuals, many of them the victims of terrible trucking accidents.

Key to its success is the relationship between its two principals, Brent Goudarzi and Marty Young. Cousins, they grew up together working on their grandfather’s Gilmer, Texas, ranch. Teamwork comes naturally to them.

When Goudarzi traveled 470 miles West to Lubbock to attend Texas Tech after high school graduation, Young enrolled in Kilgore Junior College 20 miles from home. While Goudarzi knew all along he was going to be a lawyer, Young thought he might become a medical doctor.

One visit home, Goudarzi asked, “Marty, you and I are really close, we grew up together. Why don’t you just go to law school and we’ll be partners?”

Young thought that sounded pretty good.

“I changed my major, and the rest is history,” he says.

“When I went out to finish my last two years of undergrad at Texas Tech, Brent was starting his first year of law school, so we were roommates.”

Young didn’t bother with internships at other law firms. He took classes year-round, the traditional fall and spring semesters as well as both summer sessions, completing his juris doctorate at Texas Tech in just two and a half years.

“Then I came back home and practiced what we call ‘cowboy law,’” he recalls. “What that means is I did a little bit of everything: personal injury work, some family and some criminal law. Once we got our client base built up, we switched to full-time personal injury litigation.”

And pretty good is a little understated. Goudarzi & Young, the firm the cousins founded, opened its doors in Gilmer – a town of a little more than 5,000 in Upshur County, about two hours east of Dallas – in 1997. Today, it employs six attorneys in addition to the two name partners and has an additional office in Longview, Texas, on Interstate 20 between Dallas and Shreveport, La. It has represented more than 17,000 clients, many of whom were harmed by safety violations in the trucking industry. In 2019, the firm obtained a $140M settlement, the largest in American history for a sin-

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

BY KATRINA DEWEY gle-plaintiff case, for a 39-year-old man whose arms and legs were paralyzed after an 18-wheeler collided with his vehicle. Goudarzi and Young have built an all-too rare law firm, anchored with a true dedication to the region and people from their hometown and offering the best advocacy anywhere.

Lawdragon: Do you remember your first trial?

Marty Young: I do. I was just two years out of law school, and it was in the Upshur County courthouse, a clear-cut liability case. My client had a soft-tissue injury, a black eye from the accident. And I remembered the jury paid me to the penny what I asked for, which was somewhere between $25,000 and $26,000.

My jury foreman was a vet out of Gladewater, Texas.

And after the trial, I said to him, “I’m a young lawyer.

Is there anything I could have done better?” He was an older man, and he said, “Son, you did a real exceptional job. And when you asked us for the amount of money you asked us for, I thought you were very reasonable and you didn’t stretch the amount and I told the whole jury panel, ‘We’re going to pay to the penny what you asked for.’” And that’s exactly what they did.

LD: That must have made a big impression.

MY: It definitely helped that that was my first trial, and it led me to try many, many cases after that, probably in excess of 100. I tell people I try small cases and big cases. There’s not a case that’s too small and there’s not a case that’s too big. I’ll go try a $20,000 case if I have to.

My job is to help the people, and that’s what I intend to do. If it’s important to them, it’s important to me.

LD: What made you decide to take your cousin up on his proposal that you become a lawyer and go into business together?

MY: I saw the way that Corporate America took advantage of ordinary people, basically. I felt in order to level the playing field, people who are injured need an advocate and I felt like I would be a good advocate for them.

The sad thing is that when you get too old or injured to work, Corporate America just sends you out the door and they get a new, younger version of you to come in and take your place. It’s a cycle that continuously repeats itself, and it costs the people who are going out the door their livelihood. They don’t have the financial means to stand up and fight against corporate America. They depend on lawyers who

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500 can stand up and fight for them, and that’s what we do here in this office. It is my job to put them on a financially level playing field to fight against these large corporations.

The only way you can get justice is you have to go to a courthouse and you have to be willing to try lawsuits.

And nobody tries more lawsuits than me and my partner do. Period. And nobody gets the results we get. To be a good lawyer, you have to be able to relate to the little guy.

LD: You’re right. It’s easy for lawyers to lose their ability to do that, regardless of their backgrounds. But you’re still the people from the town you came from. How do you do that after all the success you’ve had?

MY: Well, I’m from a blue-collar family, not a whitecollar family, and I still consider myself blue-collar when I go out in the community. I mean, I know the community looks up to me, what I’ve done for them, but I consider myself being one of them and it’s my job to help them when I can.

LD: What was the biggest verdict you ever got?

MY: It was a case that Brent and I tried together, and we won $260M. When it’s a big case, we always work together, and we have a whole team – it’s not just the two of us. He and I work with all the witnesses, pick the jury and make the opening statement. But the case is always a team effort: Three or four sets of eyes and three or four brains are much better than one set of eyes and one set of brains. Everybody knows that. And we value the other lawyers that work with us: We all have a different skill set.

Brent’s very good at cross-examination. That’s what he enjoys doing. I enjoy working with the client. When we try the big cases I do the direct examination. That means when we put our client up, I’m the one who spends the time with them and really gets into how everything has affected them.

LD: Lawyers coast-to-coast admire how you get such large verdicts for what are, typically, single plaintiffs.

What do you think it is that sets your firm apart?

MY: Preparation, preparation, preparation. You have to pay attention to the small details because in every trial there’s some detail that the other side is going to misstate, misquote or forget, and you can bring it to the jury’s attention. You never know what it’s going to be, because every trial’s different. But when you work harder than the other side, it’s going to pay off for you.

Maybe not every single time, but the harder you work, the luckier you get. Anybody that works knows that.

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We can go around in our community and people can say, “Y’all have done very well. Good verdict.” And we’re very humble and say, “We’ve been lucky,” and they know it. They say, “No, you’re not lucky. You work hard.” So really, the harder you work, the more you prepare, the better you can represent your clients and the better results you’re going to get. When we try a big lawsuit, we may be holed up for a month preparing, working from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 or 11:00 at night for many weeks. And I can assure you the other side is not doing that.

LD: When I visited your office, it was a beehive and I can envision that as you’re getting ready for a trial, everybody’s all in.

MY: When I have a trial for a client, it’s really not only a trial for that client, it affects all my current clients because when I try that case, if I can get really good results, it’s going to affect what I can settle my other clients’ cases for. If you have a winning track record, you get settlements that are bigger. If I go to trial and I consistently get beat, then it’s going to affect my value to my existing clients or my future clients.

Therefore, every trial I have, it’s a zero-sum game. I have to win and I’m going to prepare to win.

LD: You’re really doing such a service for the clients you help, especially in the trucking industry where there are so many bad accidents and safety doesn’t get the attention that’s needed. Ultimately, what you’re doing helps everyone who’s on the roads.

MY: No question. And you know what? You take any form of personal injury law, whether it’s product liability, medical malpractice, 18-wheeler litigation or small-car wreck litigation. We’re all trying to make society safer for all of us. Whether it’s making the 18-wheeler companies do what they’re supposed to be doing with the Federal Motor Carrier Act, or whether it’s product liability where they’re making products safer for the consumer, the public, the parents, the children, whatever.

LD: What do you love most about being a lawyer and what you’ve been able to do so far?

MY: Probably the freedom to work on the types of cases that I enjoy, the personal-injury cases. Like I said, when I started out, I did cowboy law and I didn’t enjoy criminal law or family law that much. I knew personal injury law was what I enjoy doing. That’s why we gravitated toward that. I’ve just enjoyed being able to help people. I have people who have been seriously injured, whose lives are forever changed, and they have one shot at justice. That’s it.

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Richard Lewis

Kathy Love

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

MCGINN MONTOYA ALBUQUERQUE

Robert Lewis

Kenneth Lumb

THE LAWRENCE FIRM COVINGTON, KY.

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

Micha Liberty

Thomas Luneau

LIBERTY LAW OAKLAND, CALIF.

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

Graham LippSmith

Michael Lyons

KASDAN LIPPSMITH LOS ANGELES

LYONS & SIMMONS DALLAS

David Lira

Stephen Mackauf

ENGSTROM LIPSCOMB LOS ANGELES

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

Zoe Littlepage

Francisco Maderal

LITTLEPAGE BOOTH HOUSTON

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Judith Livingston*

Raj Mahadass

KRAMER DILLOF NEW YORK

PMR LAW HOUSTON

Michael Livingston*

Moshe Maimon

DAVIS LEVIN HONOLULU

LEVY KONIGSBERG NEW YORK

Ramon Lopez

Mitchell Makowicz

LOPEZ MCHUGH NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF.

BLUME FORTE CHATHAM, N.J.

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cedures for battling such blazes. He settled a landmark case against Ford Motor Co. over police interceptor vehicles that burst into flames upon rear impact during car crashes, prompted by Phoenix police officer Jason Schechterle’s near-death in a March 2001 accident.

There were 18 such cases across the country that he and David Perry litigated. The case ultimately led to the carmaker’s modification of 350,000 vehicles.

McGroder made his mark in complicated high-profile cases, all involving catastrophic injuries and product liability – most with a social justice component. His accomplishments and dedication to have an impact helping attain justice for victims – as well as his philosophy burnished in his Buffalo, N.Y., roots – have made him one of Arizona’s most acclaimed trial lawyers and a member of the Lawdragon Hall of Fame.

Patrick McGroder BEUS GILBERT (PHOENIX)

PATRICK M C GRODER

BY KATRINA DEWEY

PATRICK MCGRODER’S GRADES IN LAW

school weren’t the sort that attracted offers from highend firms. Struggling to find a job after earning his law degree, he eventually struck out on his own, a selfprofessed “dirty-shirt lawyer” who learned on the job.

“I was sworn in on Saturday and had my first jury trial on Monday morning,” McGroder of Beus Gilbert in Phoenix recalls. It was a criminal case, and one he lost.

“I didn’t know anything, and I don’t think the jurors left the box,” he says. “They probably wanted to find me guilty of impersonating a lawyer. I left there completely humiliated and mortified. I vowed that was never going to happen again.”

McGroder turned that promise into a career winning more than $600M for hundreds of injured people in high-profile cases, including 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, a team of firefighters who perished during a 2013 wildfire, winning compensation for their families and prompting new safety pro198

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“I gravitated to those types of cases, and I was very fortunate to have a staff and lawyers to work with me that subscribed to my commitment to humanity, to social change,” he says. “Virtually all of my cases involved some type of remedial change to not only make the world a better place, but to make it a safer place and to ensure that tragedies like I’ve seen, preventable tragedies, don’t happen again.”

Lawdragon: Your. career and accomplishments are incredibly impressive. Where did your drive to effect social change come from?

Patrick McGroder: I was raised in Buffalo, N.Y., an incredibly ethnic, blue-collar rust bucket – as they now refer to it – a town where I learned what’s important in life is loyalty, commitment, to not only your God, and family, but also to your fellow man, and the dignity that your fellow man represents. So that’s how I was raised. Philanthropy and social service was not an option in my family. My sisters and I were raised by incredible parents. They were not well educated, but came from a generation where basic human rights were respected and those who were victimized in life must be afforded dignity, compassion and empathy.

And then there’s my Catholic faith. So that’s why I believe so strongly that great human beings make great lawyers – people who are respectful, civil and understand that our profession is not a business, but a calling. It’s a calling that ensures that we use the power of our licensure to effectuate solutions to problems, and I don’t care if it’s as simple as a will or a divorce or someone buying a home, or in my case, someone who’s catastrophically injured. It doesn’t matter. Our profession should be about understanding what our clients’ needs are and doing everything we can to ensure that those needs are met in a legal, ethical way.

We’re not here to make problems. In my experience,

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I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO GET INTO THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA AND ARRIVED IN TUCSON IN THE LATE ’60S, AND QUICKLY THOUGHT THAT I’D DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN. there are a lot of lawyers out there, perhaps unwittingly so, who cause more problems than they solve.

LD: How did you decide to become a lawyer yourself?

What inspired you – did you know lawyers?

PM: My father was a first-generation American and was a great believer in education. I had gone to Catholic boys schools all my life – grammar school and high school. Then, eventually I went to Notre Dame, which was my father’s dream, because he was Irish. I’m not sure I was all that crazy about it. My dad was executive vice president of the Buffalo Bills football team. I spent four years at Notre Dame. I really had no desire or burning passion to be a lawyer. I always wanted to be a doctor, but my failures in life were generally directed towards the study of science and math, so…

LD: I feel your pain.

PM: I wasn’t particularly equipped for the medical profession but ironically, I wound up in the personal injury/medical malpractice field, where 50 percent of my practice is medicine, so I guess in a roundabout way, fate took me where I wanted to be. After Notre Dame, it was the height of the Vietnam War. I was getting called for physicals all the time. My father, who – as I said was a great believer in education – wanted me to go to law school. And I really had no desire at that point to be a lawyer. So I said, “Look, you always wanted me to go Notre Dame, but if I’m thinking about going to law school, I’d like to pick the law school myself.” So he said, “That’s fine.”

So coming from Buffalo, where there are essentially two seasons, July 4th and winter, and then spending four years in South Bend, Ind., where it snowed from the time I got there to the time I left, I applied mostly to warmer-weather schools and co-ed schools. Notre Dame, when I went there, was all boys.

LD: Clever man.

PM: I was fortunate enough to get into the University of Arizona and arrived in Tucson in the late ’60s, and quickly thought that I’d died and gone to heaven.

There was sun, and a variety of other things that a coed school had to offer. I arrived there, driving a ’67

Corvette and pulling a Triumph TT motorcycle, and I was about 215 pounds then, and I thought of myself as an athlete. I wasn’t exactly mentally prepared for law school. But I was quickly befriended by my mentor, Professor Junius Hoffman, who was a brilliant man. He had an undergraduate degree in Greek mythology, I believe, from Harvard and a Yale degree in law. We were kind of the odd couple, because I was about three times his size, not mentally of course, but physically. Within the first year, I realized that being in law school was not only a privilege, but that it might be the start of a very promising career. So I finished law school, and still wanted to go back to Buffalo and work for the Bills. I came up to Phoenix and took the bar exam in Phoenix and just fell in love. It was only about 600,000 people then, and it was just a fabulous town.

Because my grades were not prestigious in law school, I struggled finding a job. So I essentially became a sole practitioner; I learned to practice on the street, and I hit my first personal injury case for a million dollars within a few years and took off from there. I started my own firm and ran that firm for about 25 years. A lot of my partners retired, and I went with a semi-large firm here in Phoenix. I established a large personal-injury practice. I realized that I could be much more effective if I took fewer cases and concentrated on those in which there was catastrophic injury or wrongful death associated with some social architecture. So I became known for taking those kinds of cases, whether they involved road design, aviation disaster, corrections, accounting, legal and certainly medical negligence.

Eventually, most of the high-profile cases in Arizona that involved catastrophic injury or wrongful death would find their way to my door, from the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the firefighters who were burned alive, to the news helicopters that crashed over downtown Phoenix.

LD: We have the honor of knowing numerous great lawyers who are great people, and then we’ve also seen the folks who want to be the same as those great lawyers, but maybe don’t have the moral underpinning, right? It seems to me a lot of what drives you to take the kinds of cases that you take and fight the way that you do comes from your personal code, from who you are.

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500 PM: You know, I can’t heal the sick, I can’t raise the dead, but I can restore a modicum of dignity to my clients who have faced the most overwhelming adversity. And I hope that I do it in a way that’s empathetic, compassionate, and at the same time represents a full measure of justice. I don’t have any desire to be on the cover of any magazines, nor argue in front of the Supreme Court 10 times a year, although that would be a great honor.

But what I do changes lives, and to me, that is my calling.

LD: Can you describe what it’s been like to be an advocate for your clients in court as well as to be an advocate for the openness of courts to people who lack financial resources?

PM: A lot of defendants talk about jury reform. I think juries are the ultimate reformation. They truly try to do the right thing. Do they come off the rails sometimes?

Sure. Do they decide things based on irrelevancy?

Sure, I mean that happens sometimes. But juries are the great equalizer, as is having a plaintiffs’ bar that’s available and affordable. To bring people justice that heretofore would not have a voice nor the financial wherewithal to litigate against institutions, people of means and wealth, governmental agencies, or any other potential defendant in a superior financial or leverage situation. We provide access to justice in a way that doesn’t penalize the poor, the voiceless and the underserved. And I strongly believe in that.

LD: How do the victories that you’ve won for your clients motivate you when you wake up in the morning or when you’re finishing a long day at the office on a difficult case?

PM: It is beyond fulfilling to be able to use the power of your personality, intellect, creativity and ingenuity, to bring justice for those who otherwise would simply never have an opportunity to bring their cases into the system. The scorecard of life, it’s not measured by wins and losses; it’s measured by the justice that we’re able to obtain for our clients. And especially in the plaintiffs’ bar, those clients who have been devastated, destroyed by injury, by travesty, by death. And to be able to say to them, “Look, what we’re able to do from a justice standpoint or a compensation standpoint, at the end of the day, perhaps is meaningless in your world.

But maybe we can make your life a little bit better. And maybe the defendant will remember your name. And maybe the defendant will ensure, through changes and remedial measures, that something like what happened to you, is never, ever going to happen again.”

LD: You’re a nationally acclaimed plaintiff lawyer, but I know your heart is in Arizona, and many of the hall-

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mark cases that you’ve done are Arizona-based. Obviously, Phoenix has grown into a major city while you’ve lived there – do you feel satisfied when you think about the ways that you’ve contributed to what it is today?

PM: Yes, absolutely. I’m silently proud – because I’m not somebody who wears my achievements on my sleeve – when I go by a road that has been redesigned because of what we’ve done, like Route 89A up in Sedona, for example, where our cases resulted in rockfall remediation on a very scenic highway where rocks were falling and catastrophically injuring and killing people. Or considering the transformation of a waterway here where two doctors were killed or, whenever a police car drives by, thinking that we made police vehicles safer in this country, I feel quietly satisfied.

LD: What advice do you give your son, who’s following in your footsteps, or other attorneys who are starting out?

PM: I learned the hard way. I learned to practice law as a dirty-shirt lawyer. I didn’t have any clerk jobs. I was not recruited by silk-stocking firms. I did not have the types of mentors that one would find in a large law firm. I learned to practice law in the courtroom by trial and error, by doing everything I could, and through working 24/7 for probably the better part of 45 years.

Now a lot of that may have been fear: fear of making mistakes, fear of not doing what is in the best interest of my client, maybe because I didn’t know what was in the best interest of my client. So fear, for me, was a great motivator. But what I tell young people is, “Look, you need to learn every day. There are no stupid questions.” Because, let me tell you something, I ask every stupid question there is. I have seen so many lawyers, so many young lawyers, who are afraid to ask that stupid question. They’re afraid, because someone might think that they’re something less than as smart as they think they are. Or they’re afraid to put in the time and the commitment and the effort it requires to be a trial lawyer.

If you want to be a trial lawyer, you’ve got to learn about the human condition. And you’ve got to learn to listen and learn to communicate. And without those tools, you’re not going to be much of a force in the courtroom. You’ve also got to work. You’ve got to sit down, analyze, be creative, be innovative, you’ve got to apply facts and theories of the law, and then work backward and understand the law and apply those theories and facts to the law. You need to know the other side’s case as well as they do. You need to understand how you can lose, because if you understand how you can lose, then you understand how to win.

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Adam Malone

Neil Maune

MALONE LAW OFFICE ATLANTA

MAUNE RAICHLE ST. LOUIS, MO.

Andrew Maloney III

David Mazie

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

MAZIE SLATER ROSELAND, N.J.

Steven Marks

Niall McCarthy

PODHURST ORSECK MIAMI

COTCHETT PITRE BURLINGAME, CALIF.

Amy Rose Martel

David McClain

CHIHAK & MARTEL SAN DIEGO

KAZAN MCCLAIN OAKLAND, CALIF.

Annika Martin

Craig McClellan

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

MCCLELLAN LAW FIRM SAN DIEGO

Reid Martin

James McEldrew

MARTIN WALKER TYLER, TEXAS

MCELDREW YOUNG PHILADELPHIA

Roberto Martinez

Randi McGinn

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

MCGINN MONTOYA ALBUQUERQUE

Ricardo Martinez-Cid

Christopher McGrath

PODHURST ORSECK MIAMI

SULLIVAN PAPAIN GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

Angela Mason

Patrick McGroder*

THE COCHRAN FIRM DOTHAN, ALA.

BEUS GILBERT PHOENIX

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Stephen Garcia GARCIA ARTIGLIERE (LONG BEACH, CALIF.)

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STEPHEN GARCIA STEPHEN GARCIA HAS SPENT HIS LIFE

fighting for the rights of elders, winning over $1B for his clients over the span of his decades-long career.

His work has laid crucial groundwork for protecting the rights and the quality of care for the elderly and infirm in this country.

Garcia started out as a criminal lawyer, but found his true calling when a desperate family approached him for assistance in a challenging case and he was able to knock it out of the park for them. His first firm, The Law Office of Stephen M. Garcia, was acquired by a major player in the elder abuse space, Wilkes & McHugh, in 2001. He founded the full service litigation firm Garcia & Artigliere in 2003, which focuses on issues of elder abuse and neglect of elder and infirm adults. Garcia continues to handle multiple cases while setting up his firm to thrive as he makes moves to step down in the coming years.

Lawdragon: How did you become interested in developing a practice focused on elder abuse and neglect?

Stephen Garcia: Mostly by accident 30 years ago.

I am a Mexican American and three decades ago a wonderful Spanish speaking family, Zoila and Jesus Noy, changed the course of my career. They were looking for a lawyer with an office at the beach who spoke Spanish. I took the case and the defense pulled out all the stops forcing us to trial. And we achieved a very significant verdict in favor of the clients. Little did I know at the time that the case was one of the first matters tried pursuant to a new legislative scheme called the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act. The personal and professional reward for me helping a truly magical family achieve justice when so many others had turned down their case was so fulfilling that I knew I had found my life’s calling.

LD: So you really have a passion for what you do!

SG: Yes. I help those who feel no strength nor ability to achieve justice against multi-national, multi-billion dollar, corporate behemoths who pillage in their lust for unlawful profit comfortable in their belief that their money and power insulate them from responsibility for their misconduct, receive justice. That’s a game changer and a reason for living!

LD: Aside from that case, is there another from your career that stands out as particularly memorable?

PHOTO BY: AMY CANTRELL

BY ALISON PREECE SG: We represented the interests of an incredible young mother who was incapacitated for life as the result of the abject failure of an acute care hospital to provide her the most obvious care. As it was an acute care hospital they asserted that they were insulated to $250,000 in non-economic damages per California’s limits on medical malpractice cases. We took the approach that in housing her the hospital was a care custodian of our client and hence the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act applied, with no arbitrary caps. The matter was litigated all the way to the California Supreme Court and we ended up securing a $36.8M award for our client. That has changed the viewpoint of reckless neglect in acute care hospitals and improved the delivery of care as a whole.

Acute care hospitals can no longer hide behind an arbitrary cap of damages when they commit reckless neglect of elder and/or dependent adults and that is a game changer.

LD: What are some trends in your practice?

SG: We are seeing the same bad actors over and over again. One particular provider in California has over 90 long term care facilities, is well known by the State of California to be over $90,000 in arrears on quality taxes, and operates under other licenses when the State of California has rejected his applications time and time again. What we see is that smaller firms can be run out of the case by this self-professed billionaire’s willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid providing the better care his residents deserve were he to spend half that on their care. The trend now is to a nuclear war to bring these modern day baron robbers to task, lasting many years. One really has to have the staying power to overcome these unsavory characters, but that is the way it seems to be moving.

We are in year five of litigation attempting to force nursing homes to staff their facilities with sufficient staff to meet the needs of their residents. We recently had a settlement forcing an increase in staffing at the facilities to occur now and into the future. That was a huge win for the elder and infirm residents of these facilities.

LD: What were the key challenges in that litigation?

SG: Size, time and money. These cases are overwhelmingly expensive. One must have the resources

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Cynthia McGuinn

Ron Mercaldo

ROUDA FEDER SAN FRANCISCO

MERCALDO LAW FIRM TUCSON, ARIZ.

John F. “Mickey” McGuire

Kristine Meredith

THORSNES BARTOLOTTA SAN DIEGO

DANKO MEREDITH REDWOOD CITY, CALIF.

Martin McLean

Derek Merman

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

HEARD LAW FIRM HOUSTON

Thomas McManus

Jordan Merson

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

KLINE & SPECTER NEW YORK

Randy McMurray

Tom Methvin

MCMURRAY HENRIKS LOS ANGELES

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Rick Meadow

Donald Migliori

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Ted Meadows

Dee Miles

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Andje Medina

Betsy Miller

ALTAIR LAW SAN FRANCISCO

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Marco Mercaldo

Michael Miller

MERCALDO LAW FIRM TUCSON, ARIZ.

THE MILLER FIRM ORANGE, VA.

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to withstand their well-funded legal attacks to bring justice to bear.

me with personal problems, challenges and life as a rule. I am a lucky guy to have him.

LD: Can you walk us through the impact on the industry from this matter?

LD: Can you share a lawyer you have come up against in a negotiation or case who you admire?

SG: That’s simple, the robber barons are finally learning that due to diligent and effective legal advocacy from many, they are going to face justice and they will pay. It is far better and simpler and more honorable for them to put the money into a more appropriate level of care to their residents than to pay lawyers.

And hence, the civil justice system is invaluable in bringing about important change.

SG: I admire a few defense lawyers, because they are honest. A few names come quickly to mind, Mike Trotter, John Supple, Bill Wilson, Rima Badawiya, Brian Reid, there are certainly others but these ones put integrity to the forefront for sure.

LD: What first led you to pursue a career in law?

SG: Having a father and three uncles who were lawyers will traumatize anyone and it did me.

LD: Did you have any jobs between undergrad and law school that affected your legal career in some way?

SG: I tended bar and waited tables. That taught me how to connect and understand normal people in the normal exercise of life which is an invaluable tool with jurors.

LD: Is there a specific reason why you chose Loyola University over another law school?

SG: Jesuits!

LD: Is this the type of practice you imagined yourself practicing while in law school?

SG: Never, wanted to be a criminal lawyer. I guess in some ways I still am. Over the first seven or so years of my career I was solely a criminal lawyer. I am in a far different sea at this point.

LD: How would you describe your style as a lawyer?

SG: Aggressive, very aggressive, and honest. I will not pursue a case for a shakedown or if I do not fully believe in its merit. That causes us to walk away from a significant amount of money but it is the right thing to do.

LD: What are some of the challenges you face in your leadership role at Garcia & Artigliere?

SG: I never worked for a firm so I have no idea how to do it. As we’ve grown to a large firm that has become a constant and evolving challenge. We are grooming some to replace me and for us to become a firm less centered upon my involvement and more on cultural sustainability. When recruiting, we sell our culture.

We should probably have double the staff we have but then we would not be the family we are. By being small we are also able to pay unmatched salaries and help our staff as a family helps one another in life’s endeavors.

LD: Has your style of management changed?

SG: Yes, I was a temperamental ass at the beginning.

I am more of a grandpa now.

LD: Was there a course or professor from law school that was particularly memorable?

LD: What are some interests you have outside the office?

SG: Professor Alan Ides and Constitutional Law. Fascinating. My son just took it and I loved even now talking about the issues with him.

SG: I follow my kids around in their endeavors and snow ski, I snow ski a lot. Also, I have sat on a number of boards and even founded a charity which now thrives. Once one has all they require, it is an obligation of a fair and just society to give back, in my judgment.

LD: What advice do you have now for law students?

SG: Know why you are going to law school. You are about to incur over $100,000 in debt. Be true to yourself and have a compelling reason for doing so. Know what you want to do ASAP, then clerk, clerk and clerk to learn the practice you wish to enter.

LD: Do you have any mentors?

SG: Judge Victor Chavez of the Los Angeles Superior Court. He was, and remains, my idol. Near 90 and still sits on the Bench bringing down his own brand of stern, yet fair, justice. He has done that for me all of my almost 60 years as a father figure to me helping

LD: If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing now?

SG: I would be a snow ski instructor working for the race department at a mountain somewhere far into the back country!

LD: Is there a larger takeaway you can share from the work you’ve done over the years?

SG: Honor our elders as they are the bedrock upon which all of us came.

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Russ Herman HERMAN HERMAN (NEW ORLEANS)

RUSS HERMAN A BEATING, RED HEART THU-THUMPED,

thu-thumped on the sleeve of the famous lawyer’s beautifully cut jacket. His hands peered forth from within the cuffs, gesturing delicately, and with palepawed determination to illustrate the paths his life has taken.

A jealous mistress has ruled many of Russ Herman’s days and graced her fair share of his finest hours. Herman has been utterly complicit in what Justice Joseph Story termed the “long and lavish courtship” required of a lawyer who would seek greatness. He has led the law firm that his father and uncle founded, winning landmark verdicts including a multimillion-dollar case against Big Tobacco, and becoming a legend along the way.

But for Herman, that is the beginning of his measure rather than the sum. Herman’s penchant for quoting Greek and Roman philosophers is legendary in the New Orleans trial bar. When he won a fight to bring litigation over the 2010 BP oil spill back to New Orleans, Reuters penned of a “Shakespeare-quoting

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BY KATRINA DEWEY father” with a novelist son. He attends Mardi Gras parades, paints, writes, teaches, has explored the Amazon, Machu Picchu, Greece and Rome and studies the great works of philosophers and poets.

If there is a personification of laissez les bon temps rouler, it is Herman, a blessed son of the Big Easy.

Even preparing for what he describes as the last major case he’ll try - while applauding his son’s trial skills and leadership in his firm’s continuing stellar reputation he is eager to discuss quantum mechanics with his wife Sandra, and write about Native American oratory and rhetoric.

The connection, not precisely an intuitive one, between the seemingly far-flung topics is the concept of change.

Quantum mechanics attempts to explain the fluctuating nature of reality at the subatomic level. So naturally Herman was mulling the 19th century clash between European settlers whose lifestyle was increasingly dominating the North American continent

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

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and the Native Americans whose home it had been for centuries.

While the Native Americans cherished tradition, Europeans saw change as a constant, a principle articulated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the 6th century BC and embraced by the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius – whose work Herman quotes as easily and with the same gusto as most of us order our favorite cocktail.

The differing cultures and mindsets fostered a clash of civilizations that, in many ways, determined the course of the fledgling United States.

Exploring that historical detour led Herman to a speech on Native American rights and environmental values attributed to Seattle, the 19th century Suquamish and Duwamish chief for whom the western U.S. city is named.

“For lawyers, if you want to read and know rhetoric, you can’t just stop at Aristotle, at Cicero,” he explains.

“Cicero said that reading is the well-spring of perfect eloquence.”

Chief Seattle’s speech, Herman argues, offers valuable instruction in the most visible and least teachable art of the legal profession.

“A lawyer can pick it up and should read it five or six times, master the rhythm, the words used, the metaphor in speaking,” he says. “If you do that, you begin to speak in your arguments and then your openings and closings in a rhythmic, prosaic way, which is much more interesting and much more persuasive.”

1942, and his wife, Reba, an educator, songwriter and lifelong smoker who relied on a portable oxygen tank to breathe at the end of her life and encouraged her sons in their legal battle with Big Tobacco.

That fight was one that Russ, his son Steve, and his brother, Maury, would win in 2004, convincing a jury to order tobacco companies to pay $591M to help Louisiana smokers quit. It’s one of the many cases that earned Russ Herman a spot in the Lawdragon 500 for more than 10 years, making him a Lawdragon Legend and a permanent member of its Hall of Fame.

In 2007, he was Lead Negotiator for Plaintiffs in litigation against Merck & Co. that led to a $4.85B settlement over deaths related to the pain medication Vioxx, which the prescription drugmaker pulled from the market.

More recently, he has served as Plaintiffs’ Liaison Counsel in multidistrict litigation over defective Chinese drywall used in repairs after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“Such class actions were started because ordinary folks and small businesses couldn’t afford to get lawyers, and major corporations, etc., always had an advantage: They could get as many lawyers as they wanted and pay whatever they liked,” he says. “Today, Congress has diminished the access to the courts for small businesses, poor people, indigents and consumers. That’s an actual, historic fact. You’re not going to turn it back, but that doesn’t mean I like it.”

While lawyers are taught to communicate with juries in the language they would use with their families at the breakfast table, Herman notes, “you can do that and be eloquent, you know.”

Multidistrict, class-action litigation with the prospect of awards large enough to change corporate and government behavior offers a remedy to that imbalance, even in an era in which instantaneous communication and access to information have served to entrench opposing positions at least as often as they have leveled the playing field between the powerful and the vulnerable.

The sentiment is one you might expect from the attorney who in the BP battle to be placed in Federal Court in New Orleans, quoted “Measure for Measure,” William Shakespeare’s play about a duke who disguises himself as a friar to observe a corrupt judge’s governance of the realm in his absence.

The wealth of information via powerful search engines like Google has made instantaneous expertise – or at least its appearance – possible. Yet left people who access those easy answers lacking in the depth of knowledge that once provided perspective and insight on how to use what they know.

If such Renaissance philosophy is all too rare in 21stcentury America, it remains inextricably intertwined in New Orleans, the nexus of French, Creole, African American and Anglo American cultures where voodoo lives alongside the French Catholic tradition of Mardi Gras and beignets may be served before or after jambalaya. Or with.

“I’m very philosophical, I think, and I don’t believe the ‘plaintiffs lawyers’ and ‘defense lawyers’ in their 30s and 40s understand each others’ roles,” Herman says. “Lawyers on both sides don’t get a chance to think because everybody wants an immediate response. The judges want it, the clients want it, the adversaries want it.”

It’s the city where Russ was born to Harry Herman, the attorney who co-founded the family practice in

It’s a different world than the one he entered in 1966, when lawyers did a considerable amount of business on a handshake.

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Nancy Gray Armstrong Miller

John Morgan

THE MILLER FIRM ORANGE, VA.

MORGAN MORGAN ORLANDO

Ronald Miller

Mary Ann Morgan

MILLER & ZOIS BALTIMORE

MORGAN TRIAL LAW WINTER PARK, FLA.

Matthew Minner

J. Kevin Morrison

HARE WYNN LEXINGTON, KY.

ALTAIR LAW SAN FRANCISCO

Marc Moller

Jane Morrow

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

OTOROWSKI MORROW BAINBRIDGE, WASH.

Robert Mongeluzzi

Elizabeth Mulvey

SALTZ MONGELUZZI PHILADELPHIA

CROWE & MULVEY BOSTON

A. Elicia Montoya

Daniel Munley

MCGINN MONTOYA ALBUQUERQUE

MUNLEY MUNLEY SCRANTON, PA.

Patrick Montoya

Marion Munley

COLSON HICKS CORAL GABLES, FLA.

MUNLEY MUNLEY SCRANTON, PA.

Jennifer Moore

Francis Patrick Murphy

MOORE LAW GROUP LOUISVILLE, KY.

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

Thomas Moore*

Majed Nachawati

KRAMER DILLOF NEW YORK

FEARS NACHAWATI DALLAS

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WHILE LAWYERS ARE TAUGHT TO COMMUNICATE WITH JURIES IN THE LANGUAGE THEY WOULD USE WITH THEIR FAMILIES AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE, HERMAN NOTES, “YOU CAN DO THAT AND BE ELOQUENT, YOU KNOW.” In the Vioxx case, Herman’s eventual settlement – which followed a number of trials and a year of negotiation – was reached when he and defense attorney Douglas Marvin hammered out the details on a napkin at a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

“After all that had come before, he made one call to his client, and I made a call to my group and said, ‘This is the figure,’” Herman recalls. “We never, ever had a cross word.”

Herman misses those days, when plaintiffs’ lawyers who had a problem with the defense team could walk over to their offices and work it out. One where defense lawyers would call Herman and say, “Russ, can we go to lunch?”

Today’s legal processes are driven too much by paperwork and an endless array of emails demanding immediate action, he believes.

“I’ll guarantee you there is not a lawyer who hasn’t received at 6 p.m. on a Friday some document that had to be answered on Monday or Tuesday,” Herman says. “Where it used to be, ‘Listen, I got your brief and it looked pretty good to me, but I’ve got a heck of a response and I’d like at least 10 days.’ And the opposing lawyer would say, ‘Sure.’”

After their first date, spent at an Italian restaurant discussing Shakespeare and history, Herman asked her to call when she arrived at her home in Baton Rouge so he’d know she was safe.

“I was tired,” she recalls, “but I picked up the phone and said, ‘I guess I’ll call him.’ And he said, ‘I’m glad you called: I’ve written this poem about you.’”

His words made “Roses are red, violets are blue” those of a schoolchild.

“It was beautiful,” Thompson says. “I’m such a voracious reader and words are so important to me that I felt if I were going to be with someone, I wanted it be someone who had deep and meaningful thoughts.

And I felt from that night forward, and I think he did, too, that it was just a matter of time.”

The poetry book wasn’t Herman’s first endeavor in creative writing. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he wrote two plays and a short story adapted for the television series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” He was also executive producer of actor and “Major Dad” star Gerald McRaney’s first movie, “Night of Bloody Horror.”

If it sounds like Herman never slows down, that’s not inaccurate, but he does spend more time doing what he loves in his Penthouse Aerie overlooking Lafayette Square, surrounded by books, music, art and with Sandra.

That environment fostered the Vioxx settlement Herman reached with Marvin, who was a wedding guest when Herman married his wife, Sandra Thompson, in 2008, following a courtship he chronicled in “The Topography of Life, Love and Travel,” a book of poetry and reminiscence.

Now in his late 70s, he can’t recall a time when he didn’t work and describes selling shoes for spending money while working on his undergraduate degree at Tulane University and earning $300 a month when he began practicing law at his father’s firm.

Thompson, a longtime resident of Baton Rouge, was the first Cabinet-level Secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism in the 1970s.

She founded and ran her own oilfield services company in the 1980s and returned to state government in the ‘90s to lead the multimillion-dollar Atchafalaya Basin program promoting Louisiana’s swamp wilderness.

“If I’ve turned out well, it’s because I always wanted to achieve to make my folks proud,” he says. “I never practiced law for money. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been successful, but I always wanted the hard case. I wanted the case nobody else would take. If they told me it was impossible, I loved it. It was one where I felt I was on the right side.”

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portation companies, hazardous worksites, negligent corporate practices and business disputes.

Throughout four decades in practice, Branson has simultaneously embraced regional and national leadership roles in political campaigns, organizations and causes. When the largest publicly funded hospital in North Texas faced a potentially catastrophic loss of federal funding following a series of high-profile regulatory and compliance failures, Branson had just been tapped to serve on the hospital’s board of directors, but within months, she was the elected chair of the board. That began a five-year commitment marked by long workweeks, in addition to the demands of her law practice. Her leadership during that crisis is credited with helping bring the hospital back into good standing and regaining the public’s trust.

Debbie Dudley Branson THE LAW OFFICES OF FRANK L. BRANSON (DALLAS)

DEBBIE DUDLEY BRANSON

BY KATRINA DEWEY

THE POWER AND THE RESPONSIBILITIES

that come with being a lawyer are practically hardwired into Debbie Dudley Branson’s DNA. The legal profession was her father’s calling and his father’s and his father’s. Going back three generations in rural Northeast Arkansas, each practiced law in a way that placed great importance on leadership, political involvement, education and community service.

Like them, Branson has dedicated her career to using her resources as a lawyer to make a difference in people’s lives. Her talent in the courtroom has helped build Dallas-based litigation boutique The Law Offices of Frank L. Branson into one of the most wellknown and respected plaintiff litigation firms in the Southwest. Along with her husband, renowned trial lawyer Frank L. Branson, her work has contributed to headline-grabbing verdicts on behalf of individuals injured by dangerous products, trucking and trans210

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When Covid-19 began to spread rapidly in early 2020, Branson was again called to serve, this time for a role on the Dallas County Covid-19 Task Force and its Public Health Committee, where she takes part in daily meetings and works with medical leaders to coordinate a multiagency response for one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Like her work in the courtroom on behalf of injured individuals, the common denominator is her recognition and embrace of the lawyer’s unique ability to make a difference in people’s lives.

Meanwhile, she continues to leverage her trial science and jury expertise to help level the playing field for individuals. She was part of the trial team that, last year, won a record $242M automotive product defect verdict.

Lawdragon: As the fourth generation of lawyers in your family, how did you decide to become a lawyer?

Debbie Dudley Branson: My decision to become a lawyer was really a practical choice. Having said that, I’ve always been proud to be a lawyer. I believe that practicing law is a privilege, and being a trial lawyer, very simply, means providing a level playing field in the courtroom for ordinary people.

I’ve been a lawyer for 40 years now. My father and his father and grandfather were lawyers. My husband is a lawyer, as is my sister and son-in-law. My children are both trained as lawyers, making them the fifth continuous generation in my family to be lawyers. Pretty cool! And it has been an absolute joy and privilege to practice law with Frank for so many years.

LD: What are some of the takeaways that you’ve learned in your career in law and public service?

PHOTO BY: JEREMY ENLOW

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DDB: I’ve learned that opportunities for leadership often arrive without warning. Anyone can make a difference if she responds to a genuine opportunity to find a solution to a problem – whether it’s yours or someone else’s. Over the years, I’ve concluded a few things – one of them is that men and women really think about things differently. I’ve learned that we, as women, can lead with quiet force, with integrity, with command of the subject matter, with lofty goals and with a smile!

I’ve confirmed that hard work is the only way to get things done. I know that we can learn from all sorts of people and in all sorts of circumstances. In terms of our moral compass, I’ve learned that we need to be consistent in doing the little things right to have any hope of doing the big things right. You’re ready to do what’s right when it really counts because you’ve done what’s right when it barely counted.

One of the most important things that I’ve learned is to be me as a lawyer. I think it’s very important to watch others and emulate those you admire, but when I started practicing law, the successful lawyers I watched were men. I thought I needed to be like them. Not so. I’m much more effective as a lawyer when I convey the fact that I am a lawyer who is a lady.

I also know that women’s experiences are sometimes like those of our male peers – and sometimes not.

And candidly, I think there is a huge advantage in the courtroom, and most anywhere, to having the benefit of all the experience we can muster.

At the end of the day, we have chosen a profession that allows – demands, really – that we spend our time reading, learning about other people’s lives, their needs and their screw-ups, thinking deeply, logically and creatively, and then persuading others about the rightness of our position. And most of the time, we get paid to do it. From a trial lawyer’s perspective, at the end of a case, we have often made a real difference in someone’s life. What could be better?

official – first as a prosecutor, then as a trial judge and finally as an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice. So I grew up in the thick of whatever Democratic politics were going on around the state. I’ve been to more Fourth of July fish fries than anyone should. I clearly remember going down to the Randolph County courthouse as a little girl in my pajamas to watch as votes were counted and tallied. I thought it was important and exciting then and still do.

My mother served on boards and taught Red Cross swimming lessons. My grandmother, who was the first licensed clinical psychologist in Arkansas, set up special-ed programs and did testing throughout the state.

My great-grandfather, Robert Dudley, literally rode a mule across the state in order to continue his education beyond ninth grade. He supported himself for two years while attending school. After graduation, he rode his mule back home and taught school for a number of years before he was elected Treasurer of Clay County, Ark. After deciding to become a lawyer, he could have easily “read law” and obtained his J.D. without going to law school. But he wanted a better education. He graduated from the only law school in Arkansas and was elected to the state legislature while there.

LD: What advice do you have for lawyers interested in public service?

DDB: Most of us get involved in the community because there is some need not being met. It may be for your business. It may be a service your child should have – or a program for the community’s children. It might be an issue or a candidate that captures your imagination. The goal is usually to better life in some manner. I am no different.

DDB: I’m from a family of doers. Their values and work ethics – their perseverance and commitment to improving themselves and the lives around them – were instilled in me at an early age.

There are so many opportunities to help. Sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone, really understand the work that needs to be done and just roll up your sleeves. I firmly believe that we have a responsibility to do just that. As I’ve said countless times, those of us who have the benefit of a good education; an honorable profession; and an income sufficient to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table and gas in the car have a special responsibility.

For me, this involvement has been an exceptionally rewarding part of my adult life.

I grew up in Pocahontas, Ark. – a bustling town of about 5,000 – and my family has always placed great importance on education and community service going back many generations. My dad was an elected

LD: You have blazed many trails in your career as a trial lawyer. What are some of the important lessons and advice you can share for lawyers just starting their litigation practices?

LD: How did your upbringing affect your career path, work ethic and professional values?

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500 DDB: There is a story that Leon Panetta tells that I like. It’s about a rabbi and a priest who decided to learn more about each other and to better understand one another through social interactions.

One evening, they attended a boxing match. As the fighters entered the ring, one of them made the sign of the cross. The rabbi asked the priest what it meant. He replied, “It doesn’t mean a damn thing if he can’t fight!” The moral of that story is that even with heroic hard work and a great jury, the underlying case matters. What we do – how we fight – also matters. I encourage lawyers to be daring, look at a case from different perspectives, be creative, be anything that will demonstrate integrity of purpose with consistency and credibility – and then listen some more.

Your reputation is critical. Who you work with is important. Walking into a courtroom in which the judge knows he can count on you to be an honorable professional makes a big difference. As Warren Buffett says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

The impression you and your team make on jurors is crucial. It serves you well to remember that jurors notice much more than what happens on the witness stand. The jury watches you, your clients and each of your staff – in and out of the courtroom. After a recent trial, I was reminded of this when each of the jurors I interviewed complimented the fluid, courteous, cohesive and professional – their words – way in which our trial team worked and interacted. Those observations impact your credibility.

They not only notice how you treat each other within your team but how you treat the Court and its entire staff. They notice you in the hallway, in the bathroom and in the garage. They notice if you help someone in the hallway looking for directions – or if you don’t.

All of these things factor into their evaluations of whether you’re a likeable, trustworthy and credible person/lawyer.

Jurors look for consistency. They want a presentation – a story – that makes sense. Again, after a recent trial, a common refrain from the jurors was that our story was consistent. The defendants threw out a number of theories, and in the end, none of them sold. Their credibility was diminished by doing so.

Successful lawyers know to let the witnesses tell their part of the story. Work on words, flow and communicating ideas. Do what you need to do to prove your

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case, make your record and then stop. I’ve heard so many jurors say that they “got it” long before a witness left the stand. You can often see their faces glaze over when they’ve had enough. I have heard on a number of occasions that jurors feel their intelligence is insulted when lawyers continue to make the same points over and over again.

Sequencing witnesses is important, too. Lots of schedules have to be managed during trial, but telling the story in a way that makes sense and delivers the most impact shouldn’t be underrated.

When considering your strategy, remember and honor the fact that our experiences and communities shape who we are. I review, over and over again, the information collected on each juror and use that information in determining how and what needs to be elicited from witnesses and, without fail, points for argument. It serves us well to remember that our lives are influenced by millions of events that interact in mysterious ways to form the basis of our opinions and decisions. Jurors don’t leave behind their training, their family experiences, their community experience, their adversities, their successes or their feelings about right and wrong as they deliberate.

All of these things matter. Pay attention to all the information you gather – and then listen and watch some more. Learning to really listen will enable you to actually hear.

Jurors want guidance on numbers for the damage issues. They may not accept them, but they want them.

Again, if you have earned credibility and trust by the end of trial, what you say matters.

LD: Your public service work is rarely relegated to passive involvement, and you often end up working in leadership roles on difficult projects. What was your most challenging role in this regard?

DDB: From a community-service perspective, my service at the Parkland Health & Hospital System has been the most meaningful to date. It was challenging – a truly arduous task.

I was appointed to be on the Parkland board of managers in February 2011, with the idea that it would be a commitment of 10 to 12 hours per month. I felt that was doable, it would be interesting work and provided an opportunity to do something particularly worthwhile. But three months later, the results of a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) survey and a threat that federal funding would be cut brought the hospital to its knees. When the previous chair stepped down, I was asked to consider replac-

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ing her. The only responsible answer was yes. To walk away from such an important institution in its darkest hour would simply have been wrong.

But those 10 to 12 hours per month turned into 60 or 70 hours per week. Because the C-suite was in such flux, my role as board chair morphed into something more akin to executive chair out of necessity. It was not the optimal role but a necessary one. There were many sleepless nights, vast amounts of time away from my practice and my family, and lots of new lines on my face. I had to make many really difficult decisions and had to have plenty of painful conversations. But I also came to appreciate the amazing people who comprise Parkland – with their awesome dedication, passion, commitment and plain old hard work devoted to the hundreds of thousands of Parkland patients.

During my time on the Parkland board, I learned a lot about myself, while drinking from a firehose learning the intricacies and complexities of a large safety-net hospital. My core values were important.

The necessity of stepping up and standing tall was reinforced. As board chair, I was under constant scrutiny, and many times, it wasn’t pleasant. The notion of the importance of diverse perspectives in leadership was reinforced. The value of being prepared – something that’s imperative for a good trial lawyer – was reinforced.

And as important as anything else, the power of relationships was demonstrated. Without diminishing one moment of hard work performed during the crisis, the relationships created and built with regulators were critical. Those relationships allowed us to earn credibility and trust – which were sorely lacking.

I also learned how difficult it is to restore public trust once it’s been broken, as well as how vital each position of leadership is. It’s the “weakest link in the chain” theory. I saw what happened when there are breakdowns. I concluded that both our legal clients and hospital patients inhabit the same sacred space.

They expect, and rightfully so, that we will go the extra mile to make certain their interests are protected.

I know that neither backing up or backing down are options when the going gets tough. My parents taught me a long time ago that you don’t quit something you’ve started.

My legal training and background were invaluable – in spite of the fact that lawyer jokes are rampant in a hospital setting! The ability to ask lots of questions,

gather information, analyze it and determine how to use it effectively was useful. The goal, both as a lawyer and as board chair, is to find solutions to problems.

While I know leadership matters, it takes the whole village to change culture and turn a ship. No matter your role, you are important.

The good news is that Parkland completed rigorous corrective procedures, which provided a road map for sustainable improvements in the areas of quality of care, patient safety and regulatory compliance. We moved into a state-of-the-art hospital. We hired a CEO who has proved to be top-notch. There is a continuing partnership with a world-class medical school, and there is incredible support from the community.

There will always be challenges, and there will surely be mistakes and missteps, but Parkland is again showing its compassion, its competence and its leadership during the Covid-19 crisis in Dallas County. For that, I am grateful and proud.

LD: You’ve won record verdicts and taken on immense challenges in your career. What motivates you at this point in your career?

DDB: What has motivated me and what continues to motivate me are a strong work ethic, a solid desire to tackle tasks with capability and competence, and an ultimate goal to make some difference, even to a single person.

Every single one of us is defined by the choices we make, the obstacles we surmount, the dreams we achieve, the relationships we have and maybe by the goals we don’t quite reach. How we choose to handle those moments is what makes us.

I am a wife, mother, lawyer – and most importantly – a grandmother. I am the product of a small Arkansas town and its public schools who has had the good fortune to see and do more things than I knew possible. I love this time in my life. I belong to a generation of empowered, mature women who have experience, education, health, economic resources and information. We’re strong. We’re committed.

We know how to get things done.

It’s important to reach out and back to help others move forward. As women, we have not only the opportunity but the responsibility to add our viewpoints, our wisdom and our voices to whatever we are engaged in. As long as I can contribute, I will. It doesn’t have to be a big thing – just a good thing.

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Kathleen Nastri

Leigh O’Dell

KOSKOFF KOSKOFF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

Robert Nelson

Steven Offutt

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

WAIS VOGELSTEIN BALTIMORE

Marie Ng

Ann Oldfather

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

OLDFATHER LAW FIRM LOUISVILLE, KY.

Minh Nguyen

Jack Olender*

NGUYEN LAWYERS LONG BEACH, CALIF.

JACK OLENDER LAW FIRM WASHINGTON, D.C.

Darren Nicholson

Jami Oliver

BURNS CHAREST DALLAS

OLIVER LAW OFFICES DUBLIN, OHIO

Nanci Nishimura

David Olsen

COTCHETT PITRE BURLINGAME, CALIF.

DEWSNUP KING SALT LAKE CITY

Harold Nix

Christopher Otorowski

NIX PATTERSON DAINGERFIELD, TEXAS

OTOROWSKI MORROW BAINBRIDGE, WASH.

Leslie Nixon

Chris J. Panatier

NIXON VOGELMAN MANCHESTER, N.H.

SIMON GREENSTONE PANATIER DALLAS

Victoria Nugent

Brian Panish

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

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Nicholas Papain

Thomas Penfield

SULLIVAN PAPAIN NEW YORK

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

Mike Papantonio*

Cheryl Perkins

LEVIN PAPANTONIO PENSACOLA, FLA.

WHETSTONE PERKINS COLUMBIA, S.C.

Tej Paranjpe

Craig Peters

PMR LAW HOUSTON

ALTAIR LAW SAN FRANCISCO

Michelle Parfitt

Kathleen Flynn Peterson*

ASHCRAFT & GEREL WASHINGTON, D.C.

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

Lorraine Parker

Rebecca Phillips

PARKER LIPMAN DENVER

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

D’Juana Parks

Roberta Pichini

PROVOST UMPHREY BEAUMONT, TEXAS

FELDMAN SHEPHERD PHILADELPHIA

C. Cary Patterson

Frank Pitre

NIX PATTERSON TEXARKANA, TEXAS

COTCHETT PITRE BURLINGAME, CALIF.

Jane Paulson

James Pizzirusso

PAULSON COLETTI PORTLAND, ORE.

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

Brandon Peak

Cole Portis

BUTLER WOOTEN COLUMBUS, GA.

BEASLEY ALLEN ATLANTA

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Andrew Yaffa GROSSMAN ROTH (CORAL GABLES, FLA.)

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ANDREW YAFFA IF YOU WALK INTO THE OFFICE OF ANDREW

Yaffa, the first thing you will notice is the collection of photos. Faces of people young and old, from myriad backgrounds, all with one thing in common: They came to Yaffa for help at the worst times of their lives.

And he delivered.

A highly effective advocate for plaintiffs, Yaffa has personally won over $500M for his clients, in cases that range from medical malpractice to product liability to personal injury and catastrophic death.

“Every picture has a story that goes with it,” says Yaffa of Grossman Roth. “It’s the fight to help these people that keeps me going.”

His father is a surgeon, and he almost went to medical school himself. He pivoted at the last moment to law school, but maintained his interest in medicine by diving into malpractice suits.

In a sign of the type of respect that his approach to the practice engenders, Yaffa regularly lectures to doctors and other health care professionals on med-mal cases.

“I often tell nurses and physicians when I’m speaking to them: I would much rather prevent a malpractice from occurring than get new cases in, because the whole key is making this world a safer place.”

In a string of high-profile cases in his home state of Florida, he represented a handful of families whose children had been forgotten and died in overheated vans during day care. He was also involved in cracking down on what USA Today described as “medical tourism,” with shoddy plastic surgery clinics causing damage and even death to patients.

Currently in his cross-hairs are a network of bogus medical clinics touting miracle cures via unproven uses of stem cells, with several patients suffering complete blindness after falling victim to the claims.

Yaffa’s effectiveness is underscored by his humility, which he maintains despite being increasingly recognized as one of Florida’s top tier trial lawyers. Among his many and growing accolades, Yaffa is a member of The International Academy of Trial Lawyers and of the 2020 Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers.

Lawdragon: Will you walk us through your career trajectory, Andy? How did you decide to go to law school, and what happened next?

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

BY ALISON PREECE Andrew Yaffa: It’s crazy, but this is the only job I’ve ever had. I’ve worked with Stuart [Grossman] and Neal [Roth] my entire career.

I was pre-med. My father is a general and vascular surgeon. For as long as I can remember, my dream was to follow in his footsteps and work in the operating room. As I was getting ready to graduate college, I took the MCATs and the LSATs within a couple of months of each other. My father told me at the time that he’s not sure medicine is the same as when he went to school, and he would think twice about going into the profession.

I ended up going to law school with the specific intent of defending doctors at hospitals, because I had seen the worst of what medical malpractice litigation can bring. There were two suits I didn’t think had merit that were brought against people I knew and loved, and it was heartbreaking to see what it did. When I started clerking for Stuart and Neal, my first year of law school, it was initially with the intent of defending these physicians in hospitals that I thought were being sued without merit, without an appropriate basis.

I fell in love with the practice. I saw the tremendous amount of agony that some of these physicians and hospitals were causing. These were righteous cases that would lead to very interesting dinner conversation.

I was able to get the best of all worlds, helping people who got hurt, while still working in the medical field, which I so desperately wanted to be a part of for as long as I can remember.

LD: Beyond your medical malpractice practice, you’ve handled some incredible personal injury cases, several of which have resulted in the prevention of future harm. Can we talk about the case against Ag-Mart Produce? You represented a child who was born without limbs, as a result of his mother’s work in pesticidesprayed tomato fields.

AY: That case will always especially stand out. If you were to walk in my office, you would see photographs across the top of the wall of Carlito [Candelario-Herrera, the plaintiff in the case], as he’s grown. It’s still amazing to me that we were able to do what we did for him at the time, and he’s growing into a great young man.

LD: It’s no exaggeration to say you changed the course of his life with that case. It also exposed poor working conditions in the agricultural industry, as detailed in the 2011 book, “Tomatoland.”

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Derek Potts

Troy Rafferty

POTTS LAW FIRM HOUSTON

LEVIN PAPANTONIO PENSACOLA, FLA.

Scott Powell

Marcus Raichle Jr.

HARE WYNN BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

MAUNE RAICHLE ST. LOUIS, MO.

Joseph Power

Audrey Perlman Raphael

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

LEVY KONIGSBERG NEW YORK

Thomas Power

Jeffrey Rasansky

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

RASANSKY LAW FIRM DALLAS

Gary Praglin

Ramon Rasco

COTCHETT PITRE SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

PODHURST ORSECK MIAMI

Jessica Klarer Pride

Rahul Ravipudi

PRIDE LAW SAN DIEGO

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

Mark Proctor

Stephen Raynes

LEVIN PAPANTONIO PENSACOLA, FLA.

RAYNES MCCARTY PHILADELPHIA

George “Tex” Quesada

Carey Reilly

SOMMERMAN MCCAFFITY DALLAS

KOSKOFF KOSKOFF BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

Kevin F. Quinn

Melissa Rhea

THORSNES BARTOLOTTA SAN DIEGO

JACK OLENDER LAW FIRM WASHINGTON, D.C.

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AY: That book makes me blush.

LD: What part? When they say you have movie-star good looks?

AY: [Laughing] LD: I thought it was a fascinating profile of you. I like how the author describes how the case came through a recommendation, and that when you took on the case, the plaintiff and his family “had just caught what might have been the first break they’d ever received in their hard travelled lives,” because, “If you’re injured in a car accident or hurt on the job or the victim of a negligent physician, you can do no better than getting Andrew Yaffa to represent you.”

AY: Oh no, don’t tell me you’re reading directly from it now.

LD: Indulge me for a moment. It’s just so good.

“In his early 40s at the time of Carlito’s birth in 2004, Yaffa was widely recognized as one of the top lawyers in the state. He’s won many multi-million dollar settlements and cases tried before some of Florida’s toughest judges. One of Yaffa’s competitors in Florida described him to me in an email as a great lawyer, a solid person, equity partner in a fabulous law firm, creative, innovative, bright, ethical, the works.”

And here’s where it gets really good: “Yaffa is tall and has the sort of telegenic good looks that make him a shoe-in to play the role of a leading man if someone ever does a movie version of his life as a crusading lawyer.”

AY: What would happen if I just hung up on you?

LD: I’m almost done torturing you. It gets better. “His short, dark hair is brushed back and moussed neatly in place. And I caught the merest whiff of cologne.

His handsome face is tempered by a kind, Midwestern earnestness. He’s actually a Virginia native. Yaffa establishes an instant rapport, speaking with a soft and wavering voice.”

This next part gave me chills: “When I asked him why he chose to take on such a long shot of a case as that of Carlito’s, he eyed me in the way he might stare at an uncooperative witness and said, ‘I see a lot in my work, but when I see a child or a family that’s been harmed or in distress, I don’t need a whole lot more motivation than that.’”

AY: Well that last part is absolutely true. The rest…. [laughing]. Humility is a huge part of who I am. I never give myself the type of accolades or credit that this gentleman decided to give me here. Or others try to give me in other areas. So it’s humbling.

LD: The truth is, with the work that you’re doing, you really do have a chance to make an outsized impact, which you have done. You changed Carlito’s life, gave his family some measure of justice for their suffering, and beyond that, you saved countless others from a similar harm by exposing the dangers of working with pesticides. Your career tells the tale of how much a lawyer can really do.

AY: I like to believe that is true…. I try to tell myself that, because it’s really easy to get lost in the minutia and the day-to-day fighting that goes on, because there’s a ton of it. It can be difficult to do what we do and stay positive. To see the big picture, if you will, as opposed to getting lost amongst the trees.

LD: Yes, how do you do that? How do you keep showing up for these clients that are in the worst times of their lives? Is it the results that keeps you going?

AY: Honestly, I don’t know that I can say it better than that author. You show me a child or a family that’s suffering, and I don’t need any more motivation. It’s the fight to help these people that keeps me going.

Believe it or not, as much as I love helping them, once a case resolves, whether it’s by way of jury verdict, or God willing, a huge settlement, I go into a post-result funk, if you will. I get depressed, because I need something else to sink my teeth into, to fight for, to focus on.

There’s a deep-seated passion in me to fight for those in need and to help them. When I don’t have that, I really find myself lost, for lack of a better word.

LD: Interesting, so it’s the process itself that keeps you going. It’s not even the results, necessarily. It’s the desire to get there.

AY: Correct. To make their lives better, to ease that financial burden, to get them the care that they need.

We can’t fix the vast majority. In fact, I would tell you 100 percent of the cases we handle, we can’t fix what’s been done or what’s been lost. So if I can bring any sense of justice, any sense of peace, where these people can attempt to move on, then I’ve done my job.

LD: With Carlito’s case, how did you decide to take it on? And when did you realize this was bigger than just one family’s suffering?

AY: I knew as soon as I met this young boy that this was a case I had to handle. I’ll never forget pulling up to the trailer. There were mattresses that were standing up against the wall, there were strings going across the room with meat hanging on the strings, no air conditioning, no refrigeration. I don’t think they had any power in there.

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YOU SHOW ME A CHILD OR A FAMILY THAT’S SUFFERING, AND I DON’T NEED ANY MORE MOTIVATION. IT’S THE FIGHT TO HELP THESE PEOPLE THAT KEEPS ME GOING. Francisca, his mother, was outside of the trailer with Carlito. Carlito was sitting in one of these little baby bouncy seats, this beautiful little boy, and there were flies buzzing around. There was a trailer park dog that had recently had a litter of pups, and one of the pups came over and nipped at the child. He started to wail, and that was just a picture that I couldn’t swallow. This little boy couldn’t move away. He didn’t have the ability to swat at the dog. He couldn’t even swat at a mosquito, because he didn’t have any limbs. I felt viscerally in that moment that this child would never be able to help himself. And I knew, if we can draw a link between the exposure that his parents and everybody else had in the fields, and this child being born with tetra-amelia, then I could help this young boy and his family.

The more we dug into these farming practices, the more we found a picture of modern-day slavery. That’s what it is. It’s not limited to the pesticides that are wellknown to cause birth defects. There were all types of other ailments. It went far and wide into kidnapping and prostitution. All kinds of awful things that unfortunately are happening right under our noses in modern-day society.

LD: And right here in the U.S. AY: That’s right, they were working in a farm in Immokalee, Fla., for a large company called Ag-Mart, which was the largest processor of cherry tomatoes in the United States at the time. Just like most of these migrant workers, they were smuggled in illegally through Mexico and Texas. They’re given fake IDs through coyotes, smuggled in, and charged for transportation and housing.

They’re brought in, basically as indentured servants because they’re working off this debt, which continues to mount faster than they can pay it down. So they’re never free. And they’re terrified because if they speak up or do anything to advocate for themselves, their safety, or the safety of loved ones, they risk being arrested and deported. This was a threat that was commonly used by the farm bosses: “Keep your mouth shut and move on, otherwise something bad will happen.”

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LD: Such a horrifying situation, particularly given the scope. You must have had such incredible pushback as you started to dig into these things. How did you even begin to tackle something of that magnitude?

YF: We took it step by step, knowing we had an important case, and knowing we needed to find the best angle to approach it. In the U.S., as you know, we have these workers’ compensation laws in place to protect employers for injuries that happen to their employees while on the job. As I began to dig into this, I started to fear that workers’ compensation might be a bar to my ability to help this family. A light bulb went off when I realized that this child was not an employee.

Although this parents couldn’t sue, because they were employees, I could certainly sue on his behalf.

LD: That’s a smart move.

AY: I tried to take a very complicated case and make it simple. Can I prove that the mother was exposed to these specific pesticides, which are known to cause birth defects, at a critical time in her pregnancy? Can I prove definitively that was the cause of Carlito’s missing limbs?

I asked myself, “How can I make this simple?” I thought, why not just bring it as a straight premises liability cause of action? That is, the property owner, or the people in control of the farms, created a zone of danger that was foreseeable to cause harm or damages….

They had to be aware that women were working in the fields, and that some of these women may well either become or be pregnant. So they’ve got to put in appropriate safeguards to make sure that these women are not exposed to the pesticides that are known to cause birth defects.

I brought that cause of action on behalf of the baby, and despite their efforts to get it dismissed, on workers’ compensation and other grounds, we got passed that motion. Next, I brought in a world-renowned geneticist to help me prove that this was not a genetic cause, the child genetically was perfect, and so exposure from the environment at a very critical time in his development caused him to not have arms and legs.

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David Rheingold

Larry Rogers Jr.

RHEINGOLD GIUFFRA NEW YORK

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

Joseph Rice

Larry Rogers Sr. *

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

Amanda Riddle

Daniel Rose

COREY DANKO GIBBS CHICO, CALIF.

KREINDLER & KREINDLER NEW YORK

David Ring

Susan Corner Rosen

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

ROSEN LAW FIRM CHARLESTON, S.C.

Lyssa Roberts

Neal Roth

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

GROSSMAN ROTH CORAL GABLES, FLA.

Cindy Robinson

Steve Rotman

TREMONT SHELDON BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

HAUSFELD BOSTON

Daniel Robinson

Ben Rubinowitz

ROBINSON CALCAGNIE NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF.

GAIR GAIR NEW YORK

Mark Robinson

Douglas Saeltzer

ROBINSON CALCAGNIE NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF.

WALKUP MELODIA SAN FRANCISCO

Sarah Rogers

Regan Safier

CRAIN BROGDON ROGERS DALLAS

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

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500 We also found three or four other women who had given birth to children who were either stillborn or born with similar deformities, or other types of defects, who were exposed in the same fashion as Carlito’s mother.

Once I’d put those pieces in place, it became an allout war for me to go ahead and push. It was a very straight line, and in the end it became a very easy case to prove, especially when, a), you had people on the other side that were very poor record custodians, and b), there was so much prejudice and dirt on the other side in terms of how these people were treated, with the smuggling and indentured servitude. It had all of the pieces needed to paint a vivid picture.

The company tried to say that they warned these workers about the exposure, but most of them lacked a second-grade education. They couldn’t read, they could not communicate and additionally, the warnings that were given languages they did not speak….

It was a complete mess.

The communication just wasn’t there. The warning wasn’t there. Still to this day, I’m very passionate about that case and wanting to help that family. I was ecstatic to be able to help them.

LD: I love that you still have Carlito’s picture on your wall, too. Are there any other clients or former clients up there?

AY: I have a picture up of every plaintiff I’ve ever worked with.

LD: Wow, that’s amazing. Must be a full wall at this point.

AY: If you walked into my office, you would see so many pictures. Each picture has a story that goes with it.

LD: What’s catching your eye right now?

AY: Haile Brockington. She was a two-year-old child who died when she was forgotten in a day care van on a swelteringly hot day.

LD: How awful.

AY: I went through a cycle of these cases, where I had five or six children that were forgotten in the vans in the day care setting. They baked to death in the Florida sun. That was a big focus of mine for a while, and we tried to get special laws passed that would require an alarm to mandate the driver walk through the van to make sure all the children were removed, in order to turn the alarm off. Sadly that amazing opportunity was lost because of political

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infighting amongst the Democrats and the Republicans at the state level.

LD: I know you’re involved now in some really interesting litigation surrounding stem cells. How did you get involved in that work?

AY: I sort of stumbled my way into the stem cell litigation. One of my partners on the West coast got a phone call from a referral lawyer as a potential medical malpractice client, and the lady who had age-related macular degeneration, which is a disease where you basically lose your central vision. There’s really no cure for this. There’s a couple of drugs they can give you to try and stop the progression, if you will. But if the drugs don’t work, there’s really nothing they can do. If the disease continues to progress, you may lose your central vision, but you’ll always have your peripheral vision.

This one lady tried the traditional therapy and it didn’t work, and she ended up falling victim to this adipose stem cell therapy, which is stem cells that are captured from your fat. Adipose tissue is fat tissue. There are corporations that are developing this practice around the world.

These companies are touting modern-day snake oil.

They are capitalizing on the use of the term “stem cells,” which is exciting, cutting edge and truly may hold the key to curing many illnesses for which there is currently no cure, but we are not there yet. There’s a lot of work and research that still has to be done.

You can get stem cells from your bone marrow, you can get stem cells from the umbilical cord and many other sources. When my wife and I had our children, we subscribed to something called the Cord Blood Registry. They get blood from the umbilical cord, harvest the stem cells, and store it. God forbid you or a loved one develop some kind of cancer down the road, maybe science would have progressed and they can use those stem cells to treat you or a family member.

You can get these stem cells from bone marrow, the umbilical cord, fetuses, embryos, you can get it from any type of muscle tissue. You can get it from fat.

There are many clinics and corporations that are doing these mini-liposuction procedures and basically using digestive enzymes to allegedly isolate these stem cells, and then they’re touting these stem cells as being the end all and be all cure for everything you might have. They are taking advantage of those that are most desperate and most vulnerable!

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In this case, they told our client that this would cure her macular degeneration. For $15,000, we will get your fat, harvest the stem cells, and we will inject it into your eyes. That’s exactly what they did, and this poor lady ended up going totally blind.

She ended up being one of three that were treated the exact same day at the exact same clinic by the exact same people, and all three ladies ended up going totally blind. Two of the three ended up contacting me. One of the ladies ended up losing the eyeballs themselves because they began to wither.

LD: That is horrifying.

AY: The story gets even crazier. As a result of those cases, the New England Journal of Medicine did an article on these women, and I was contacted by yet a fourth lady treated at the same clinic. Even from France, she was duped exactly the same way. They are advertising their services as a clinical trial on a website that is owned and operated by the National Institute of Health. It’s called ClinicalTrials.Gov. They get listed on there, and just by being there, they’ve got this air of authenticity.

This lady from France found the clinical trial on that website. She flew in from France, had the same procedure, and she lost her vision in the one eye that was injected as well.

LD: This is so scary, because as a layperson, not overly familiar with stem cells, I just know they are seen as this potential miracle cure. The science needs to evolve, but it would certainly be easy to be drawn in by the promises being made, especially, as you say, with the authenticity of a site like that.

AY: That’s exactly right. After those ladies, I got contacted by yet another that was treated through a California defendant in Georgia. Her name is Doris Tyler, and like the others, she had age-related macular degeneration. It wasn’t responsive to the medicine, and a family friend gave her a book called the Stem Cell Revolution.

There’s also a website called Stem Cell Revolution, and if you visit it, you’ll see something called the Cell Surgical Network.

Now, Cell Surgical Network is the brainchild of the founders, Drs. Elliott Lander and Mark Berman. Lander is a urologist, and Berman is a plastic surgeon.

These guys have decided that they are going to train and create a network of physicians around the world, and develop a clinical trial that will study a variety of different things. If you look at this website, you’ll see

there’s nothing they won’t treat. Urology, cardiac, orthopedics, neurology. Parkinson’s. Autoimmune, ophthalmology. Everything. Crohn’s disease. Lupus.

They talk about treating things for which there is no cure. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Any problem you might have….

LD: That’s infuriating, they’re preying on desperate people.

AY: It really is. So Doris Tyler got this book and she reached out to these people, and she was told that the closest clinic in their “Physician Network,” to where she lived, with somebody that could treat her macular degeneration, was in Georgia. This clinic is run by Dr. Jamie Walraven, an emergency room doctor who got tired of emergency room medicine and not making enough money. So she opened up the Stem Cell Center of Georgia. She went and took the course put on by Drs. Berman and Landers, and became the local affiliate.

Unfortunately for our client, the protocol, if you will, had been changed, but not communicated. Others in the network had removed intravitreal injection, which is where they take a needle and stick it into your eyes, from the protocol several months before my client was injected. They had stopped doing it because of the other cases we handled in south Florida where these women went blind. But because there was this huge breakdown in communication, the people in Georgia weren’t told to stop doing this, so Doris Tyler ended up going blind as well. She went blind as a result of injections into her eyes that she never should have received!

LD: This is maybe a ridiculous question, but have they ever done this successfully?

AY: No. LD: That is just so frustrating, that this would be able to keep happening.

AY: Yep. It will continue happening unless and until the FDA and the other policing bodies crack down and make this illegal.

LD: That, and the good work you’re doing in the courts.

AY: We are certainly working on it. There was an injunction that was brought against the Florida defendant in federal court, and the court presently, got them to shut down. So in Florida, we have made substantial progress in preventing this from ever happening again.

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Patrick Salvi

Richard Schoenberg

SALVI SCHOSTOK CHICAGO

WALKUP MELODIA SAN FRANCISCO

Patrick Salvi II

Susan Schwartz

SALVI SCHOSTOK CHICAGO

CORBOY & DEMETRIO CHICAGO

S. Shay Samples

Thomas Scolaro

HARE WYNN BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

LEESFIELD SCOLARO MIAMI

Elise Sanguinetti

Carmen Scott

ARIAS SANGUINETTI EMERYVILLE, CALIF.

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

Diana Santa Maria

Christian Searcy*

LAW OFFICES OF DIANA SANTA MARIA DAVIE, FLA.

SEARCY DENNEY WEST PALM, FLA.

John “Jack” Scarola

Ibiere Seck

SEARCY DENNEY WEST PALM, FLA.

SECK LAW LOS ANGELES

Darin Schanker

Christopher Seeger

BACHUS & SCHANKER DENVER

SEEGER WEISS RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.

Fred Schenk

Scott Segal

CASEY GERRY SAN DIEGO

SCOTT SEGAL CHARLESTON, W.V.

Scott Schlesinger

Joseph Sellers

SCHLESINGER LAW OFFICES FT. LAUDERDALE

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Derek Sells

Roman Silberfeld*

THE COCHRAN FIRM PHILADELPHIA

ROBINS KAPLAN LOS ANGELES

Anthony Shapiro

James Sill

HAGENS BERMAN SEATTLE

FULMER SILL OKLAHOMA CITY

Adam Shea

Chris Simmons

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

LYONS & SIMMONS DALLAS

Loretta Sheehan*

John Simmons

DAVIS LEVIN HONOLULU

SIMMONS HANLY ALTON, ILL.

Robert Sheldon

Jeffrey Simon

TREMONT SHELDON BRIDGEPORT, CONN.

SIMON GREENSTONE PANATIER DALLAS

Stephen Sheller

Linda Singer

SHELLER PHILADELPHIA

MOTLEY RICE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Carol Nelson Shepherd

Thomas Siracusa

FELDMAN SHEPHERD PHILADELPHIA

POWER ROGERS CHICAGO

William Sieben

Hezekiah Sistrunk, Jr.

SCHWEBEL GOETZ MINNEAPOLIS

THE COCHRAN FIRM ATLANTA

Philip Sieff

Adam Slater

ROBINS KAPLAN MINNEAPOLIS

MAZIE SLATER ROSELAND, N.J.

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was struck. The client had lived in the United States for less than six months.

Thirteen years later, in 2007, Tom Power won $13M on behalf of a boy whose physician failed to test him for tuberculosis after complaints of a fever and lethargy. The child developed meningitis and suffered brain damage.

In 2020, he secured a settlement in the amount of $13M for a widow and her four children after a dump truck collided with the car being driven by her husband, which was stopped in a lane of traffic due to a flat tire. The decedent died instantly. This was a record settlement in Lake County, Ill. Power began his career in the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, where he worked for seven years and handled more than 300 bench and jury trials, eventually joining the elite murder task force unit.

Tom Power POWER ROGERS (CHICAGO)

TOM POWER

BY JAMES LANGFORD

THE JOBS TOM POWER HELD AS A TEEN

offered him more than just cash to buy gas.

They were early installments on potential career paths.

One, fueling planes at Chicago’s Midway Airport, reflected a longtime fascination with flying and a dream of becoming an airline pilot. The other, a part-time gig in the file room at Chicago’s Criminal Courts building, gave Power the opportunity to watch criminal trials and honed his interest in becoming a trial lawyer – the profession he would choose after abandoning an aviation major at Southern Illinois University.

He’s now a personal injury partner at Power Rogers, the firm founded by his brother, renowned trial lawyer Joseph Power Jr. Tom Power’s specialties include product liability, automobile and construction negligence and medical malpractice. In 1994, the siblings won the largest knee-injury verdict in Indiana history, $1.5M, for a Polish immigrant whose disabled truck 226

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“It’s the only place I applied for a job at the end of my law school career because I wanted to be a trial lawyer, and I knew that the only place you could get to try a lot of cases was in the criminal area,” Power says.

The experience proved invaluable.

“In the public defender’s office, you don’t get to pick your cases. You get your assigned cases, they’re yours, and you have to try them,” he says. “It’s very challenging. When you go into a courtroom, the judge is against you, the jury is against you, the clerks are against you, the victims, the police officers, the States Attorneys and the sheriffs, everybody is against you, and it’s just you and your client.”

Lawdragon: It’s hard work that criminal defense lawyers do, and so often under-appreciated. My hat’s off to you, especially for being able to do it that long, because you have to keep caring and the odds are against you every single time.

Thomas Power: I enjoyed that aspect of it. Once you try a lot of cases that are tough like that, you’re very confident when you go to trial with a good case. But every case I ever tried, I always thought I had a chance regardless. If you are not optimistic and confident, the jury will notice and it will affect your case.

LD: Tell me about your first trial as a public defender.

TP: It was a bench trial, and the client was charged with eluding the police. It was my first day on the job, but I was handling the case by myself. I ended up getting a “not guilty” verdict because at the time the statute required the cars to be marked squad cars and it wasn’t a marked squad car, so I focused on that point. I started out well even though it was an insignificant case.

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

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LD: Are there other cases from your time as a public defender that stand out in your memory?

TP: One that I’ll never forget is a case that I lost, a murder case. I had a client who was 17 and, looking at the police report, the physical evidence and what the witnesses had to say, I thought it didn’t look good for him. Typically, if you had a tough case to try like that, you might take a bench trial because if you lost, the judge might not impose as long a sentence as after a jury trial. I talked to my client, gave him the option. He chose a bench trial; the judge had indicated he’d give him 30 years if he chose a bench trial and at the time, defendants would serve about half of their sentence.

Now, they have to serve almost all their time.

Then we went to trial and midway through the trial, when I was cross examining the witness, I was shocked because I thought for the first time, “This kid’s not guilty.” I was convinced that he was not guilty, and I really felt bad for him. If we’d taken a jury, I have no doubt I would’ve won it. The witness didn’t hold up on cross examination, but the judge found him guilty anyway. What happened next made it even worse. He ended up giving him 40 years, instead of 30. That really angered me, and I let the judge know it. I’ll never forget that case.

LD: How did you end up moving into private practice?

TP: At the time, I had four children and I decided that I needed to try to make some money, so I came on with Joe. I was lucky enough to have a brother who is a prominent attorney and had a successful law practice and was willing to take me on. In addition to Joe and myself, my sister, Margaret, and my brother Billy were practicing attorneys. So is one of my sons.

My father was chief judge in the criminal court for a number of years.

LD: What was the transition like?

TP: It was a change: Civil laws are different than criminal laws, and the case law is different, too, so there’s a lot to catch up on. As far as the trial work, though, it’s largely the same: It’s based on evidence, rules of evidence, being persuasive, being able to crossexamine and put witnesses on.

What was great about the experience with the public defender’s office is that I got so much cross examination experience with not only trials, but hearings, because they aren’t handled by attaching deposition testimony.

When you have a motion to quash or motion to suppress, you’re putting live witnesses on. You get a

great deal of cross-examination experience there, which I have found helpful in the civil area, too. I was very confident because of my experience, but again, it took a while to learn the civil rules and the case law.

It’s more complicated than it is in the criminal area.

Your demeanor on trial needs to be different in a civil case. You have to have a softer demeanor in civil.

LD: What do you like about your practice, helping people who’ve been badly injured?

TP: What I like the most is the satisfaction that I provide for my clients. I’ve had clients who have really suffered, perhaps because of the physical limitations after an injury or the loss of a loved one who was the breadwinner. The main objective in those cases is to make sure that they’re secure for the rest of their life financially. I get a lot of satisfaction out of making sure that they’re happy and when they tell me if I helped change their life. We often have clients who are minors, and we have to make sure that down the road, if you secure a substantial settlement or verdict for them, that nobody is in there trying to take their money from them.

LD: That’s such an important part of it. You want to win the settlement or the verdict, but it’s crucial to make sure it’s secure.

TP: Exactly. We’ve seen so many cases when people will just get the money, millions of dollars, and then it’s gone within five years. People come in that are now their best friends and they give sob stories to them and they help them out. Or they go into a business that they have no business going into, where they don’t know what they’re doing. That’s what I try to advise my clients, to protect their money for the future.

LD: I know over the years you’ve done at least a couple of cases with your brother. What’s that like?

TP: I’ve never learned more from anybody in my career than I have my brother. He’s phenomenal; he thinks on a different level. As far as trying cases with him, it’s just amazing to watch how he works it up and his strategy. There’s no one better at picking a jury than he is. He reads people like nobody else can.

His strategic capability is amazing, too. In one case we were trying, we had both a negligence and a product liability theory, and the defense was defending the negligence more than the products part of the case. Then in the middle of the case Joe switched and concentrated more on the products part of it and the defense didn’t see it coming. By the end of the week, the defense was begging him to settle it.

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of thing happen to them makes it feel like I’m now no longer powerless to do something about it,” Searcy explains. “It’s very fulfilling to me.”

Embarking on his career, ironically, meant going against explicit advice from his father, himself a trial lawyer in Jacksonville, Fla. “He told me, ‘Chris, whatever you do, don’t become a trial lawyer,’” Searcy recalls. “But I worked for him a couple of summers, and I noticed that Dad and the other plaintiff trial lawyers were a whole lot more fun to be around than most grownups.”

So Searcy decided to adopt that career track, at least temporarily.

He never got off of it, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class from Stetson University College of Law and becoming at age 29 the youngest lawyer in the U.S. to win a $1M verdict in a single personal-injury case in 1977.

Christian Searcy SEARCY DENNEY (WEST PALM BEACH, FLA)

CHRISTIAN SEARCY

BY JAMES LANGFORD

SIXTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE CAR

crash that killed Christian Searcy’s brother and he can still describe the details as though it were yesterday: The sudden, violent impact; the family’s Cadillac Fleetwood spinning crazily around; and checking the pulse of his older sister, who had been thrown to the curb.

He was just 12 years old that June day in 1960, young enough that he didn’t follow the details of the litigation that followed but old enough that what happened would drive a fierce determination to obtain justice for his clients in a record-setting career as a trial lawyer.

“I was the oldest brother, and my dad worked all the time so it was my job to take care of my brothers and sisters,” says Searcy. “I know, intellectually, that as a 12-year-old kid sitting in the car there was nothing that I could have done. Still, to this day, I feel ashamed and I feel guilty that I failed to protect my little brother.”

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The amounts have only grown higher since. Now president of the law firm that bears his name, Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley, he has amassed accolades including the War Horse Award from the Southern Trial Lawyers Association and the prestigious Perry Nichols Award from the Florida Academy of Trial Lawyers. Searcy is a Lawdragon Legend and in our esteemed Hall of Fame.

He has also served as president of the International Academy of Trial Layers, an invitation-only group limited to just 500 members worldwide.

When he reflects on his career, Searcy said, the cases that stand out are largely tragedies, horrible life-changing events in which “I’ve had the good fortune to be able to help other people.”

One was the death of 6-year-old Jasmine Jenkins in a car crash in West Palm Beach in 1997, a collision blamed on defective road design that prevented her mother, Kathy, and the police officer whose car broadsided them from seeing each other.

Jasmine’s 3-year-old twin brothers, Landon and Jordan, suffered catastrophic injuries that would require millions in treatment and care for the rest of their lives.

The family rejected a $15M settlement offer in trial, and Searcy won a $256M jury verdict at trial in 2001.

“You know the old saying that you need to have professional detachment? I don’t think that’s true,” Searcy says. “I had no professional detachment in that case.

I felt like I was representing my family, who I was so powerless to help. It was 41 years later, and I was on fire with righteousness.”

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

500

IF WE WANT OUR COUNTRY TO CONTINUE TO BE A DEMOCRACY, THE RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL MUST BE SACROSANCT. WE CANNOT SACRIFICE THAT FOR ANYTHING…. THE PANDEMIC IS CAUSING DELAYS IN PEOPLE GETTING THEIR JURY TRIALS, BUT I DO THINK THAT’S SOMETHING WE’LL BE ABLE TO SOLVE. IF WE’VE GOT TO HAVE DELAYS, I THINK WE NEED TO HAVE THEM RATHER THAN LOSE THAT RIGHT. Lawdragon: You’ve been able to accomplish so much for people. Can you talk about a few more of the cases that were most meaningful to you?

Christian Searcy: One was in 1989, involving Gerry and Donna Michaud, a couple from Bridgeport, Conn.

They had flown to West Palm Beach with their three children, 8-year-old Dawn, 6-year-old Stephen, and 3-year-old Michael, for a vacation at a Stuart hotel that was hosting a circus for the summer. On their way, they pulled off into the emergency stopping lane of the Florida Turnpike and while they were there, a tractor-trailer going about 75 miles an hour drifted off the road and ran over their car, which burst into flames. Witnesses, who couldn’t get close because the flames were so hot, said they were shooting 20 to 30 feet into the air. They thought everyone inside was dead. After about two minutes, though, they saw a woman crawling through the broken windshield of the car. As she started to regain her senses, Donna tried to run back to it, screaming, “My life is in that car.”

When I first met Donna in the burn unit at the Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida, I was afraid she was going to commit suicide. She had lost her entire family, and almost lost her life. But it turns out her husband, Gerry, who was the dean at Fairfield College Preparatory School, was good friends with a detective on the Bridgeport police force named John Berger.

The two of them had started teaching a martial arts class in their spare time to make a little extra money, and unbeknownst to Donna, Gerry and this fellow John Berger had made a pact with each other, that if anything ever happened to the other one, the sur-

vivor would take care of the other’s family. So, John Berger came down and visited Donna at Shands and investigated the accident himself. When she was released from the burn unit several months later, she went back to Bridgeport where she lived in a burn suit in her sister’s upstairs bedroom for about a year.

Berger, when he would get off work, would get them a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and come sit and talk with her. Their friendship grew into love and several years after Gerry’s death, John and Donna got married.

She wanted to have children then, but despite efforts including in vitro fertilization, she was unable to get pregnant. The first time we had taken her case to court, it ended in a mistrial. The second trial was scheduled a year later, and about two weeks before it was to start, she called and told me, “Settle the case. We’re not going to trial.”

I said, “Donna, we can settle this case for a lot of money, but not what we’re going to get if we try this case.

This is one of the most powerful catastrophes I’ve come to know about in my adult life.” And she said, “Settle the case, we’re not going to trial.” I said, “Why are you doing this?” She said she and John had been out to California visiting a world-famous physician in reproduction who had done all this testing on Donna and told her, “The reason you cannot get pregnant is because of your level of stress. The only way you’re going to get pregnant is for you to tremendously reduce your stress level.”

When she learned that, she decided she wasn’t going to have the stress of the trial or any of that. She was going to relax. So, I settled the case, and 10 months later, she had twins, Christian and Meredith. She

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500 named the little boy after me. He graduated from law school at the University of Virginia last year and is now practicing law in New York. He worked three summers in our firm. Meredith received her graduate degree in business/commerce, marketing and management and is working at Amazon in Washington, D.C. LD: That’s such an amazing story. You’ve said that you view your wins as proof that the trial-by-jury system in this country is working. During the pandemic there’s been this move towards remote civil jury trials. Some jurisdictions are even doing pilot programs. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think something gets lost with a remote jury?

CS: One of our leaders once described the jury trial as “the canary in the coal mine” of our democracy, which I believe is true. In coal mines in the old days, when they didn’t have oxygen sensors, they’d take a canary down with them, and if it died, they knew they had to rush everybody out because they were running out of oxygen.

When our ancestors founded this country, they knew they wanted a jury trial, because if they didn’t get one, it would be political. If they were going to be in front of a judge who was a servant of the king, they were never going to have a chance against the system. If they could summon a jury from amongst the citizens of the community, though, nobody would have had the opportunity to gain control over those people. They could have their cases decided by their peers, instead of someone beholden to somebody higher up in the system who wasn’t going to give them a fair shake.

to substitute an in-person jury for people at home on Zoom, because you don’t know what is going on in the environment that they’re sitting in.

I don’t think that they ever should take away the right of an individual to not be deprived of their life, liberty or property without an in-person jury trial. That’s what has made our country so special.

LD: Can we talk about your firm for a bit? You’re one of the founders, right?

CS: Well, it all depends. If you’re talking about the firm that bears the name of Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart & Shipley, yes, I’m one of the founders. But our firm morphed from earlier firms dating back to one called Howell & Howell in 1901 that eventually grew into Howell, Kirby, Montgomery, D’Aiuto & Dean; one of their partners, Bob Montgomery, offered me a job after law school. They were doing mostly defense work, though, so I turned him down to go to Frates, Floyd, Pearson & Stewart, which was handling mostly plaintiff work, which is what I wanted to do.

So my answer is that if we want our country to continue to be a democracy, the right to a jury trial must be sacrosanct. We cannot sacrifice that for anything.

I tried some plaintiff cases there as a young lawyer, got real good verdicts on my first three plaintiff cases, and Bob Montgomery came down and hired me away. He made the offer to double my salary and I turned him down. Then he learned about my car, an old clunker from law school. My wife, Priscilla, was pregnant at the time with my son, Henry, and she was having to, every time the gears stuck, get out of the car, open the hood, lean down and manually unstick the gears with her hand. So, a few weeks later, Bob Montgomery called me back and said, “Chris, I admire you being loyal to your firm. That’s one of the reasons I want you to come to work for me. I’ll not only double your salary, I’ll give you a brand new Cadillac.” So, I sold out for the car.

Now with this Covid virus, you don’t want to have more than 10 people together in a room, so you can’t very well get a big group of people together from which to select a jury. So the pandemic is causing delays in people getting their jury trials, but I do think that’s something we’ll be able to solve. If we’ve got to have delays, I think we need to have them rather than lose that right.

Of course, he also told me he was trying to transform his firm into a plaintiffs’ firm and that I had more plaintiff experience than anybody there except for him, so he wanted my help. I didn’t get many plaintiff cases in the beginning because they had mostly insurance matters and I didn’t know anyone in town. The cases I did get were mostly the ones nobody else wanted.

LD: That makes a lot of sense. The jury trials going remotely is not the same experience of course, and there’s a lot of non-verbal communication that happens between people in any circumstance, and certainly when you’re in trial. Some of those things might get lost when you’re talking over a screen.

Fortunately, some of those, even though they were very difficult liability cases, had some big damages.

This was way back in the early ‘70s. There had only been three $1M verdicts in Florida, and in 1976 or ’77, I got the fourth, for a young construction worker from Vermont who had lost both his legs in a train accident.

CS: I think the remote thing is fine as long as it’s voluntary for all the parties. I don’t think we ought to try

The next year, I tried two cases. One was another train case in Fort Pierce that took a week, where I won a

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D. Neil Smith

Donald Soloff

NIX PATTERSON DALLAS

SOLOFF & ZERVANOS PHILADELPHIA

Michael Smith

Andrew Sommerman

LESSER LESSER WEST PALM, FLA.

SOMMERMAN MCCAFFITY DALLAS

R. Allen Smith

Christine Spagnoli

THE SMITH LAW FIRM RIDGELAND, MISS.

GREENE BROILLET SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

Rod Smith

Shanin Specter

AVERA & SMITH GAINESVILLE, FLA.

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

William Smith

Broadus Spivey*

ABRAMSON SMITH SAN FRANCISCO

SPIVEY & GRIGG AUSTIN

Daniel Smolen

Kathryn Stebner

SMOLEN ROYTMAN TULSA

STEBNER LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

Kathryn Snapka

Andrew Stern

SNAPKA FIRM CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

Thomas Sobol

L. Chris Stewart

HAGENS BERMAN BOSTON

STEWART TRIAL ATTORNEYS ATLANTA

Alison Soloff

Larry Stewart*

SOLOFF & ZERVANOS PHILADELPHIA

STEWART TILGHMAN MIAMI

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WHEN WE HAVE SOMETHING WE BELIEVE TO BE WRONG, WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO IT, NO MATTER HOW PROFITABLE IT MIGHT BE TO DO IT. I THINK IF YOU DO WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE THE RIGHT THING, WHETHER IT’S CONVENIENT OR PROFITABLE OR NOT, THEN LIFE IS A LOT MORE COMFORTABLE TO LIVE. verdict for $2.5M on a Friday. The following Monday, I started a trial in Sanford, Fla., with an elderly gentleman who had been hit by a young lady driving to school. The elderly gentleman had been cited for failure to yield the right-of-way, and he was paralyzed. I got a verdict for $1.95M the following Thursday. Those were the sixth and seventh $1M dollar verdicts in the state of Florida; I had won them within a week of each other, and all of a sudden, here I was, a baby trial lawyer and I was famous in Florida.

come up with something that you’ve got no idea about? What are you going to do? Did you prepare long enough? Should you have done this or done that?

LD: That must have really increased your confidence level.

LD: It seems like all the lawyers at your firm have an ethos similar to that. Everyone seems really dedicated to justice, but also very humble. You’ve also said you don’t believe in handling cases dispassionately, that it’s important to bring your passion in. Is that across the board there?

CS: I’m not sure about that; they were very difficult liability cases. What I did decide, though, was that I could never let my fear of getting up and taking a chance on losing it all govern my behavior. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me, because it still does.

But I believe if a case should be tried, it’s important to go on and try that case and not be governed by fear. I’ve been trying cases for 46 years now, and to this day, when I’m driving to the courthouse to start a trial, I have this little voice in my head that says, “Is this the time everybody’s going to figure out how stupid you really are?”

LD: Imposter syndrome. I’d never have guessed you had it.

CS: I think it’s just called worrying that you’re not smart enough. Because with these cases we try, and with the adversary system, you can never be in total control of all the variables. And you want to be in control of all of the variables.

LD: Right.

CS: But you can’t. And you know that showing up, you’re going to be up there in the well of the courtroom with nobody to hide behind, and what if they

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Once trial starts, all of that goes away. It’s like the player on the football field. You’re waiting for the kick off, and you get butterflies. I think it’s that concern about whether you’ll be prepared enough that makes you prepare hard, and makes you do well.

CS: I think so. What would be the best way to put it?

Number one, we’re a trial firm. We’re going to go in and try our cases, and I want every lawyer I hire to become a lead trial lawyer. I want every lawyer in our firm to be able to handle any case, because that’s how everybody’s the most helpful. I think it’s just the way we are. When we have something we believe to be wrong, we’re not going to do it, no matter how profitable it might be to do it, because I mean, how many times can you go out to dinner and how nice a car can you buy, and so forth? Nothing makes up for doing something that you believe to be wrong, or something that you’d be embarrassed about, or something you’d be ashamed of, something you’d want to hide.

We’ve had a number of times where we’ve turned down a lot of money because it didn’t seem right to us. I think if you do what you believe to be the right thing, whether it’s convenient or profitable or not, then life is a lot more comfortable to live.

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Paul Stritmatter

Timothy Tietjen

STRITMATTER KESSLER HOQUIAM, WASH.

ROUDA FEDER SAN FRANCISCO

Robert Sullivan

Paul Traina

SULLIVAN PAPAIN GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

PANISH SHEA LOS ANGELES

Dennis Sweet III

Michael Trunk

SWEET & ASSOCIATES JACKSON, MISS.

KLINE & SPECTER PHILADELPHIA

Laura Tamez

Lucy Tufts

THE HERRERA LAW FIRM SAN ANTONIO

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

Mark Tanner

Nancy Turbak Berry

FELDMAN SHEPHERD PHILADELPHIA

TURBAK LAW OFFICE WATERTOWN, S.D.

Anthony Tarricone

Kenneth Vogelstein

KREINDLER & KREINDLER BOSTON

WAIS VOGELSTEIN BALTIMORE

John Taylor

Aimee Wagstaff

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

ANDRUS WAGSTAFF LAKEWOOD, COLO.

Brandon Thompson

Gary Wais

CIRESI CONLIN MINNEAPOLIS

WAIS VOGELSTEIN BALTIMORE

Fred Thompson III

Robert Waldsmith

MOTLEY RICE MT. PLEASANT, S.C.

ABRAMSON SMITH SAN FRANCISCO

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Brent Walker

Paul Weitz

ALDOUS WALKER DALLAS

THE COCHRAN FIRM NEW YORK

John “Jack” Walker

Geoffrey Wells

MARTIN WALKER TYLER, TEXAS

GREENE BROILLET SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

Mary Anne Walling

Jeanmarie Whalen

SULLIVAN PAPAIN GARDEN CITY, N.J.

DOMNICK CUNNINGHAM PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA.

Judson Waltman

Tim Wheeler

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

GREENE BROILLET SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

Johnny Ward

Charles Whetstone

WARD SMITH & HILL LONGVIEW, TEXAS

WHETSTONE PERKINS COLUMBIA, S.C.

Navan Ward Jr.

Matthew White

BEASLEY ALLEN MONTGOMERY, ALA.

GRAY & WHITE LOUISVILLE, KY.

Donald Watson

William Whitehurst*

GARY WILLIAMS STUART, FLA.

WHITEHURST HARKNESS AUSTIN

Elizabeth Weinstein

Reggie Whitten

GRANT & EISENHOFER CHICAGO

WHITTEN BURRAGE OKLAHOMA CITY

Stephen Weiss

Lorenzo Williams

SEEGER WEISS NEW YORK

GARY WILLIAMS STUART, FLA.

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Matthew Williams

C. Steven Yerrid*

SALVI SCHOSTOK CHICAGO

YERRID LAW FIRM TAMPA, FLA.

Allen Williamson

Marty Young

BOYD POWERS WILLIAMSON DECATUR, TEXAS

GOUDARZI & YOUNG GILMER, TEXAS

Lawrence Wilson

Kathleen Zellner

LANIER LAW FIRM HOUSTON

ZELLNER & ASSOCIATES DOWNERS GROVE, ILL.

David Wirtes Jr.

Michael Zerres

CUNNINGHAM BOUNDS MOBILE, ALA.

BLUME FORTE CHATHAM, N.J.

R. Brent Wisner

John Zervanos

BAUM HEDLUND LOS ANGELES

SOLOFF & ZERVANOS PHILADELPHIA

Michael Worel

Laura Zois

DEWSNUP KING SALT LAKE CITY

MILLER & ZOIS BALTIMORE

Andrew Yaffa GROSSMAN ROTH CORAL GABLES, FLA.

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Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC salutes Lawdragon’s Leading Plaintiff Lawyers and congratulates our own honorees: Benjamin Brown

Richard Koffman

Kit Pierson

Shaylyn Cochran

Kalpana Kotagal

Laura Posner

Michael Dolce

Leslie Kroeger

Julie Goldsmith Reiser

Suzanne Dugan

Stephan LeClainche

Sharon Robertson

Donna Evans

Theodore Leopold

Aniko Schwarcz

Agnieszka Fryszman

Emmy Levens

Joseph Sellers

Carol Gilden

Jeanne Markey

Daniel Small

Michael Hancock

Daniel McCuaig

Catherine Torell

Anita Hill

Betsy Miller

Christine Webber

Brent Johnson

Victoria Nugent

Antitrust | Civil Rights & Employment | Complex Tort Litigation | Consumer Protection Employee Benefits / ERISA | Ethics & Fiduciary Counseling | Human Rights | Public Client Securities Litigation & Investor Protection | Whistleblower / False Claims Act

202.408.4600 | cohenmilstein.com CHICAGO, IL | NEW YORK, NY | PALM BEACH GARDENS, FL PHILADELPHIA, PA | RALEIGH, NC | WASHINGTON, DC

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For the third consecutive year, Lawdragon is proud to publish the 500 Leading Plaintiff Employment Lawyers – our indispensable guide to the heroic lawyers throughout the U.S. working to ensure that workers’ rights are respected and fairly compensated.

That was a big ask over the past year, which saw decimated workforces throughout the globe and brought about change that is likely permanent in the configuration of the employment structure. The pandemic has provoked unprecedented layoffs, furloughs and terminations, impacting families in deep and destructive ways. While these lawyers are the best in the business, they are representative of a remarkable legal corps throughout the U.S. of excellent advisors who have dedicated their careers to representing unions and workers.

We’re especially excited by the inclusiveness of this guide, which is 45 percent female and 20 percent inclusive. Lawdragon believes inclusive representation is just, fair and smart.

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DOING WELL WHILE

DOING GOOD

BY KATRINA DEWEY

The road to greatness was not easy. In 1998, when Outten & Golden opened its doors, it was a Mom-and-Pop shop, comprised of the two founders, Wayne Outten and Anne Golden, plus Wayne’s wife Ginny handling administration and one other lawyer. Golden and Outten had worked together for several years at Lankenau Kovner & Outten.

Outten used his payout from his previous firm and a home-equity line of credit to pay the bills for the first few years. It was a gamble, fueled by Outten’s determination to create better representation – and rights – for workers.

How Outten & Golden Became a Model for Impact, Diversity & Transition

The firm focused initially on representing individual employees in all areas of employment law, including discrimination, retaliation and contractual agreements.

In 2000, the firm started a fledgling class and collective action practice – led initially by Adam Klein – forging new frontiers for workers’ rights and fighting against wage theft as well as gender and other forms of discrimination. During the ensuing years, Outten & Golden grew to become the nation’s largest employee-side employment firm, whose two complementary parts together created much more than one whole.

Wayne Outten served as Managing Partner until the end of 2018, when he became Chair and Adam Klein became the Managing Partner. Anne Golden retired in 2015.

A tireless and surprisingly soft-spoken titan, Outten fell into representing employees by writing a book about employee rights. After college, he was supposed to rejoin the family furniture business (Outten Brothers in Pocomoke City, Md.). But as he came of age during the late ‘60s, he saw a different path for himself.

“As a product of the time, the reason I became a lawyer in the first place was to ‘change the world.’ I didn’t do it to make a big living. That is why, while I was in college, I shifted directions and decided to become a lawyer,” says Outten, who graduated from Drexel University in 1970 with a business degree. “The people making things happen then tended to be lawyers or preachers – and I knew I didn’t want to be a preacher.”

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Clockwise from top left: Wayne Outten, Adam Klein, Laurence Moy and Wendi Lazar.

PH OTOS PRO V ID E D B Y T H E FIRM

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500 He enrolled at New York University School of Law because of its focus on public interest law, and he met Norman Dorsen, the head of the ACLU and a professor and champion of civil liberties. Dorsen was editor-in-chief of a series of handbooks on individual rights; and in 1978, he asked Outten to write “The Rights of Employees.”

Though he had never even taken a course in labor or employment law, his path was laid before him.

“Most people become an expert in something and then write a book about it. I did it the other the way around,” says Outten. “I knew nothing about the subject when I started the book. Literally nothing.”

Starting in 1979, he spent the next two decades at Lankenau Kovner becoming a leading advocate for employees.

“I happened to be in the right place at the right time because, until the ‘70s, there really wasn’t a body of what we now call employment law,” says Outten.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the groundwork for civil rights in employment; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 provided some protections for older workers and job applicants; the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (the year Outten graduated from NYU Law) set standards for retirement and welfare funds; the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990; and the Civil Rights Act was amended in 1991. These and other laws enhanced the rights of minorities, women, the disabled and other employees.

Although employee rights were expanding, financing a firm that would solely enforce those rights was scary. “I was 50 when I started Outten & Golden. I wanted to build and grow a public interest law firm representing employees, based on sound business practices, that could go toe-to-toe with any employer-side firm in the country. From age 50 to about 57, I never worked harder in my whole life,” recalls Outten. “I was generating the bulk of the money initially and I sometimes had to lend money to the firm to meet the payroll.”

Outten & Golden’s potential began to come into focus on January 1, 2000, when Klein, a far-thinking and determined advocate, joined. He set to work creating the class-action practice that has come to define a major part of the firm’s mission.

Its partnership is a model of diversity in law practice.

Sixty percent of the firm’s partners are women, and more than 20 percent of its partners are Black, indigenous and people of color, or BIPOC; three of the 240

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seven members of the firm’s Executive Committee are women. The firm has developed a team of about 55 attorneys, with offices in New York, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, creating a corps unmatched in its national impact.

Its civil rights practice represents the alchemy that extends its reach and defines its mission. A virtuous circle is created by the funding from its long-term successes in class actions, which in turn are bolstered day-to-day by its representation of individual employees and executives. The firm’s lawyers choose to make less by donating generously to civil rights and workers’ rights organizations, while also serving in leadership positions in organizations that seek to do the same.

“We have a real presence within the community of civil rights organizations of people who are serving the community’s interests in a way that’s impactful,” says Klein, who until recently was Co-Chair of the Executive Board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “That’s a real part of our DNA; that’s important to us. It’s not just pro bono work that we do because the bar requires us to do it or because of good corporate citizenship. We’re doing it for a different reason, completely different reason.

It’s who we are.”

Among the firm’s voluminous contributions to civil rights, Klein led the landmark lawsuit against the Census Bureau that challenged the use of arrest and criminal history records – or any interaction with the police – to screen out approximately 500,000 Black and Hispanic applicants to be enumerators for the 2010 census. In 2016, the federal government settled the case, which led to fundamental reforms in the hiring process for future applicants and creating a class-member Records Assistance Project.

While Klein leads the discrimination unit of the class-action practice, Justin Swartz generally calls the shots on wage-and-hour cases, which Outten & Golden was among the first private firms to take to federal court.

“We started by filing some lawsuits on behalf of lowwage workers in the grocery store industry, the bank call-center industry and the restaurant industry,” says Swartz, who joined the firm in 2003. “What we realized was that there was mass non-compliance across those industries and others and that there’s a real need for private enforcement, because the government enforcement agencies like the federal and state departments of labor – despite all good intentions – were not sufficiently resourced or staffed to even make a dent in the need to enforce those laws.”

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Over the past two decades, workers’ claims and employers’ efforts to insulate themselves from costly fallout have morphed into what Swartz calls a “game of cat and mouse.”

“The employers’ bar comes up with new ways to cheat workers, obscure their violations, or keep workers from enforcing their rights, and the plaintiffs’ bar figures ways around that,” he says.

“The most recent example is forced arbitration,” Swartz adds. “More and more employers have forced their workers to agree to resolve any dispute that they have with the employer in arbitration, as opposed to court, which in many cases effectively renders the employee’s rights unenforceable because arbitration is a difficult, expensive process that is weighted in favor of employers.”

Among Outten & Golden’s successes in wage-andhour cases is a series of cases filed on behalf of unpaid interns that helped level the playing field between college students and recent graduates from relatively privileged backgrounds – who could afford to work for free – and lower-income peers who couldn’t.

“These cases were important not just because they ended up with workers getting paid, but also from a social justice perspective, because unpaid internships have always been a ticket to highly paid jobs,” Swartz says. “Our efforts have resulted in a lot of companies paying their interns, and that opened up internships for people who couldn’t afford to work for free, including people of color and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and anybody else who needed money for their labor. That was particularly satisfying.”

But like a literal pipeline that must be laid, there are years of, well, laying pipe, before any oil flows. “In the early years, we could not find adequate capitalization,” says Klein, “which is a fascinatingly difficult barrier to entry.” Without it, the firm was taking on employers defended by the biggest, most well-resourced law firms around. “With fewer than 20 lawyers, it was hard to compete.”

But somehow, they did. Because sometimes nothing succeeds like passion fueled by determination and necessity, plus excellent lawyering and the strong merit of their cases.

Laurence Moy, now the firm’s Deputy Managing Partner and co-head of the firm’s Individual Practice Area, brought 18 years of experience in financial arbitrations (including 10 years at a plaintiff employment competitor) when he joined in early 2004. He also

brought the life experience of working in his family’s Nanuet, N.Y., Chinese restaurant and a side passion as a pool shark and author.

“I worked in the Chinese restaurant as a dishwasher and a waiter. My sister worked up front. My mother worked seven days a week – she worked full time during the week as a customer service supervisor for the local utility company and at the restaurant on weekends. My dad worked six days a week. By the time I became a lawyer, compared to what we did at the restaurant, I didn’t think the hours were so bad.”

“I always felt like I’d rather be on the side that’s pushing to level the playing field,” says Moy, who had advocated before FINRA and the NASD regarding exits, compensation, discrimination, you name it.

Larry, the name he usually goes by, has built a tremendous practice advising individuals, particularly in the financial world, in a range of disputes. Among his achievements are a $70M arbitration award in an international arbitration for a group of finance employees and an $18.9M arbitration for two finance executives, two of the largest arbitration awards in employment cases.

The case that boosted Outten & Golden’s future came from a client Outten counseled in 1998, a former Morgan Stanley institutional equity saleswoman, who alleged that she had been denied promotions and pay commensurate with her male colleagues.

Working with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Outten – with Klein’s key assistance – transitioned that individual discrimination case into a case involving 340 women. In 2004, after years of battle, Morgan Stanley paid $54M to settle the case on the eve of trial (including $12M for the lead plaintiff), resulting in the first relatively substantial fee for the firm.

Exhale. Briefly.

When Wendi Lazar met Wayne Outten around that time, she found synergy and admired his vision for Outten & Golden. She had her own successful boutique law practice representing individuals and small companies in business, individual employment and immigration. Early on, she represented women in sexual harassment cases as well.

When Outten invited Lazar to consider joining the firm, Lazar was concerned because she’d have to give up her corporate clients. It’s Law Firm 101 that, to make money, you need to represent corporations, or at least have a reliable base of hourly or other predictable revenue.

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500 But it was worth the risk because Outten and Lazar were forging a different path. Representing high-level executives domestically and globally in negotiations and transactions is a highly valued service. And “you can do well while doing good,” Outten told Lazar. He has said that so often over the years that it became the firm’s mantra.

Lazar brought an executive compensation and employment practice to O&G, with a healthy dose of entertainment, advertising and media clients. She also continued to take on gender discrimination cases.

With Outten, she realized, they “could build a larger combined practice for executives and talent. We would be as good as any of the large firms and able to produce excellent work for executives on the level of a Simpson Thacher or Paul Weiss…we could build a practice and brand that really gave executives another alternative,” she said.

“Wayne and I were probably the only employee-side lawyers on the East Coast who were dealing with individual representation of talent on a global basis, especially multi-national executives,” she said.

The firm’s Executives and Professional Practice Group, as it is known, is without much competition among employee-side firms, especially with its focus on a problem-solving, strategic approach. For many lawyers, financial professionals, private equity players, founders selling their businesses and female executives, there is only one call to make when they need help. And it is to Wayne or Wendi – or one of their other practice group colleagues. “We understand their world,” says Lazar.

That practice fits nicely into the firm’s public interest mission. “Our civil rights work is definitely on everybody’s mind. It is the glue that binds all of us,” says Lazar. “No matter whether we’re representing CEOs or undocumented workers, getting our clients what they deserve is our priority,” Lazar says.

As of January 2019, Jahan Sagafi, Tammy Marzigliano and Ossai Miazad became equity partners of the firm.

Marzigliano, who is a national leader in representing whistleblowers, among other workers, joined the firm in 2004. Like her partners, she is passionate about the law and takes great pride in her representation of her clients. “Often times my clients just want to be heard and I give them that platform – when they cannot speak for themselves; I speak for them. When they cannot fight for themselves; I fight for them.” Marzigliano believes that “every 242

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worker should be treated with dignity and respect.”

She not only co-chairs the firm’s Whistleblower and Retaliation Practice Group and its Financial Practice Group, but she also is a member of the firm’s Sexual Harassment practice, where she is often struck “by the imbalance of power in these cases” and the “utter disregard for the law.” It is good to be on the “right” side of these issues.

“What drives me every day is that I have the ability to help people and make a difference in their lives.

What’s even better is that I get to practice in a place with like-minded caring people,” says Marzigliano.

Like Klein, Moy and Lazar, Marzigliano has been there for the good times, as well as the rough ones, and understands that, with growth in the size of the firm, “You may lose intimacy, but you also get to meet amazing, brilliant people and to do great work with them.”

Sagafi leads the San Francisco office, which he opened upon joining from Lieff Cabraser. Another member of the firm’s class-action powerhouse corps, he has recovered more than $100M against companies including Uber, Hertz, IBM, Wells Fargo, Walmart and Farmers Insurance. Most recently, he’s been working on gender and racial discrimination and harassment in the tech industry.

He followed in the footsteps of his mother, who worked at the EEOC and then as a sole practitioner representing employees. She met Sagafi’s father while serving in the Peace Corps in Iran. Sagafi was raised Quaker, “steeped in the moral principles of equality and the fight for justice, and the civil rights movement,” he says.

When he decided to join Outten & Golden, he was impressed with the firm’s work, “but the most important part was just that they are good people. I didn’t know Wayne at first, but I knew Adam and Justin and other folks from the ABA and from co-counseling.”

Miazad, who co-chairs the Discrimination and Re-taliation practice group, was a key member (along with Klein) of the team on the Census case – work for which the group earned the Public Justice 2017 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award.

Miazad, herself an immigrant to the U.S., is leading the firm’s class action discrimination cases on behalf of Dreamers. “There is real value placed on innovation and thinking outside the box which makes this firm an incredible place to work,” she said. She is motivated, in part, by the impact that creative lawyering can have on chipping away at structural barriers to equality.

500 She is co-chair of the firm’s Equity and Engagement Committee. “I am deeply aware that there are very few women of color who rise to equity partnership in law firms. I am excited to be in the room and to bring new perspectives,” Miazad added.

The firm’s partners are remarkably of one mind about its values – which is especially impressive given their diverse backgrounds. To a partner, they share a belief that their individual compensation is not their measure as lawyers or as people. Instead, it is making enough for a good middle-class lifestyle and contributing to workers’ rights that is the goal.

“We’re not trying to maximize everyone’s net worth.

Because people here are smart enough that they could’ve gone into investment banking, if money was all they had in mind,” says Moy. “That’s why we get a talent level, especially from our newer lawyers, that almost we don’t deserve. It’s unfair. Because for the people who come here, it’s a calling for them to get involved in work that has a public interest dimension and a civic dimension.”

There are lessons in Outten & Golden’s story of passion, dedication, decency and commitment to something beyond oneself. There is also – and this is important – that rare non-cautionary tale of what can happen when someone steps away before his or her partners wished it were so.

Outten talked about his transition and the craft of moving on more than two years ago, as he ate a salad at his desk in Midtown Manhattan. He showed a photograph of a marvelous country house near Ocean City, Md., where he was going that Thursday afternoon for a long weekend.

After more than 40 years representing workers, he is practicing his own advice with a rare self-awareness that to stay would not only be gratifying his own conceit but also would be robbing those he brought into the firm of the opportunity to advance in their own field. In the firm whose doors he opened (and which bear his name), he won’t be the one to turn out the lights.

The transition from Outten’s “create it and grow it” era to Klein’s methodical running of a mid-size business with a powerful practice began in 2018 as Outten approached 70.

Golden, Outten’s co-founder, had retired three years earlier, after leading the firm’s Discrimination and Retaliation Practice Group. During her career at O&G, Golden earned the respect of both management-side and employee-side lawyers as a gentle 244

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but firm advocate for her clients. She represented employees in trials, appeals, mediations, arbitrations and negotiations in every aspect of employment law; she litigated groundbreaking cases involving summary judgment, retaliation and attorneys’ fees; and she negotiated many agreements on behalf of executives and other employees. As she approached retirement, the New York affiliate of the National Employment Lawyers Association awarded Golden its highest award.

As part of his plan to hand over the reins, Outten launched what he called O&G 2.0 to examine and re-create every aspect of the firm – from finance to technology to benefits – to build a solid new foundation for the next 20 years, with a particular focus on leadership and management.

Since January 2019, Adam Klein has been the Managing Partner. In truth, the transition had always been in place as Klein helped build the firm from the outset and always had his eye on the future.

“So much of the credit goes to Wayne for always having in mind preserving a legacy by letting go. Like he always had in mind the transition. He could’ve easily continued to be the dominant figure in the firm for as long as he wanted,” says Moy. “And I think that would have created a different legacy for him. But instead he had the long view. He created something that’s going to outlive us all. It comes from his wisdom and unselfishness.”

The Covid pandemic presented major challenges for everyone during 2020, including O&G and its clients.

The firm’s offices were closed, and the progress of cases was delayed as the courts shut down and or dramatically changed their procedures. Meanwhile, the firm’s clients needed help navigating the changed workplace.

The firm’s leadership responded in a deliberate and compassionate manner to address the interests of its people and its clients. Among other things, the firm created an internal taskforce to figure out how to help clients, which included adding substantial information to its website to inform workers about their rights. The transition to remote work for everyone worked quite well and will continue as long as necessary to protect its people. The firm’s lawyers adapted to the changes in the practice of law, including virtual mediations and depositions and client conferences by video.

As he planned his gradual transition out of firm leadership, Outten considered the importance of the firm’s culture. It was the entire focus of the last

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Clockwise from top left: Tammy Marzigliano, Justin Swartz, Ossai Miazad and Jahan Sagafi.

all-attorney meeting he led as Managing Partner; and that culture may – perhaps more than even the astounding impact on workers’ rights he has created – ultimately define Outten & Golden. For, it turns out, if you really believe in and make your living from advocating for the rights of workers and for better workplaces, there is no place like home.

personally participated in and made the job offer to every single lawyer hired. His criteria from day one were threefold: First, the lawyer must be smart and industrious with good judgment – someone who can provide excellent service for every client. “But that’s not enough,” Outten says.

“To be immodest, I envisioned and molded the firm culture,” says Outten. For the firm’s first 20 years, he

Second, the lawyer must have a passion for Outten & Golden’s cause. “They want to help people. It’s not

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500 just a job. It’s a mission,” says Outten. “We’re a civil rights firm; we’re a public interest firm. So, everybody who comes here must come here because what they really want to do with their legal skills and as a professional is to help people – to help employees specifically – and to help improve the law, to educate workers and to advance their interests on a one-byone, person-by-person basis, on a class basis and systemically and societally.”

Third, every lawyer (and every other person who works at the firm) must be a nice person. While hard to measure, “it’s not as hard as you might think. Somebody can have the greatest credentials in the world and really, really want to work here; but if the person is a jerk, we’re not going to hire or retain that person,” says Outten.

Firmwide, and especially in the leadership ranks, there’s a recognition that the values Outten & Golden fights to uphold in court must be reflected in its own offices. “We’re advocating for clients to have a fair workplace, to be treated with dignity, to have outcomes that they understand and for them to be treated with respect and not discriminated against,” Miazad explains. “So, the firm itself can’t work any other way. We wouldn’t be able to survive that kind of hypocrisy.”

Indeed, Outten says, the firm’s mission is “excellence and integrity above all else” – all work must be done with integrity.

“Nobody’s allowed to cut corners. We say, if anybody gets close to any ethical line, then they’ve gone too far. We’re known for that out there in the world – that we’re responsible, that the lawyers here will tell the truth and that the lawyers here will be honorable,” says Outten.

Outten’s path over the past few years is heartening in a world of “hanging on” as a public art form among those who – for many reasons – can’t walk away. It’s a funny transition. Outten and Klein are not alike, but Outten does not try to shape Klein in his own image.

Which would not be possible. Which is another part of the transition lesson: For founders who believe that only they, or someone in their image, can carry on, shouldn’t you ask what it is you’ve created if it’s still all about you?

Outten is quiet, still, even. Klein is also on the low-decibel end of the spectrum, but the energy that jumps out of his head is a chaotic symphony.

Klein is co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in a long-running gender discrimination lawsuit against Goldman Sachs.

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He also is focused on the use of technology in hiring practices, “gamified psychometrics” by which companies replace interviews and longstanding hiring protocols with video games that purportedly measure instincts and other values that allegedly correlate with hiring.

Klein was raised by a father who ran a motel and a mom who worked at a local newspaper in Riverhead, N.Y., a working class Long Island town. They were relatively poor, and he observed early on the difference in outcomes from those with more resources. That underdog sense fueled his success as a litigator – and now has made him an astute leader of Outten & Golden.

“The practice of law has radically transformed. In a way, it’s sort of like a driver-less car relative to, like, a Model T Ford,” he says. Klein’s made it his mission to transform the firm for whatever comes next.

“We hit that button after realizing there’s no way to grow people internally that would have the skill set.

We cannot just rely on our talent. It doesn’t work,” he says. “We’ve learned that you need a mix. You need homegrown talent and to retain your talent. But you also sometimes have to bring in external talent.”

He is unafraid of the challenge of the future; and as a civil rights litigator, he has seen that “a common thread of successful people is that they ignore their failures.”

“I often think about our firm challenging normative behavior,” says Klein. “What was tolerable then, becomes intolerable and offensive now. There are so many contemporary examples of the firm leading the charge on addressing social ills in the workplace or with other aspects of our society. I wake up every morning thinking about what we are missing – how can we make the world a better place. I wish everyone had that type of career.”

Outten & Golden has been the beneficiary of traits Outten passed along from his parents, both of whom grew up in large farm families during the Great Depression. The business savvy of his father (Norris Outten) is reflected in the firm’s business-like approach to running a public interest law firm. The kindness and decency of his mother (Marie Perdue Outten) is reflected in the firm’s culture; Outten has imbued the firm with “Perdueness” – a salt-of-theearth genuine nature.

Pass it on.

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Sally Abrahamson

Lori Andrus

WERMAN SALAS CHICAGO

ANDRUS ANDERSON SAN FRANCISCO

Vicki Lafer Abrahamson

Margaret Angelucci

ABRAHAMSON VORACHEK CHICAGO

ASHER GITTLER CHICAGO

Andrew Abramson

Melissa Auerbach

ABRAMSON EMPLOYMENT LAW BLUE BELL, PA.

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

Gregg McLean Adam

Chirag Badlani

MESSING ADAM SAN FRANCISCO

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

Michael Adler

Rebekah Bailey

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

Ann-Marie Ahern

Ebby Bakhtiar

MCCARTHY LEBIT CLEVELAND

LIVINGSTON BAKHTAR LOS ANGELES

J. Bernard Alexander

Anita Bala

ALEXANDER MORRISON & FEHR LOS ANGELES

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

Ilona Demenina Anderson

Morris Baller

SAENZ & ANDERSON AVENTURA, FLA.

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

Jennie Lee Anderson

Lisa Banks

ANDRUS ANDERSON SAN FRANCISCO

KATZ MARSHALL & BANKS WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Kathleen Barnard

Harvey Berger

BARNARD IGLITZIN SEATTLE

BERGER WILLIAMS SAN DIEGO

Jeffrey Bartos

Lynne Bernabei

GUERRIERI BARTOS WASHINGTON, D.C.

BERNABEI & KABAT WASHINGTON, D.C.

John Beasley, Jr.

Jonathan Berns

JF BEASLEY ATTORNEY AT LAW WATKINSVILLE, GA.

DOBSON GOLDBERG ST. LOUIS

Allyson Belovin

Inga Bernstein

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

ZALKIND DUNCAN BOSTON

Jonathan Jay Ben-Asher

Stephen Berzon

RITZ CLARK & BEN-ASHER NEW YORK

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Seth Benezra

Michael Bien

BENEZRA & CULVER DENVER

ROSEN BIEN SAN FRANCISCO

Tiffanie Benfer

Rachel Bien

HARDWICK BENFER DOYLESTOWN, PA.

OUTTEN & GOLDEN LOS ANGELES

Rachel Berlin Benjamin

Saba Bireda

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

SANFORD HEISLER WASHINGTON, D.C.

Barry M. Bennett

Alan Blanco

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

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Robert Bloch

Victoria Bor

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

SHERMAN DUNN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Beth Barrett

David Borgen

BLOOM BLOOM LAW SEATTLE

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

Katherine Blostein

Kirsten Branigan

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

KSBRANIGAN LAW MONTCLAIR, N.J.

Tanesha Walls Blye

Lynne Bratcher

SAENZ & ANDERSON AVENTURA, FLA.

BRATCHER GOCKEL INDEPENDENCE, MO.

Ellen Boardman

Elaine Charlson Bredehoft

O’DONOGHUE & O’DONOGHUE WASHINGTON, D.C.

CHARLSON BREDEHOFT COHEN RESTON, VA.

Kathleen Bogas

David Brody

BOGAS & KONCIUS BINGHAM FARMS, MICH.

SHERIN & LODGEN BOSTON

Karine Bohbot

Molly Brooks

BOHBOT & RILES OAKLAND

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

Manuel Boigues

Carla Brown

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

CHARLSON BREDEHOFT COHEN RESTON, VA.

Subhashini Bollini

Deane B. Brown

CORREIA & PUTH WASHINGTON, D.C.

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

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Lawdragon: What is your mix of work like?

Toni Jaramilla: Since 1994, I have represented hundreds of workers against discriminatory employers, achieving multiple millions of dollars in state and federal jury verdicts, settlements and arbitration awards. My cases are often followed by news media, such as my representation of five young women in the “take-down” of a well-known clothing company and the ousting of its founder and CEO for sexual assault. My employment law cases involve claims of discrimination and harassment from all protected categories – race, national origin, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy – as well as retaliation/whistle blower, wrongful termination and unpaid wages.

Toni Jaramilla LAW OFFICES OF TONI J. JARAMILLA (LOS ANGELES)

TONI JARAMILLA

My activism extends to litigating civil rights cases involving police brutality and shooting deaths, many of which have also been featured in the press. During the civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder and global #BLM protests, I was invited to meet with Los Angeles Chief of Police Michel Moore and County Sheriff Alex Villanueva to discuss the arrests and abuse of peaceful protestors. Along with other civil rights leaders, we advocated for greater transparency and accountability by law enforcement who abused their power.

LD: What pushed you towards this type of career?

of life for Toni Jaramilla. Like many Lawdragon honorees, she has marched as many pathways as needed to improve equity in American society. The daughter of a Philippine immigrant who served in the U.S. Navy and was an agricultural worker in California, she is finely attuned to the disparities and hardships faced by workers. For that reason, you will see Jaramilla in court litigating high-profile individual discrimination and harassment claims as well as in the halls of the California State Capitol advocating for broader changes in the law that strengthen protections for workers.

TJ: I was a student activist at UCLA. In an Asian American Studies class, I was assigned to interview an Asian immigrant. I chose my father. My dad immigrated from the Philippines and served in the U.S. Navy. Despite his veteran status, he faced blatant bigotry due to his national origin. He found work in Northern California as an agricultural worker. He experienced the oppressive working conditions and poverty level wages, which led to the Delano grape strikes and boycotts. After settling in Los Angeles, he and my mother worked hard to provide me with lifechanging opportunities. As a result of their sacrifices, I am the first in my family to obtain a law degree. My career as a workers’ rights attorney is built on fighting discrimination and advocating for racial equality. My determination and success are inspired, in no small part, from experiences passed down by my father.

Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles-based trial lawyer and activist also boasts a long track record of service in nonprofit organizations with a focus on improving diversity in the legal profession. A member of Lawdragon’s guide to the top plaintiff employment lawyers, Jaramilla also represents victims of police brutality.

TJ: One of the most satisfying aspects of my work in employment and civil rights law is the heartfelt gratitude that my clients express towards me. In my employment law cases, my clients have lost their jobs.

Whether my client is a low-wage earner or a high-level executive or professional, losing a job, particularly for

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LD: What do you find satisfying about your work?

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discriminatory reasons, causes not only financial loss, but also profound emotional pain and anxiety. Litigating these cases require patience and compassion, which I have. Clients truly appreciate that. And even after the case concludes, many of my clients remain my friends and colleagues because of the gratitude they feel regarding how I handled their case and how I treated them during the litigation.

LD: Can you discuss some recent work?

TJ: During the #MeToo movement, I helped introduce and advance legislation directed toward strengthening protections against sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Shoulder to shoulder with my client – who had been sexually assaulted at work but missed her deadline to file her lawsuit – we testified at the State Capitol in support of Assembly Bill 9, a bill that extended the statute of limitations from one to three years for pursuing claims under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. This game-changing legislation benefits all California employees by giving them more time to file claims of discrimination and harassment. Governor Newsom signed the bill into law, effective January 1, 2020.

I was also actively involved in the passage of SB 1300 (which was inspired, in part, by one of my sexual harassment cases), an omnibus bill that provides guidance on the legal standard for establishing harassment under the Fair Employment and Housing Act and renders as void any purported waivers of legal claims involving sexual harassment and assault or other rights under FEHA, as a condition of receiving a pay raise, bonus, or other benefit. Along with leaders in the California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA) and other allied organizations, I contributed to drafting and re-writing, lobbying and testifying for passage of this and other #MeToo inspired legislation which were ultimately signed into law by former Governor Brown and current Governor Newsom.

LD: What led you to law school?

TJ: I took a year off between undergrad and law school. I accepted an internship at the National Urban League in Washington, D.C. The National Urban League is a historic civil rights organization dedicated to economic empowerment, equality and social justice. As an intern, I helped on various projects involving housing and community development. I attended meetings with allied groups as leaders discussed programs that addressed issues facing underserved and historically oppressed communities. This experience solidified my desire to work in an area of law

which would allow me to advocate for social justice and equality for people of color.

LD: How has your practice changed over the years?

TJ: From the very beginning of my career, I practiced employment law on behalf of workers. When the #MeToo movement became part of daily headlines, more women found courage to speak out about their experience with sexual harassment and abuse. I saw an increase of my cases involving sexual harassment and assault. Women became empowered. In addition to litigating the cases, I was also active in creating positive social change at the State Capitol by helping draft stronger legislation that protects against sexual harassment and gender discrimination. I did this alongside leaders and members of CELA and other workers’ rights groups.

While I have always been a civil rights activist, after the George Floyd murder and the growing #BLM protests, my practice expanded to litigating civil rights cases against law enforcement agencies for police brutality. My practice now includes both employment law on behalf of plaintiffs and civil rights law on behalf of victims of police abuse and police shootings.

LD: Are you involved in any public interest activities?

TJ: I am passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion, both in the practice of law and in leadership roles. In 1998, I proudly served as President of the Philippine American Bar Association, providing outreach and support to the Pilipino community. In 2004, I was selected Chair of the Labor & Employment Section of the California State Bar (the third largest), the first Pilipina to hold that position. In my first board meeting, I proposed that we establish a diversity grant program and allocate $75,000 to fund bar organizations, particularly multicultural bar organizations presenting educational programs on employment law. Almost two decades later, that grant program still exists today.

From 2011-2013, I served as Chair of the California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA), the largest statewide organization of workers’ rights advocates in employment law. Under my leadership, I helped start diversity initiatives, including the creation of a standing Diversity Outreach Committee; the initiation of an annual diversity lunch with an inspirational keynote speaker; and the creation of scholarships and fellowships for diverse law students committed to practicing plaintiff-side employment law. Read the full Q&A at www.lawdragon.com/2021/04/22/lawyerlimelight-toni-jaramilla.

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Tracey L. Brown

Katherine Butler

THE COCHRAN FIRM NEW YORK

BUTLER HARRIS HOUSTON

Paul Buchanan

Lisa Butler

BUCHANAN ANGELI PORTLAND

MAINE EMPLOYEE RIGHTS GROUP BANGOR, MAINE

Edward Buckley

Alejandro Caffarelli

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

CAFFARELLI & ASSOCIATES CHICAGO

Eric Burnette

Kerry Cahill

BURNETTE DOBSON CHATTANOOGA

SUE ELLEN EISENBERG & ASSOCIATES BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.

Harry Burnette

Greg Care

BURNETTE DOBSON CHATTANOOGA

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

M. Malissa Burnette

James W. Carroll Jr.

BURNETTE SHUTT COLUMBIA, S.C.

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

Joseph Burns

Adam Augustine Carter

JACOBS BURNS CHICAGO

THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

Robert Bush

Larry Cary, Jr.

BUSH GOTTLIEB GLENDALE, CALIF.

CARY KANE NEW YORK

R. Kyle Busse

Eve Cervantez

MARKOWITZ & HERBOLD PORTLAND

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

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Robert Cervone

Jeanne M. Christensen

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

WIGDOR NEW YORK

Lin Chan

Anne L. Clark

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

VLADECK RASKIN NEW YORK

Kelly Chanfrau

Denise M. Clark

CHANFRAU & CHANFRAU DAYTONA BEACH

CLARK LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ed Chapin

Miriam Clark

SANFORD HEISLER SAN DIEGO

RITZ CLARK & BEN-ASHER NEW YORK

Katherine Charlton

Shaylyn Cochran

HAWKS QUINDEL MILWAUKEE

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Stephen Chertkof

Peter Cohen

HELLER HURON WASHINGTON, D.C.

CHARLSON BREDEHOFT COHEN RESTON, VA.

Gregory Chiarello

Kyla Cole

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

NEILL LEGLER DALLAS

Lewis Chimes

Francis Collins

LEWIS CHIMES STAMFORD

KAHN SMITH BALTIMORE

Barbara “B.J.” Chisholm

Stephen Console

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

CONSOLE MATTIACCI PHILADELPHIA

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Samuel J. Cordes

Joel D’Alba

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

ASHER GITTLER CHICAGO

Theresa Corrada

Cornelia Ho-Chin Dai

BENEZRA & CULVER DENVER

HADSELL & STORMER PASADENA

Linda Correia

Linda Dardarian

CORREIA & PUTH WASHINGTON, D.C.

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

Marc Cote

Frank Darras

FRANK FREED SEATTLE

DARRASLAW ONTARIO, CALIF.

Alan Crowley

Stuart W. Davidson

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

WILLIG WILLIAMS PHILADELPHIA

Ben Crump

Emile Davis

BEN CRUMP LAW TALLAHASSEE

DOLAN LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

John Culver

Susan Davis

BENEZRA & CULVER DENVER

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

Irwin “Buddy” Cutler

Roberta de Araujo

PRIDDY CUTLER LOUISVILLE

JOHNSON WEBBERT PORTLAND, MAINE

Jillian Cutler

Victoria de Toledo

FRANK FREED SEATTLE

CASPER & DE TOLEDO STAMFORD

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Peter DeChiara

Julie Gutman Dickinson

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

BUSH GOTTLIEB GLENDALE, CALIF.

Nicole Horberg Decter

Jerome Dobson

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

DOBSON GOLDBERG ST. LOUIS

Lori Deem

Christopher Dolan

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

DOLAN LAW FIRM SAN FRANCISCO

Jeffrey Demain

J. Peter Dowd

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

Sanford Dennison

Carl Draper

BAAB & DENISON DALLAS

FELDMAN WASSER SPRINGFIELD, ILL.

Kelly Dermody

Sarah Drescher

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

TEDESCO LAW GROUP PORTLAND

David deRubertis

Stephen Drew

THE DERUBERTIS LAW FIRM STUDIO CITY, CALIF.

DREW COOPER GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

Reena Desai

Ronald G. Dunn

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

GLEASON DUNN ALBANY

Erica Deutsch

Lori Ecker

BUSH GOTTLIEB GLENDALE, CALIF.

LAW OFFICES OF LORI D. ECKER CHICAGO

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Alan Epstein SPECTOR GADON (PHILADELPHIA)

ALAN EPSTEIN ALAN EPSTEIN IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL

employment lawyer. An avid sailor and aspiring playwright, he took a two-year sabbatical to sail the Delaware, the Atlantic coastline and the Caribbean at a time when others might consider him at the height of his career.

Epstein values the pursuit of a life rich with new experiences and views his work for employees and other workers as protecting their own right to opportunity.

Following that two-year sailing stint, Epstein received national attention for his representation of attorney Scott Burr in his wrongful dismissal case against a prominent Philadelphia law firm, in a closely watched HIV/AIDS discrimination case in the early-to-mid ‘90s. Trial took place just after the general release of the iconic film, “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, that mirrored the facts of the case Epstein tried. This was in the midst of the AIDS crisis, when homophobia was common and misunderstandings about the

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BY ALISON PREECE disease were rampant, including a pervasive fear that it could be spread by close contact. Since the film and Scott Burr’s matter were almost identical, any potential juror who had seen the film was carefully scrutinized, but not automatically dismissed for cause. Of greater concern in the jury selection process was the fact that over 80 percent of the large venire of 250 potential jurors completed lengthy questionnaires stating that they had personal or moral beliefs against homosexuality and a fear of casual contact at work with anyone who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

Discrimination in the workplace continues to be an important focus for Epstein, with his recent representation of an older female senior sales executive who sued her employer, a national healthcare provider, for wrongful dismissal and discrimination based on age and gender. The case settled for an undisclosed amount.

Epstein is also something of a pioneer in the area of private dispute resolution, having founded

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Judicate, Inc., in the ’80s which tapped former judges for mediations and later went public.

Epstein regularly volunteers his time to pro bono efforts and court-related functions and serves as a board member and officer of several local and national organizations. He earned his B.A. and law degree both from Temple University in Philadelphia, and currently serves as the Chair of the Employment Law Practice Group of Spector Gadon Rosen Vinci.

Lawdragon: Will you please describe for our readers the types of matters you tend to handle for employees or other workers?

Alan Epstein: I handle a myriad of matters for individuals, including employees, corporate board members and licensed professionals, ranging from the provision of transactional advice to full litigation representation.

Issues include general employment rights; employment contract interpretation; professional responsibility and resultant disciplinary matters relating to the practice of law, medicine, accountancy, pharmacy and architecture; licensing and disciplinary issues raised against financial and banking brokers and executives; individual responsibility related to executive officers; and board governance issues governed by federal, state and local statutes and ordinances.

I also give advice about and litigate cases concerning constitutional torts including unlawful government intrusions and defamation of individuals by institutions.

LD: How did this practice develop for you?

AE: I was for the first eight years of my practice employed by a firm that represented unions and litigated employment-related injury lawsuits for union members. When I and three of my fellow associates left that practice, I began concentrating my individual practice on the rights of individuals in the workplace and the civil rights of government employees and individual citizens and continue to do so today.

LD: What are some aspects about representing employees and workers that you find professionally satisfying? What keeps you excited about it?

AE: Protecting the important liberties of, and advising about personal responsibilities to, individuals is a very satisfying way of making a living. It is not only the way I can best serve my clients and society as

a whole, but it also allows me to constantly create new and effective approaches to protections that are the essence of our democracy.

LD: Out of all the work you’ve done in your career, what would you say is the most interesting matter you’ve handled?

AE: Only because it caused the greatest attention by reason of the movie “Philadelphia” and its daily on-air coverage by Court TV, the case I litigated for an attorney with AIDS who was fired by a Philadelphia-based law firm with a national reputation and practice was my most interesting.

Scott Burr was the subject of the case, and he stands out as one of the most brilliant and courageous lawyers I have ever known. He, like the character portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie, undertook his own representation long before I became involved, only shortly before motions for summary judgment were filed. It was several months after the denial of summary judgment motions based in important part on the issue of whether AIDS impeded essential life functions that the trial then began in October 1994.

We lost Scott last year due to an unrelated disease process attacking his compromised immune system, but only after he spent many years as a successful complex litigation practitioner. He remains my ultimate litigation hero.

A close second was a discrimination/defamation case I handled by an orthopedic physician that first was the subject of an important 3rd U.S. Circuit opinion regarding ADA Title III protections for staff physicians and then a defamation trial after 23 years of litigation that ended in a record-setting defamation verdict in a Pennsylvania county Court of Common Pleas.

LD: Are there any trends you are seeing in your practice in terms of the types of matters keeping you busy these days?

AE: Yes. Workplace issues relating to high-level corporate employees, board members and professionals including contract interpretation, post-employment rights and obligations, corporate governance issues and discrimination have more than ever been omnipresent in the employment landscape, complicated by the ever-increasing reliance on high tech and social modes of communication.

LD: What are some challenges unique to representing employees in today’s world compared to earlier in your career?

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Daniel Edelman

Michael Fayette

KATZ MARSHALL & BANKS WASHINGTON, D.C.

PINSKY SMITH GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

Keith Ehrman

Brenda Feis

MCGUINN HILLSMAN SAN FRANCISCO

FEIS GOLDY CHICAGO

Herbert Eisenberg

Robert Fetter

EISENBERG & SCHNELL NEW YORK

MILLER COHEN DETROIT

Sue Ellen Eisenberg

James Finberg

SUE ELLEN EISENBERG & ASSOCIATES BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Joshua Ellison

Michele Fisher

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

Karen Engelhardt

Samuel Fisher

ALLISON SLUTSKY CHICAGO

WIGGINS CHILDS BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

Alan B. Epstein

Stephen Fitzgerald

SPECTOR GADON PHILADELPHIA

GARRISON LEVIN-EPSTEIN NEW HAVEN

Joe Espo

Benjamin Flam

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

GORDON LAW GROUP BOSTON

Yvette Everhart

Bruce A. Fredrickson

SASS LAW FIRM TAMPA

WEBSTER & FREDRICKSON WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Andrew D. Freeman

Hal Gillespie

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

GILLESPIE & SANFORD DALLAS

Andrew H. Friedman

Joseph Gillespie

HELMER FRIEDMAN BEVERLY HILLS

GILLESPIE & SANFORD DALLAS

Ernest Galvan

Charles Gilligan

ROSEN BIEN SAN FRANCISCO

O’DONOGHUE & O’DONOGHUE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Joseph Garrison

Amy Gladstein

GARRISON LEVIN-EPSTEIN NEW HAVEN

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

Carol Garvan

Bradley Glazier

JOHNSON WEBBERT PORTLAND, MAINE

BOS & GLAZIER GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

Matthew Gauger

Marie Gockel

WEINBERG ROGER SACRAMENTO

BRATCHER GOCKEL INDEPENDENCE, MO.

Rachel Geman

Nathan Goldberg

LIEFF CABRASER NEW YORK

ALLRED MAROKO LOS ANGELES

Narendra Ghosh

Joseph Golden

PATTERSON HARKAVY CHAPEL HILL

THE SHARP FIRM CLINTON TOWNSHIP, MICH.

Carol Gillam

Jon Goldfarb

GILLAM LAW FIRM LOS ANGELES

WIGGINS CHILDS BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

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MY FIRST EMPLOYMENT AS A LAWYER CEMENTED MY BELIEF THAT EMPLOYEES ARE THE LIFEBLOOD OF OUR SOCIETY AND ECONOMY AND DESERVE EQUAL AND FAIR TREATMENT BY THEIR EMPLOYERS. AE: The over-reliance on discovery in litigation and the problems associated with electronic storage and device exploration. How courts will deal with those important issues is constantly evolving.

AE: My aunt, Ruth Honig, was one of the first and may have been the youngest woman to practice law in New Jersey and the United States and will always be on the top of my “heroes” list.

LD: Will you tell us about a recent matter that you’ve handled?

LD: Did you have experiences as an employee earlier in your life that played a role in how you shaped your career?

AE: Because of privacy concerns and attorney-client privilege constraints, I cannot provide the details of a case I recently settled for a highly-placed older female sales employee that gave rise to her federal lawsuit based upon the intersection of gender and age. That sex-plus claim was the subject of a recent settlement on the eve of trial only after the company’s motion for summary judgment was denied by the court. The facts and circumstances presented in that case were emblematic of the real-life difficulties women over the age of 50 suffer in the workplace.

LD: What challenges were you up against in representing this employee?

AE: The issue of discrimination against older women is not new, but the cogency of sex-plus-gender claims has only recently been the subject of a handful of court decisions.

LD: It’s about time! Do you think this settlement might have a larger impact, beyond justice for your client?

AE: Hopefully, more and more employers and entities, especially those in highly visible arenas like broadcasting, sales and board membership, will become increasing aware that discrimination against older women is against the law.

LD: Is there a specific lesson from this work or is there anything from it you will find especially memorable?

AE: No unique lessons, just a constant reminder that the value of each person serving a private or governmental entity deserves to be treated fairly and viewed equally in carrying out their workplace responsibilities.

LD: When and why did you first develop an interest in becoming a lawyer?

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AE: My first employment as a lawyer cemented my belief that employees are the lifeblood of our society and economy and deserve equal and fair treatment by their employers.

LD: Is there a specific reason why you chose Temple for law school?

AE: I was a journalism and creative writing major in college and accordingly most other professional pursuits were foreclosed. I was in my formative years also very interested and participated in stage acting that made law school a likely choice.

LD: Was there a course, professor or experience that was particularly important in your decision to build a career representing employees?

AE: Not really…although one of my favorite teachers in law school was a traditional labor lawyer and professor, my current avocation arises more from my formative years in practice.

LD: Did you have mentors early on?

AE: Yes, the partners in the law firm that I joined directly after law school. I have had the good fortune of many mentors in my younger career days, but probably paramount in that group was the revered jurist A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

LD: What advice do you have for current law school students who hope to represent employees?

AE: The practice of labor and employment law is not the most lucrative practice, but if you want the opportunity to affect the lives of your clients, regularly meet the challenges of constitutional issues and once in a while get to have the figurative opportunity to “stroke Abraham Lincoln’s beard,” take up

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Eileen Goldsmith

Ira Gottlieb

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

BUSH GOTTLIEB GLENDALE, CALIF.

Barry Goldstein

Susan Gragel

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

GOLDSTEIN GRAGEL CLEVELAND

Joyce Goldstein

Cara Greene

GOLDSTEIN GRAGEL CLEVELAND

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

Nathan Goldstein

Paula Greisen

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

KING & GREISEN DENVER

Jill Goldy

John Griffin, Jr.

FEIS GOLDY CHICAGO

MAREK GRIFFIN VICTORIA, TEXAS

Lisa Gomez

Gay Crosthwait Grunfeld

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

ROSEN BIEN SAN FRANCISCO

Joshua Goodbaum

Joseph Guerrieri

GARRISON LEVIN-EPSTEIN NEW HAVEN

GUERRIERI BARTOS WASHINGTON, D.C.

Philip Gordon

Sue Gunter

GORDON LAW GROUP BOSTON

SHERMAN DUNN WASHINGTON, D.C.

David Gottlieb

Caren Gurmankin

WIGDOR NEW YORK

CONSOLE MATTIACCI PHILADELPHIA

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500 the practice of protecting the rights of individuals in the workplace.

LD: Has the practice of representing employees become more or less difficult now than at the outset of your career?

AE: Not any easier now. Just as challenging and equally satisfying.

LD: Can you share a lawyer you have come up against in a negotiation or case that you admire, and why?

AE: There are many opposing law yers who were fierce advocates for their clients but always approached that advocacy with civility and professionalism. Too numerous to name here.

Thankfully, they far outnumber those opposing practitioners who do not meet their standards in that regard.

LD: How would you describe your own style as a lawyer?

AE: I am a very strong and forceful advocate of my clients’ rights, but always remain civil, courteous and calm, even when confronted with rude and uncivil opponents.

LD: What do you like about Spector Gadon, and how did you end up there?

AE: After many years of practice as a lawyer, first with a large labor/litigation firm and then in a small employment and civil rights law boutique, I created a corporate entity providing former judges as mediators and arbitrators, called Judicate, the National Private Court System. I took that company public and ran it for several years as the CEO. I then bought a large cruising catamaran, went sailing for two years mostly in the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean and then came back to the boutique practice.

After getting tired of the responsibilities attendant to the daily tasks of a successful business, I joined my present firm to again concentrate on the practice of employment-related law and the singular and important tasks associated with the representation of clients. My firm has been wonderfully supportive

of my efforts to “save the worlds” of the employees I represent and I continue to engage in a full-time and busy schedule doing just that.

LD: You also serve on the firm’s Executive Committee, correct? Are there challenges that come along with that?

AE: I am a member of the firm’s Executive Committee, yes, but I never look at what I do in that respect as being challenging. It is simply additional work that is important to keep the firm headed in the best direction for lawyers, paralegals and staff members who work with us.

LD: There are many high-quality firms out there.

What do you try to “sell” about your firm to potential recruits – how is it unique?

AE: We try hard not to “sell” our fi rm. Lawyers and clients are attracted to us based upon our reputation of being aggressive and effective advocates of our client’s needs. The phone rings and we always answer with enthusiastic promises to be the best representatives the putative clients could retain.

LD: What do you do for fun when you’re outside the office?

AE: In normal times, exercising, running, traveling and sailing. Lately, in light of the current situation, I’ve been reading and watching interesting movies and documentaries.

LD: Do you have a favorite book or movie about the justice system?

AE: “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I had the wonderful experience of meeting and spending the day with its author Harper Lee, an experience that I will always cherish and is preserved in a photo taken while we were engaged in conversation.

LD: If you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing now?

AE: Sailing around the world and writing the ultimate stage play relating the human experience.

Move over Eugene O’Neill!

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Barbara Hadsell

Chad Hansen

HADSELL & STORMER PASADENA

MAINE EMPLOYEE RIGHTS GROUP PORTLAND, MAINE

Ryan Hagerty

Virginia Lee Hardwick

ASHER GITTLER CHICAGO

HARDWICK BENFER DOYLESTOWN, PA.

Kate Hallward

Donna Harper

LEONARD CARDER OAKLAND

SEDEY HARPER ST. LOUIS

Aaron Halstead

Tom Harrington

HAWKS QUINDEL MADISON, WIS.

THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

Doug Hamill

Margaret Harris

MIKEL & HAMILL CHATTANOOGA

BUTLER HARRIS HOUSTON

Andrea Hamm

Genie Harrison

MILLER COHEN DETROIT

GENIE HARRISON LAW FIRM LOS ANGELES

Mark E. Hammons

Michael Hausfeld

HAMMONS GOWENS OKLAHOMA CITY

HAUSFELD WASHINGTON, D.C.

D. Michael Hancock

Timothy Hawks

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

HAWKS QUINDEL MILWAUKEE

Adrienne Hansen

Jeremy Heisler

MAINE EMPLOYEE RIGHTS GROUP PORTLAND, MAINE

SANFORD HEISLER NEW YORK

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Matthew Helland

Sarah Riley Howard

NICHOLS KASTER SAN FRANCISCO

PINSKY SMITH GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

Gregory Helmer

Evan Hudson-Plush

HELMER FRIEDMAN BEVERLY HILLS

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

Marisel Hernandez

Susan Huhta

JACOBS BURNS CHICAGO

OUTTEN & GOLDEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Anita Hill

Scott Hunt

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BUSSE & HUNT PORTLAND

Eve Hill

Kristen Hurley

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

GORDON LAW GROUP BOSTON

Janet Hill

Douglas Huron

HILL & ASSOCIATES ATHENS, GA.

HELLER HURON WASHINGTON, D.C.

Kristina Hillman

Amber Hurst

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

HAMMONS GOWENS OKLAHOMA CITY

Kent Hirozawa

Daniel Hutchinson

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

Laura Ho

Chris Hwang

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

LEONARD CARDER SAN FRANCISCO

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Jeremiah Iadevaia

Jocelyn Jones

VLADECK RASKIN NEW YORK

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

Dmitri Iglitzin

Stephen Jordan

BARNARD IGLITZIN SEATTLE

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

Toni Jaramilla

Lisa Joslin

TONI JARAMILLA LOS ANGELES

GLEASON DUNN ALBANY

Jason Jasmine

Alan Kabat

MESSING ADAM SACRAMENTO

BERNABEI & KABAT WASHINGTON, D.C.

Pamela Jeffrey

James Kan

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

William Jhaveri-Weeks

Walter Kane

JHAVERI-WEEKS LAW SAN FRANCISCO

CARY KANE NEW YORK

Lori Jodoin

Allan Karlin

POWERS JODOIN BOSTON

ALLAN KARLIN & ASSOCIATES MORGANTOWN, W. VA.

Larry Johnson

James Kaster

HAWKS QUINDEL MILWAUKEE

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

Colleen Ramage Johnston

Debra Katz

JOHNSTON LYKOS PITTSBURGH

KATZ MARSHALL & BANKS WASHINGTON, D.C.

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sion. She’s now in private practice at Brown Goldstein & Levy, with judicial aspirations down the line.

Hill made her mark early in her private practice with a case against Los Angeles County when they had to cut hospital costs due to budget cuts, and chose to close the only hospital that specialized in helping people with disabilities. It was an untested argument at the time, and her successful advocacy in district court and the 9th Circuit laid an essential precedent about what constitutes discrimination in this area.

Her early work boiled down to “taking the meaning of the ADA and making it real” for companies, nonprofits, state and local governments, and individuals with disabilities, Hill says. Over time, her focus has become helping these groups actively increase their inclusion of people with disabilities.

Eve Hill BROWN GOLDSTEIN & LEVY (BALTIMORE)

EVE HILL

BY ALISON PREECE

THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO, THE AMERICANS

with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) was passed, which federally mandated equal access for people with disabilities to all aspects of public life.

The year was 1990, which was “shockingly late” for basic civil rights to be extended to that population, says Eve Hill, who graduated law school just before the Act was passed. She was immediately drawn to the nascent practice, taking one of the first available trainings on disability rights law as a young associate.

Her career since has been one of symbiotic growth with the application of the ADA, as she’s weaved between the Department of Justice and private practice, setting case law and providing guidance for institutions “to go beyond compliance” and build truly inclusive structures for people with disabilities.

Tapped early on to spearhead the DOJ’s ADA Mediation Program, Hill returned to Main Justice in recent years as part of the leadership of the Civil Rights Divi266

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“Disability has traditionally been thought of as a compliance issue. Comply with the law, reasonably accommodate, done,” says Hill. “But it’s really a diversity and inclusion issue. How do we make being a person with a disability in a job or a college a complete experience and not a lonely one? Because it’s not just about getting invited to the party. It’s about getting to dance.”

Lawdragon: You seem to have been at the forefront of disability rights throughout your career, really helping define and shape the scope of the ADA and how it gets applied. From your perspective, how’s our country doing in this area?

Eve Hill: We’ve come a long way, to be sure, but the work is far from over. There are a couple of different ways to look at the ADA. One of them is to do the bread and butter discrimination: physical access, denials of interpreters, denials of braille, those kinds of things, for individuals. Another is to explore the systemic aspects of the law. That includes things like, why are so many people with disabilities in institutions, when the law says they can’t be unnecessarily segregated? Why are so many people with disabilities being arrested or killed or injured by police? Why are so many kids with disabilities being segregated or disciplined out of school? What’s going wrong with the system that leads to these outcomes over and over, and how does the ADA fit in there?

That was our focus while I was at the DOJ - the big systemic work. We got tens of thousands of people out of institutions and worked with states to set up their healthcare and housing systems so that people with disabilities could get services in their communities. We did a lot of work with police departments on how to interact with people with disabilities. We did

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“DISABILITY HAS TRADITIONALLY BEEN THOUGHT OF AS A COMPLIANCE ISSUE. COMPLY WITH THE LAW, REASONABLY ACCOMMODATE, DONE,” SAYS HILL. “BUT IT’S REALLY A DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION ISSUE. HOW DO WE MAKE BEING A PERSON WITH A DISABILITY IN A JOB OR A COLLEGE A COMPLETE EXPERIENCE AND NOT A LONELY ONE? BECAUSE IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT GETTING INVITED TO THE PARTY. IT’S ABOUT GETTING TO DANCE.” a lot of work on accessibility of websites, because everything is online these days, but if the website isn’t accessible, then blind people and others with print disabilities can’t use it. They’re boxed out.

LD: You left the DOJ at the end of the Obama administration. Did the change of guard at the White House impact the work you were doing there?

EH: The Trump administration did more of the bread and butter work, which is certainly legitimate work.

My perspective is that we should each do what is within our capability. An individual lawyer can do a physical access case, or an interpreter case – and there are great lawyers and organizations doing that important work to make the ADA work on the ground for individuals with disabilities. A protection and advocacy organization or a disability rights nonprofit can do a more systemic case across a big entity. But there are some things that few but the Justice Department can effectively do at the scale that they need to be done, like taking on an entire state public health system or an entire criminal justice system.

My perspective is that DOJ needs to be doing the things that are systemic and big and complex. And once they’re done, once DOJ sets the standard, the rest of us can pick it up from there. The career staff at the DOJ is excellent, and the Biden administration is picking very progressive leadership, so I expect to see a shift back to that big systemic work.

In the last administration, many of us, regular disability rights lawyers, were having to pick up where

DOJ left off and punch above our weight. My team had to do almost a dozen big matters involving inaccessible absentee voting in the last year, which normally the DOJ is very engaged in. I was involved in 10 or 12 of them.

LD: Absentee voting was such a red-hot issue, too, with the pandemic.

EH: Exactly. It was essential. Literally life or death.

The pandemic caused a lot of discrimination and exacerbated a lot of existing discrimination, especially in the technology space, where we have no choice now but to rely on the technology.

LD: Can you walk us through the key issues with accessible voting?

EH: States have been required to make their absentee voting accessible for some time. It’s illegal not to. My client, The National Federation of The Blind, wrote to every Secretary of State in the country back in the fall of 2019, and said, “Hello, your absentee voting is supposed to be accessible. Please make sure it is. Let us know how we can help.” Well, they got crickets in response.

Then the pandemic hit, and it became no longer optional to vote absentee, especially if you had another health condition or were going to have to use public transportation, as blind people do, to get to the polls.

It was disappointing, but we had to litigate it and saw over and over again how important it was. I had people call me after cases in their states and tell me, “This is the first time I’ve ever voted absentee inde-

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Paul Kelly

Sharon Krevor-Weisbaum

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

Katherine Smith Kennedy

Kathy Krieger

PINSKY SMITH GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

JAMES & HOFFMAN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Wesley Kennedy

Scott Kronland

ALLISON SLUTSKY CHICAGO

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Diane King

Kellee Boulais Kruse

KING & GREISEN DENVER

THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

Paul Kiyonaga

Avi Kumin

KIYONAGA & SOLTIS WASHINGTON, D.C.

KATZ, MARSHALL & BANKS WASHINGTON, D.C.

Adam Klein

Robert Kurnick

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

SHERMAN DUNN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Russell Kornblith

Louis Kushner

SANFORD HEISLER NEW YORK

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

Kalpana Kotagal

Nathaniel Lambright

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BLITMAN & KING SYRACUSE

Michael Kramer

Jocelyn Larkin

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

THE IMPACT FUND BERKELEY

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Nancy B.G. Lassen

Jane Legler

WILLIG WILLIAMS PHILADELPHIA

NEILL LEGLER DALLAS

Robert Lavitt

Danielle Leonard

BARNARD IGLITZIN SEATTLE

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Barbara Lawless

Ethan Levin-Epstein

LAWLESS & LAWLESS SAN FRANCISCO

GARRISON LEVIN-EPSTEIN NEW HAVEN

Therese Lawless

Carl Levine

LAWLESS & LAWLESS SAN FRANCISCO

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

Wendi Lazar

Andy Levy

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

Dolores Leal

Stacey Leyton

ALLRED MAROKO LOS ANGELES

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Caryn Lederer

Valdi Licul

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

WIGDOR NEW YORK

Andrew Lee

Brooke Lierman

GOLDSTEIN BORGEN OAKLAND

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

Michelle G. Lee

David Linesch

RUDY EXELROD SAN FRANCISCO

THE LINESCH FIRM PALM HARBOR, FLA.

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500 pendently.” Over and over again, people said, “This was such a meaningful experience, because I got to do it myself, and I didn’t have to tell anyone my vote.”

It made me cry more than once.

LD: I’m tearing up just listening. It’s terrible that it took a pandemic to get there, but it’s great that you were ready to pounce once it became urgent. What other sorts of matters have you been working on since joining BGL? EH: I’ve been doing some consulting work for Monroe County, Ind. They wanted a real deep look at why so many people with mental illness and substance use disorders are ending up in their jail and what they could do about it. I’m working on that analysis, where the disconnects are, what’s missing, what’s siloed. It’s really interesting and so fulfilling to have a jurisdiction say, “Hey, we believe this can be better.

We don’t want to wait until we get sued. What can we do to make it better?”

LD: That’s so encouraging that they came to you proactively. And with all your experience at the DOJ, they can really trust your insights.

EH: One of other the things I did at DOJ the last time was applying the Olmstead Integration Mandate to employment and education. We challenged Rhode Island and Oregon and other states to reform their systems so that people with disabilities could get real jobs. A lot of states rely on sheltered workshops to employ people with disabilities. It’s like a factory or a warehouse, and they work there all day on whatever contracts the entity has. They mostly get paid below the minimum wage at those places. But people with disabilities can do all kinds of jobs, integrated, right alongside people without disabilities, for real pay. We helped state and local governments, and the nonprofits that serve them, figure out, how do you help people with disabilities get competitive, integrated jobs instead of segregated, sub-minimum wage jobs?

So yes, now I’m in a good position to help in this area.

We’ve also been working with higher education institutions, which is an interesting area for me because colleges and universities have sort of mostly figured out how to provide extra time on tests, how to make their dorms, classes and facilities accessible, and how to handle service animals. But there’s a new set of disabilities among students coming to campuses and higher education hasn’t understood so well how to deal with those. They’ve had trouble with emotional support animals. They’ve had trouble with accessible educational technology. Too many students with

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mental illnesses get disciplined out of higher education. Usually not even under real discipline, but a kind of, “we don’t want you to hurt yourself” discipline.

They think they’re being helpful, but they’re also excluding someone from their education. I just put out a guide through the Institute for Educational Leadership, on these emerging types of disability issues and how higher education can meet them.

We also consult on criminal justice reform, accessible technology and diversity and inclusion.

Accessible technology seems like a hurdle for some companies because they think they need to outsource it, and the cost is a burden. I help them build accessibility into their web development, and their procurement, development and audit practices. We find ways to build it into their own systems so they’re not relying on a third party and it becomes integrated into their business.

LD: Is your work mostly consultancy these days? Or is it a mix with litigation?

EH: It’s a mix. We’re suing the Social Security Administration because they won’t accept electronic signatures. They require people who are blind or have other print disabilities to read and sign a physical piece of paper. E-signatures have been required by federal law for over a decade, but Social Security didn’t want to do it. So during the pandemic, when it became really important not to have to go out to your lawyer’s office and physically sign a document, and when Social Security offices were shut down, and when e-signatures were so widely available, accessible, and secure, it just made no sense that SSA required wet-ink signatures. What’s worse, it was literally putting my clients’ lives in danger. So we sued. That case is ongoing.

We are also suing the Maryland Board of Elections over accessible voting at the polling places.

LD: And you mentioned criminal justice reform, any current cases there?

EH: We’ve got a lawsuit involving a man with schizophrenia who was accused of murder and the Washington, D.C. police interrogated him while he was in a mental health crisis. Based on that interview, where the police officers were asking trick questions and it was clear that he was not able to respond, they arrested him and kept him in a psychiatric hospital for over five years. He wasn’t a danger to anyone and he was innocent of the charges. He was eventually acquitted. But he lost over five years of his life because the police didn’t take his mental illness into account

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Daren Lipinsky

Richard G. Mack, Jr.

RIZIO LIPINSKY CHINO HILLS, CALIF.

MILLER COHEN DETROIT

Jennifer Liu

May Mallari

THE LIU LAW FIRM MENLO PARK

TONI JARAMILLA LOS ANGELES

David Lopez

Louis P. Malone III

OUTTEN & GOLDEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

O’DONOGHUE & O’DONOGHUE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Dana Lossia

Jannah Manansala

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

David A. Lowe

Chaya Mandelbaum

RUDY EXELROD SAN FRANCISCO

RUDY EXELROD SAN FRANCISCO

Conchita Lozano-Batista

Robert Mantell

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

POWERS JODOIN BOSTON

Paul Lukas

Deborah Marcuse

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

SANFORD HEISLER BALTIMORE

Nikki Velisaris Lykos

Beth Margolis

JOHNSTON LYKOS PITTSBURGH

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

Brian MacDonough

Jonathan Margolis

SHERIN & LODGEN BOSTON

POWERS JODOIN BOSTON

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THE PANDEMIC CAUSED A LOT OF DISCRIMINATION AND EXACERBATED A LOT OF EXISTING DISCRIMINATION, ESPECIALLY IN THE TECHNOLOGY SPACE. when interviewing him. The ADA requires accommodations, especially in a situation as important as a criminal interrogation.

But criminal justice reform isn’t just about how police treat the public. There are many levels of the system that need reform. In Washington, D.C., when a police officer is injured, whether on the job or off the job, Police Department policy is that you can be on light duty or on leave for up to 172 days in any two-year period. If you go beyond 172 days, you’re retired on disability, immediately, mandatorily. Many people, and my clients in particular, were going to be ready to go back to full duty within a limited time, or were fully qualified to do some other job other than police officer. But D.C. doesn’t allow that. If the 172 days are up, you’re out. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be back to full duty in six weeks, or if you could easily do another job that they have open. None of that.

They mandatorily retire you. So we’re challenging that, which is clearly against the law.

LD: Do you have any current cases in the education sphere?

EH: We’re challenging Fairfax County Public Schools.

The pandemic actually improved things for our clients in this particular case. Fairfax County restrains and secludes children with disabilities, particularly kids with autism and kids with communication disabilities. So these students can’t say, “I am hurting. I feel bad. This is wrong. This is a problem for me.” They can’t express it in words. So they often express it in behavior. And Fairfax County schools routinely either restrain or segregate them. They are required by law to respond in other ways to a child’s communication-related behavior.

LD: When you say they restrain them…?

EH: As in, headlocks, or pinned on the ground. Or they put them in segregation rooms, which are these little booths that they put the kid in. One of my clients, a child with autism, was restrained over 700 times and was forced to clean up his own urine when he soiled himself in the seclusion room.

LD: Wow, that’s awful. So when the pandemic hit, these kids were probably so relieved to not have to go into school.

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EH: Exactly. When you’re virtual-learning, you don’t have to go deal with those teachers anymore, you don’t get restrained and secluded. And guess what, your behavior gets better because you’re not so scared of going to school and being, frankly, abused.

LD: You have such a breadth of experience in this area.

Many of our readers are leaders at their law firms or legal groups. What advice could you give them on fostering disability inclusiveness at their firms?

EH: Reach out to law schools and colleges, disability groups and disability student services offices. Say, “We want people with disabilities. We want to reflect the full diversity of our community. We welcome you.”

That goes a long way, “We welcome you.”

Count us. You’re not allowed to ask about disability randomly, but as part of an affirmative action program you’re allowed to ask voluntarily, how many people with disabilities do we have? Then you can track your progress and see how you’re doing on recruiting, on outreach, on inclusion.

Then, incorporating employees with disabilities takes some advanced work. Is your website accessible?

What technologies do you use? Are they accessible?

Have you ever asked? Is your physical space accessible? Call your independent living center, many of them can do a review for you.

What are your events like? I heard from a law student intern saying, “Yeah, I was at this firm for the summer and it was fine, except I found out later they had a summer associate event and they didn’t invite me to it because it wasn’t accessible.” That’s so not okay. Or, “There was a training session and I couldn’t understand any of it because they didn’t want to provide an interpreter because it was free and they didn’t want to spend any money.” Well, it’s part of the cost of doing business.

And what people don’t always realize, too, is that any costs here will pay back dividends. I’ve worked with incredibly talented people with disabilities, including law students and lawyers, very effective people, and they’re representing a portion of our population that doesn’t always get represented. It pays back dividends to accommodate us into your firm.

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David Marshall

Todd McNamara

KATZ MARSHALL & BANKS WASHINGTON, D.C.

MCNAMARA & SHECHTER DENVER

Dana Martinez

Don Meade

BUSH GOTTLIEB GLENDALE, CALIF.

PRIDDY CUTLER LOUISVILLE

Francis Martorana

Walter “Terry” Meginness

O’DONOGHUE & O’DONOGHUE WASHINGTON, D.C.

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

Tammy Marzigliano

Andrew Melzer

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

SANFORD HEISLER NEW YORK

William Massey

Ellen J. Messing

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

MESSING RUDAVSKY NEWTON, MASS.

Laura Carlin Mattiacci

Gary Messing

CONSOLE MATTIACCI PHILADELPHIA

MESSING ADAM SACRAMENTO

Cary McGehee

Thomas Mew

PITT MCGEHEE ROYAL OAK, MICH.

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

Joseph McKenna, Jr.

Ossai Miazad

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

H. Vincent McKnight Jr.

Donna Mikel

SANFORD HEISLER WASHINGTON, D.C.

MIKEL & HAMILL CHATTANOOGA

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Neil Mullin

MILLER COHEN DETROIT

SMITH MULLIN MONTCLAIR, N.J.

Dale Minami

Meredith Munro

MINAMI TAMAKI SAN FRANCISCO

KING & GREISEN DENVER

John Mooney

Rahul Munshi

MOONEY GREEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

CONSOLE MATTIACCI PHILADELPHIA

Jack Moran

Matthew Murray

MCCARTHY LEBIT CLEVELAND

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Matthew Morgan

Wendy Musell

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

LAW OFFICES OF WENDY MUSELL OAKLAND

Michael Morrison

Beth R. Myers

ALEXANDER MORRISON & FEHR LOS ANGELES

POWERS JODOIN BOSTON

Laurence Moy

Christine Neill

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

NEILL LEGLER DALLAS

Kate Mueting

Anthony Nguyen

SANFORD HEISLER WASHINGTON, D.C.

SHEGERIAN & ASSOCIATES SANTA MONICA

John Mullan

William O’Brien

RUDY EXELROD SAN FRANCISCO

MILLER O’BRIEN MINNEAPOLIS

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Michael Okun

Joseph Pass

PATTERSON HARKAVY CHAPEL HILL

JUBELIRER PASS PITTSBURGH

Katelyn Oldham

Jane Peak

TEDESCO LAW GROUP PORTLAND

ALLAN KARLIN & ASSOCIATES MORGANTOWN, W. VA.

Ernest Orsatti

Lawrence Pearson

ROTHMAN GORDON PITTSBURGH

WIGDOR NEW YORK

R. Scott Oswald

Lorrie Peeters

THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

CAFFARELLI & ASSOCIATES CHICAGO

Wayne Outten

Kathleen Peratis

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

Cliff Palefsky

Rebecca Peterson-Fisher

MCGUINN HILLSMAN SAN FRANCISCO

THE LIU LAW FIRM MENLO PARK

Joseph Paller, Jr.

Sean Phelan

GILBERT & SACKMAN LOS ANGELES

FRANK FREED SEATTLE

Michael Palmer

Matthew Piers

SANFORD HEISLER NEW YORK

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

Robert Palmer

Frank Pinchak

PITT MCGEHEE ROYAL OAK, MICH.

BURNETTE DOBSON CHATTANOOGA

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H. Rhett Pinsky

Erin Pulaski

PINSKY SMITH GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

RUDY EXELROD SAN FRANCISCO

Joshua Piovia-Scott

Daniel Purtell

CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OAKLAND

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Nina Pirrotti

Jonathan Puth

GARRISON LEVIN-EPSTEIN NEW HAVEN

CORREIA & PUTH WASHINGTON, D.C.

Michael Pitt

Debra Raskin

PITT MCGEHEE ROYAL OAK, MICH.

VLADECK RASKIN NEW YORK

Peggy Goldberg Pitt

Daniel Ratner

PITT MCGEHEE ROYAL OAK, MICH.

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

P. Casey Pitts

Michael Ravalli

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

GLEASON DUNN ALBANY

Kevin Powers

Caroline Rdzanek

POWERS JODOIN BOSTON

ABRAHAMSON VORACHEK CHICAGO

Anna Prakash

Roberta Levinson Rdzanek

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

ABRAHAMSON VORACHEK CHICAGO

Al Priddy

Charlotte Redo

PRIDDY CUTLER LOUISVILLE

SCHWARTZ ROLLINS ATLANTA

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James Reif

Lori Rifkin

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

RIFKIN LAW OFFICE BERKELEY

Randy Renick

Jessica Riggin

HADSELL & STORMER PASADENA

RUKIN HYLAND SAN FRANCISCO

Richard Resnick

Elizabeth Riles

SHERMAN DUNN WASHINGTON, D.C.

BOHBOT & RILES OAKLAND

N. Elizabeth Reynolds

Thomas Riley

ALLISON SLUTSKY CHICAGO

TOBIN CARBERRY NEW LONDON, CONN.

Stephanie Reynolds

David Ring

BERGER WILLIAMS SAN DIEGO

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

Janet Rhodes

Mark Risk

BURNETTE SHUTT COLUMBIA, S.C.

MARK RISK NEW YORK

Gregory Rich

Susan Ritz

DOBSON GOLDBERG ST. LOUIS

RITZ CLARK & BEN-ASHER NEW YORK

Julie Richard-Spencer

Beth Rivers

ROBEIN URANN METAIRIE, LA.

PITT MCGEHEE ROYAL OAK, MICH.

Kai Richter

Jennifer Robbins

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

BARNARD IGLITZIN SEATTLE

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Louis Robein, Jr.

Tad Roumayah

ROBEIN URANN METAIRIE, LA.

SOMMERS SCHWARTZ SOUTHFIELD, MICH.

Elizabeth Rodgers

Michael Rubin

GORDON LAW GROUP BOSTON

ALTSHULER BERZON SAN FRANCISCO

Elizabeth Roma

Dahlia Rudavsky

GUERRIERI BARTOS WASHINGTON, D.C.

MESSING RUDAVSKY NEWTON, MASS.

Peter Romer-Friedman

Antonio Ruiz

GUPTA WESSLER WASHINGTON, D.C.

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

Alan Romero

Peter Rukin

ROMERO LAW PASADENA

RUKIN HYLAND SAN FRANCISCO

Barry Roseman

Martin Saenz

BARRY D. ROSEMAN DENVER

SAENZ & ANDERSON AVENTURA, FLA.

Sanford Jay Rosen

Jahan Sagafi

ROSEN BIEN SAN FRANCISCO

OUTTEN & GOLDEN SAN FRANCISCO

David Rosenfeld

Susan M. Saint-Antoine

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

CONSOLE MATTIACCI PHILADELPHIA

Beth A. Ross

Richard Saks

LEONARD CARDER SAN FRANCISCO

HAWKS QUINDEL MILWAUKEE

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Richard Salzman

Aniko Schwarcz

HELLER HURON WASHINGTON, D.C.

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

David Sanford

Bryan Schwartz

SANFORD HEISLER NEW YORK

BRYAN SCHWARTZ LAW OAKLAND

Jim Sanford

Debra Schwartz

GILLESPIE & SANFORD DALLAS

SCHWARTZ ROLLINS ATLANTA

Cynthia Sass

Michael Scimone

SASS LAW FIRM TAMPA

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

Bradley Schleier

Keith Secular

SCHLEIER LAW OFFICES PHOENIX

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

Tod Schleier

Mary Anne Sedey

SCHLEIER LAW OFFICES PHOENIX

SEDEY HARPER ST. LOUIS

David Schlesinger

Joseph Sellers

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Laura Schnell

Derek Sells

EISENBERG & SCHNELL NEW YORK

THE COCHRAN FIRM NEW YORK

Robert Schug

Caren Sencer

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

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In a highly publicized case over pregnancy discrimination, Leal helped reformat the sexual politics of Hollywood for women in the groundbreaking and precedent-setting Tylo v. Spelling Entertainment Group, and the subsequent appeal – a case that would forever shape wrongful termination laws in more ways than one.

Leal has kept busy during the pandemic, saying that stay-at-home orders didn’t stop or slow discrimination or harassment in the workplace. From her long view of this work, Leal contends that we have a way to go, and change must start from the top.

Dolores Y. Leal ALLRED MAROKO (LOS ANGELES)

DOLORES Y. LEAL

BY ALISON PREECE

DOLORES Y. LEAL, AUTHOR OF “LITIGATING

Sexual Harassment and Sex Discrimination Cases,” has specialized in employment discrimination, wrongful termination and sexual harassment law for over 30 years. The highly effective litigator loves doing the “feel-good work,” as she calls it, and firmly believes in representing those who have suffered from prejudice and/or harassment in some way, shape or form.

Leal served in the federal government for 14 years at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; she started as a secretary but was quickly moved up to investigator. At the urging of her colleagues, she went to law school, and continued at the EEOC as a trial attorney. Since joining private practice in 1991 at Allred, Maroko & Goldberg (founded by the legendary women’s rights advocate Gloria Allred), she’s continued her impassioned work fighting workplace discrimination of people based on their gender, age, color, religion, race, national origin, disability or retaliation.

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Lawdragon: Is there a particular case that stands out for you from your time at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

Dolores Leal: While I was at the EEOC, one of the highest achievements was litigating a case against the Hilton casinos in Las Vegas. We represented more than 30 individuals, all men. Most of them were dealers. Some were what we called “floor persons” or supervisors. The casino was losing money for a number of months, so management decided that the employees who had been there the longest were stealing from the house, because they would know how. So they arbitrarily chose a date, and anyone hired prior to January 1, 1974 was terminated.

LD: Who was terminated then?

DL: Older persons, and only men because women were not hired back then as dealers. So it was an age and sex discrimination case that was tried in federal court over a four month period. It was being handled by a private lawyer, John McCarthy, who’s now since passed. John asked the EEOC to intervene and we tried the case together. I remember we won about $45M, which was a really big win at the time, in 1989.

The other side appealed it and it went to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. I left the EEOC in ’91 and the court of appeals decided the case in ’94, 10 years after our clients had been fired. It was a long, drawn out litigation, but well worth it because we were able to achieve some justice for our clients. That was a very interesting case. It was a disparate impact case, adverse impact case, which is uncommon really. We used an EEOC statistician during the trial. What we argued was that there was a neutral decision, i.e., selecting everyone who was hired prior to January 1, 1974, which had an adverse impact on older employees who happened to be all men.

LD: Can you talk more about what that means?

Disparate impact case?

PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE FIRM

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IN A HIGHLY PUBLICIZED CASE OVER PREGNANCY DISCRIMINATION, LEAL HELPED REFORMAT THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF HOLLYWOOD FOR WOMEN IN THE GROUNDBREAKING AND PRECEDENT-SETTING TYLO V. SPELLING ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, AND THE SUBSEQUENT APPEAL – A CASE THAT WOULD FOREVER SHAPE WRONGFUL TERMINATION LAWS IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. DL: We saw a lot of adverse impact cases back in the early days when I first started with the EEOC. It means you’re being treated differently in comparison to others of a different race or gender or age. If you had, for example, weight requirements, where you had to weigh a certain amount of pounds in order to be hired, or height requirements. Those types of requirements, although neutral on their face, impacted certain groups of individuals, namely women, and persons of color.

LD: Is it fair to say that we see less of those adverse impact cases now because the law has been clarified through litigation such as this case?

DL: I think it’s fair to say that’s part of the reason.

I’ve been in private practice for 30 years now, and I cannot think of an adverse impact case that I’ve tried.

LD: Can you talk to me about the case you handled for the actress Hunter Tylo?

DL: One of the highlights of my practice at Allred, Maroko & Goldberg was litigating the Hunter Tylo case. Hunter is an actress who was hired by Aaron Spelling to be on the show “Melrose Place.” She was going to be Heather Locklear’s nemesis, if you will.

After she was hired, she learned that she was pregnant. Then her manager advised Spelling’s people that she was pregnant and they sent her a letter: Congratulations on your pregnancy, however, the role for which you’ve been hired is not compatible with your pregnancy. You’re being terminated, we don’t need you any more.

We sued under state statute, the Fair Employment and Housing Act, for pregnancy discrimination. The reason this case is particularly important is because when the

other side took Hunter Tylo’s deposition – back then the depositions weren’t videotaped, so you really couldn’t see or hear what was going on – but during the deposition, the attorney representing Spelling started asking Hunter very, very private questions. Questions such as, “Well, isn’t it true that your husband had a vasectomy and that you couldn’t get pregnant? Isn’t it true that you weren’t even trying to get pregnant?”

LD: Really. And what followed?

DL: A lot of questions similar to that, and my objections. “Invades my client’s right of privacy and that of her husband’s right of privacy, Hunter, do not answer.”

I don’t know how many times I did that, a good 10, 15 times, maybe even more. There were a lot of questions that I felt were invasive of her right of privacy or her husband’s right of privacy. Questions about whether it was true that she went to India, and had a “friend” there. It was stuff the defense attorney apparently had read in these magazines which follow celebrities. So I kept instructing her not to answer. The lawyer filed a motion to compel my client to answer these questions and also sought sanctions against me for instructing her not to answer.

LD: Did it work?

DL: Yes, the judge agreed with him. So I took it up on appeal and the court read the transcription of the deposition. The question, the answer. The question, the answer. The colloquy between Spelling’s attorney and I. The court of appeals laid an important precedent with that decision, because the court found that just because a plaintiff files a claim for discrimination doesn’t give the defendant, the employer, a

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Heidi Sharp

Donald Siegel

THE SHARP FIRM CL INTON TOWNSHIP, MICH.

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

Kevin Sharp

Jill Silverstein

SANFORD HEISLER NASHVILLE

SILVERSTEIN WOLF ST. LOUIS

Ann Shaver

Geoffrey H. Simpson

LIEFF CABRASER SAN FRANCISCO

WEBSTER & FREDRICKSON WASHINGTON, D.C.

Kathryn Shea

Michael Slutsky

SEGAL ROITMAN BOSTON

ALLISON SLUTSKY CHICAGO

Matt Shechter

Jay Smith

MCNAMARA & SHECHTER DENVER

GILBERT & SACKMAN LOS ANGELES

Carney Shegerian

Joel Smith

SHEGERIAN & ASSOCIATES SANTA MONICA

KAHN SMITH BALTIMORE

Nancy Shilepsky

Nancy Erika Smith

SHERIN & LODGEN BOSTON

SMITH MULLIN MONTCLAIR, N.J.

Amy Shulman

Steven Andrew Smith

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

Nekki Shutt

Debra Soltis

BURNETTE SHUTT COLUMBIA, S.C.

KIYONAGA & SOLTIS WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Margery Somers

Robert Stulberg

ALLRED MAROKO LOS ANGELES

STULBERG & WALSH NEW YORK

Lisl Soto

Adam Sturdivant

WEINBERG ROGER LOS ANGELES

DREW COOPER GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.

Marcus Spiegel

Michael Subit

ALLRED MAROKO LOS ANGELES

FRANK FREED SEATTLE

Ryan Spillers

Dana Sullivan

GILBERT & SACKMAN LOS ANGELES

BUCHANAN ANGELI PORTLAND

Rachhana Srey

Geraldine Sumter

NICHOLS KASTER MINNEAPOLIS

FERGUSON CHAMBERS CHARLOTTE

Kerianne Steele

Curt Surls

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

CURT SURLS MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

Kevin Stoops

Daniel Swanson

SOMMERS SCHWARTZ SOUTHFIELD, MICH.

SOMMERS SCHWARTZ SOUTHFIELD, MICH.

Dan Stormer

Justin Swartz

HADSELL & STORMER PASADENA

OUTTEN & GOLDEN NEW YORK

Robert Stroup

Sarah Swatosh

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

SEDEY HARPER ST. LOUIS

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500 license to go on a fishing expedition during discovery.

This decision in this case, Tylo v. Superior Court, has helped plaintiffs’ lawyers many times. It’s helped me whenever I’m involved in discovery disputes, where the other side wants information from my client that I believe is not relevant to the underlying issue. And if the employer seeks private information, there’s a heightened standard in terms of them being able to prove that it’s really relevant to obtain.

pany and she was a secretary to the vice president and her best friend also worked at the company as the secretary to the president. So you had the president and the vice president, and they were family members. Well, the vice president began sexually harassing my client. Initially verbally, asking her to go out, and she wouldn’t. She was a single mom. They were both single moms by the way, and she wouldn’t go out with him.

LD: Is that something that happens frequently? That an actress gets pregnant and loses a job because of it?

Then one day he said, I’m just going to call her Mary, “Mary, come to the conference room, I need you for something.” She goes to the conference room. And what does he do? He rapes her. She came out, obviously very distraught, went to the restroom, cleaned herself up, went back, told her friend – her “best friend” – what had happened. Her best friend says, “Go home, take a shower, do what you need to do. I’ll cover for you.” After all of that happened, she contacted us.

Now, I’m trying to reach this friend, this “best friend,” but she wouldn’t return my calls. My client was beside herself. She says, “But she told me that she would stand by me.” But this woman would not return my calls. I had no other choice but to take her deposition.

I asked her, “Did Mary confide in you about what X did to her? Did Mary tell you that X did Y to her?” All of her answers were “No.” She didn’t see anything; she didn’t hear anything; or she didn’t recall.

DL: When I was at the EEOC before I became a lawyer, I was an investigator and I was on the entertainment task force. Clarence Thomas, who of course is now in the U.S. Supreme Court, was the Chair of the EEOC at the time and he wanted the L.A. office to investigate the entertainment industry. I remember it was so difficult getting people to speak because they were afraid of retaliation. Hunter was also afraid of the backlash against her if she sued Spelling. Spelling, of course, was a big, big player in the entertainment industry. But what happened is that women thereafter came to support her and thank her and for what she did. Interestingly enough, after Hunter was terminated, she was replaced by another actress, Lisa Rinna. And Lisa and Heather Locklear both became pregnant while on “Melrose Place” and nothing happened to them – they were not terminated like Hunter Tylo LD: Interesting.

DL: It was a challenging case to litigate, but the result was worth it. We stood up for the rights of pregnant women, which made a measurable impact in Hollywood.

LD: You also have a background with sexual harassment and sexual discrimination cases in the employee setting. Can you talk to me a bit about that? Is that still an active part of your practice?

DL: Very much so. Unfortunately sexual harassment is still alive. One would think that with the #MeToo movement that primarily men, because there are women too, but primarily men would know not to misbehave, and they still do. So yes, it’s still a large part of our practice. I wrote a book many, many years ago, “Litigating Sexual Discrimination and Sex Harassment Cases.” They’re difficult to litigate because our clients have to relive what they went through.

I remember one case in particular, this was probably 20 years ago, but my client was working for this com-

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LD: Oh wow.

DL: My client is sitting there just balling, balling. Revictimized. Those are very, very difficult cases for that reason. Litigation takes a toll, a significant toll on my clients. Particularly in sex harassment cases, I believe.

LD: What happened with that case?

DL: It was resolved. About 90-95 percent of all cases get resolved before trial.

LD: That’s got to be such a challenge for you, too, to go through these narratives with clients who are suffering through these terrible moments all over again.

DL: The rewards are well worth it. When I speak to young law students and they want to know about employment law, my response is: This is what I call feel-good work. I get up in the morning and it feels good that I know I’m going to be helping people.

Even though the world may not change, even though there may still be horrific people out there, you’ll find that if you can represent someone and make their life a little bit easier, it’s well worth it. That’s what I tell these youngsters and it is feel-good work, and that’s why I’m still doing it.

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THIS IS WHAT I CALL FEEL-GOOD WORK. I GET UP IN THE MORNING AND IT FEELS GOOD THAT I KNOW I’M GOING TO BE HELPING PEOPLE. LD: How did you first get started in employment law?

DL: I graduated high school and I was ready to go to college. I got a call from the EEOC and another federal agency, I think it was the FAA, for an interview.

The FAA wasn’t interesting to me, but the EEOC was different – helping persons who were discriminated against sounded much more interesting. So, I started working at the EEOC when I was 17. I turned 18 a month later. I started off as a secretary in 1976, then three years later in ‘79, I became, I think the youngest investigator in the history of the EEOC. LD: Incredible.

DL: While I was at the EEOC, people would say, “Dolores, you’re too smart. You should go to law school.”

So I went to law school, I started in ‘84, finished in ‘87. Took the bar in February of ‘88. People ask me, “Would you ever consider going on the defense side?”

In other words, representing employers. My answer was always: absolutely not. I understand employers need representation and it’s good that there are some attorneys out there representing companies to ensure that they follow the laws and they comply with the laws.

But there are just so many individuals in need of justice, and their stories will be forgotten without someone to fight for them. I love what I do for that reason.

LD: What are you seeing coming out of the pandemic in terms of employee litigation?

DL: Here in California we shut down March 13th, Friday the 13th. I remember we closed shop and we all started working from home because there was a stay-at-home order. Soon after, the first cases that we started seeing were cases where the employers began using Covid as an excuse to terminate employees they wanted to terminate for other reasons. I immediately had cases where my clients were fired purportedly because of the pandemic, purportedly because business was suffering because of Covid. The real reason, the true motive behind the decision to fire was, in one of the first cases retaliation. My client had been complaining about some illegal activity occurring at the workplace. Then Covid hit and the employer said, “You know what? Because of the pandemic. Business is slow.” Luckily, my client

was in a position where she was aware that business was not slow. She knew that money was still coming in. I spoke with witnesses who also had information and it was just a bunch of hogwash. It wasn’t true. And that wasn’t the only employer using the pandemic as a pretextual reason to terminate my clients.

LD: And now?

DL: We’re pretty much still handling the same types of cases we had before, wrongful terminations based on a protected categories: race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, medical conditions, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, retaliation.. There are still a lot of sexual harassment cases. Before the lockdowns, we knew that come January of every year, there would be some sexual assault cases, women calling us because they were sexually assaulted during a company holiday party. That didn’t happen this year – employees were working from home LD: What advice to you have to employers to stymie the flow and minimize these issues in our workplaces?

DL: It starts from the top. Companies need to set proper standards and repeatedly advise employees that “we don’t tolerate sexual harassment,” and most importantly not just give it lip service.

Many years ago, I represented a group of women who were guards at a state facility, CDCR, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. They had previously worked at one facility, I’ll call it facility A, and the wards that they were supervising were minors, ages age 16 to 20. At facility A, whenever one of the wards misbehaved and tried to do something sexual in nature to the female guards, the warden at that facility took immediate action. So the wards, these minors, knew that if they misbehaved, they were going to be in trouble. Those clients of ours later transferred to another facility. At the second facility, these wards were allowed to do anything and everything they wanted without suffering any consequences. They did some really horrific stuff to our female clients. The warden in charge didn’t take any action. So, we sued. The message coming down from the top makes all the difference.

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Van Swearingen

Laurie Traktman

ROSEN BIEN SAN FRANCISCO

GILBERT & SACKMAN LOS ANGELES

Sean Tamura-Sato

Amelia Tuminaro

MINAMI TAMAK SAN FRANCISCO

GLADSTEIN REIF NEW YORK

James Roddy Tanner

Anne Vladeck

TANNER & ASSOCIATES FORT WORTH

VLADECK RASKIN NEW YORK

John C. Taylor

Michael Vogelsang

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

Michael Tedesco

Darlene Vorachek

TEDESCO LAW GROUP PORTLAND

ABRAHAMSON VORACHEK CHICAGO

Joyce Thomas

Sherrie Voyles

FRANK FREED SEATTLE

JACOBS BURNS CHICAGO

Peter Thompson

David Wachtel

MAINE EMPLOYEE RIGHTS GROUP PORTLAND, MAINE

TRISTER ROSS WASHINGTON, D.C.

Vincent Tong

Kenneth Wagner

TONG LAW OAKLAND

BLITMAN & KING SYRACUSE

Allan Townsend

Mark Walsh

MAINE EMPLOYEE RIGHTS GROUP PORTLAND, MAINE

GLEASON DUNN ALBANY

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Patrick Walsh

John West

STULBERG & WALSH NEW YORK

ALLRED MAROKO LOS ANGELES

Melissa Pierre-Louis Washington

Benjamin Westhoff

OUTTEN & GOLDEN WASHINGTON, D.C.

SEDEY HARPER ST. LOUIS

Natalie Weatherford

Peter Whelan

TAYLOR & RING MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIF.

BERNABEI & KABAT WASHINGTON, D.C.

Christine Webber

Twila White

COHEN MILSTEIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

LAW OFFICE OF TWILA WHITE LOS ANGELES

David Webbert

Douglas Wigdor

JOHNSON WEBBERT PORTLAND, MAINE

WIGDOR NEW YORK

Jessie Weber

Gregory Wiggins

BROWN GOLDSTEIN LEVY BALTIMORE

WIGGINS CHILDS BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

Stewart Weinberg

Gwynne Wilcox

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

Jillian Weiss

Alaine Williams

LAW OFFICES OF JILLIAN WEISS NEW YORK

WILLIG WILLIAMS PHILADELPHIA

James Weliky

James Williams

MESSING RUDAVSKY NEWTON, MASS.

CHEHARDY SHERMAN METAIRIE, LA.

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Timothy Williams

Melissa Woods

BERGER WILLIAMS SAN DIEGO

COHEN WEISS NEW YORK

Deborah Willig

Stephanie Yasuda

WILLIG WILLIAMS PHILADELPHIA

YOON LAW LOS ANGELES

Christopher Wilmes

Anne Yen

HUGHES SOCOL CHICAGO

WEINBERG ROGER ALAMEDA, CALIF.

Ashley Wilson Clark

Stephen Yokich

BUCKLEY BEAL ATLANTA

DOWD BLOCH CHICAGO

Janet Wise

Kenneth Yoon

SASS LAW FIRM TAMPA

YOON LAW LOS ANGELES

Micah Wissinger

Jeffrey Neil Young

LEVY RATNER NEW YORK

JOHNSON WEBBERT PORTLAND, MAINE

Ferne Wolf

Pearl Zuchlewski

SILVERSTEIN WOLF ST. LOUIS

KRAUS & ZUCHLEWSKI NEW YORK

Nicholas Woodfield THE EMPLOYMENT LAW GROUP WASHINGTON, D.C.

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Advocates for Workplace Fairness

Katherine Blostein Molly A. Brooks

Wendi S. Lazar

Kathleen Peratis

David Lopez

Gregory S. Chiarello

Cara E. Greene

Susan E. Huhta

Adam T. T. Klein Klein Adam

Tammy Marzigliano

Ossai Miazad

Laurence S. Moy

Wayne N. Outten

Amy F. Shulman

Justin M. Swartz

Melissa Pierre-Louis Washington

Jahan C. Sagafi Michael J. Scimone

Outten & Golden is honored to be so well represented among our esteemed colleagues on the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Employment Lawyers list.

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