June 21, 2001

Jonathan Hutson, TLPJ, 202-797-8600 x 246
Arthur H. Bryant, TLPJ, 510-622-8150 x 202

The TLPJ Foundation has named the attorneys who worked on eight outstanding cases as finalists for its 2001 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award. The award is bestowed annually upon the trial lawyer(s) who made the greatest contribution to the public interest by trying or settling a precedent-setting case in the past year. It is the single most prestigious honor given to trial lawyers. The winner will be announced in July at The TLPJ Foundation’s Annual Awards Dinner.

"These attorneys exemplify how trial lawyers use their skills and determination to create a more just society," said TLPJ Foundation President Peter Perlman of Lexington, Kentucky. "They serve as inspiring models for us all."

The finalists were nominated for their committed work in cases addressing a broad range of social issues, including pension plan fraud, employment discrimination, product safety, auto safety, tobacco litigation, international human rights, and environmental justice. This year’s finalists are listed alphabetically below.

• Michael J. Aguirre and Patricia A. Meyer of Aguirre & Meyer in San Diego, and Raymond P. Boucher of Kiesel Boucher & Larson in Beverly Hills, California, battled a corrupt pension plan administrator, powerful lawyers, and unscrupulous accountants in Murray v. Belka to achieve settlements providing full restitution for 340 consumers – most of them elderly – who had lost their life savings in an investment swindle. The case arose out of one of the largest frauds in California history, which operated for over a decade under the name "First Pension." The principals in the scheme pled guilty and served time, but no one thought the victims would ever recover their losses. The remarkable result achieved by these lawyers sent a strong message to accounting and legal professionals by forcing them to pay for their role in the fraud.
  

• San Francisco attorneys Angela M. Alioto of the Law Offices of Mayor Joseph L. Alioto & Angela Alioto and Paul B. Justi of the Law Offices of Paul B. Justi won a $133 million verdict in Brown v. Interstate Brands Corp. on behalf of 21 African-American employees who endured years of racial discrimination at an Interstate Brands Corporation (IBC) bakery in San Francisco. The African-American workers were never promoted, suffered constant racist slurs and epithets from managers and co-workers, were forced to use restrooms in a separate building, and were denied use of one of the company lunchrooms. The verdict represents an important victory against institutionalized racism in Corporate America.
  

• Robert E. Cartwright, Jr., of San Francisco’s Cartwright & Alexander won a $5.143 million settlement against Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Emerson Electric in Dendy v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., then doggedly pressed the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) until it mandated a recall of 3.7 million defectively designed radial arm saws. The recall resulted directly from evidence unearthed by Cartwright during ten years of litigation on behalf of Henry Dendy, an experienced woodworker whose right hand was severed as he attempted to turn off the saw. A saw blade guard would have prevented the injury. As a result of Cartwright’s hard work, hundreds if not thousands of injuries will never take place.
  

• Two teams of lawyers in related actions used novel legal theories to win default judgments and landmark damage awards in New York federal court against genocidal war criminal Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serb fascists, for his crimes against humanity. Judith Brown Chomsky, Jennifer Green, and Beth Stephens of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and Theresa Traber of Traber, Voorhees, & Olguin in Pasadena, California, won a more than  $4.5 billion verdict under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act in Doe v. Karadzic for acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity carried out by Bosnian-Serb forces under Karadzic’s control. Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon of the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Maria Vullo of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison won a $745 million verdict in Kadic v. Karadzic on behalf of Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim women and children subjected to genocidal sexual, and other atrocities by Serbian military forces under Karadzic’s command. Both cases expanded access to justice, making it possible for survivors of international crimes to control their own civil cases, and formed the legal basis for actions against corporations participating in human rights violations.
  

• Cyrus Mehri and Pamela Coukos of Mehri, Malkin & Ross in Washington, D.C., and H. Lamar Mixson, Jeffrey O. Bramlett, and Joshua Thorpe of Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore in Atlanta achieved a landmark settlement in Abdallah v. Coca-Cola Co. totaling $192.5 million – the largest ever in a race discrimination class action – to resolve a federal lawsuit filed in April 1999 by African-American employees of the Coca-Cola Company. The settlement requires Coca-Cola to pay the class $58.7 million in compensatory damages, $24.1 million in back pay, $10 million for promotional bonuses, and $43.5 in pay equity adjustments, as well as make sweeping programmatic reforms costing another $36 million. It also grants broad monitoring powers to a panel of outside experts jointly appointed by Coke and the plaintiffs’ lawyers – an extraordinary accomplishment. This historic settlement will have a long-lasting impact not only on the class members, but on other Coca-Cola employees and workers in other companies.
  

• Stanley M. Rosenblatt and Susan Rosenblatt of the Law Offices of Stanley M. Rosenblatt in Miami, Florida, won a precedent-shattering $145 billion punitive damages verdict in Engle v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. on behalf of some 500,000 Florida smokers in a products liability class action against the entire tobacco industry. This is the largest damages award in any case. The husband-and-wife team fought for seven years to achieve this remarkable result, securing three verdicts in the process. First, the jury found in July 1999 that smoking causes 20 diseases and that each of the nine defendant companies was liable for both negligence and intentional wrongdoing. Second, in April 2000, the jury found that the defendants’ misconduct had caused the injuries to the three class representatives and awarded them $12.7 million – the highest compensatory damages verdict ever in tobacco litigation. Third, the $145 billion punitive damages verdict came in July 2000. To keep the plaintiffs from challenging the constitutionality of a new Florida law that places a $100 million cap on appeal bonds, three defendants – Philip Morris, Lorillard, and Liggett – then agreed in May 2001 to pay $710 million regardless of the appeal’s outcome. The guarantee is the industry’s first major financial commitment directly to smokers.
  

• Solo practitioner Richard G. Roth and J. Scott McLain of Reed, Carrera & McLain, both of Edinburg, Texas, obtained a $102 million verdict in Timely Adventures, Inc. v. Coastal Mart, Inc. after an eight-year legal battle on behalf of individual homeowners and businesses in a Hispanic community whose property was contaminated by a Coastal Mart gas station’s under-ground storage tanks. The tanks leaked a virtual lagoon of gasoline and other toxic chemicals that floated on top of the groundwater about 20 to 30 feet below the properties of the gas station’s neighbors, in depths as much as four to five feet thick. Coastal Mart first discovered that its tanks were leaking in 1990 – after local and state officials did a soil boring and found gasoline – but Coastal Mart failed to notify its neighbors and just kept pumping gas. Up to 250,000 gallons of gasoline had leaked from the tanks over a seven-year period by the time Coastal Mart fixed the leaks in 1992. But the company never cleaned up the mess. These lawyers held the company accountable, winning both the verdict and a court order requiring the cleanup to start.
  

• C. Tab Turner of Turner & Associates in North Little Rock, Arkansas, obtained a multi-million dollar settlement from Ford Motor Company and Bridgestone/Firestone in Bailey v. Ford Motor Co., a high profile personal injury suit in Texas involving a horrific rollover accident in a Ford Explorer that occurred when the tread on a Firestone tire blew apart. Using information he had gathered from discovery in nearly 50 lawsuits over the ten years that the Explorer had been in production, Turner also played a crucial role in bringing the two companies to ac-count for their reckless design decisions, which had ultimately led to the August 9, 2000, Ford/Firestone recall announcement of 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and Wilderness tires. If not for Turner, the public would not know of Ford’s decision in 1989 to take the air out of the tires rather than correct design deficiencies that made Explorers prone to rollover. Nor would the public know that Ford’s decision to reduce the tire pressure below Firestone’s recommendations would cause the poorly designed tires to lose their tread and, in turn, cause the vehicle to roll. As part of the settlement, Turner forced Ford officials to publicly apologize to Bailey in her hospital room.

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Trial Lawyers for Public Justice is the only national public interest law firm dedicated to using trial lawyers’ skills and resources to advance the public good. Founded in 1982, TLPJ utilizes a nationwide network of more than 2,500 outstanding trial lawyers to pursue precedent-setting and socially significant litigation. It has a wide-ranging litigation docket in the areas of civil rights and liberties, consumer rights, worker safety, toxic torts, environmental protection, and access to the courts. TLPJ is the principal project of The TLPJ Foundation, a not-for-profit membership organization. It has offices in Washington, DC, and Oakland, CA. For more information on the Trial Lawyer of the Year Award and this year’s finalists, visit the TLPJ web site, www.publicjustice.net.