For Immediate Release: Monday, June 22, 1998

For More Information Contact: TLPJ, 202-797-8600

1998 Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalists Announced

Trial Lawyers for Public Justice (TLPJ) has named the attorneys who worked on seven outstanding cases as finalists for its 1998 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award. The nationally prestigious award is bestowed annually upon the trial lawyer or lawyers who have made the greatest contribution to the public interest by trying or settling a precedent-setting case. The winner will be announced July 13 at The TLPJ Foundation's annual party.

"These attorneys exemplify how trial lawyers use their skills and determination to create a more just society," said TLPJ Foundation President Fred Baron of Dallas' Baron & Budd. "They serve as an inspiration to all of us."

The finalists were nominated for their committed work in cases addressing a broad range of social issues, including civil rights, consumer rights, workers' rights and corporate accountability. This year's finalists, in alphabetical order, are listed below:

•Bernie Bernheim of the Law Offices of Bernie Bernheim in Los Angeles scored an extraordinary victory for consumers in Taylor v. State Farm Insurance Co. when he uncovered a widespread scam at State Farm, and forced the insurance giant to settle his clients' claims for coverage under their homeowners' policy. Bernheim filed suit on behalf of Rod and Krista Taylor after State Farm denied that their policy covered the destruction of their home by an earthquake.

State Farm stonewalled discovery efforts, repeatedly requesting extensions to respond and then producing evasive witnesses who claimed not to recognize their own handwriting or voices. State Farm then moved for summary judgment on the basis of Rod Taylor's application for insurance, which did not include a request for earthquake coverage. Bernheim tried to convince the judge that Taylor's signature had been forged, but the judge granted State Farm's motion.

The judge later reversed his ruling based on information Bernheim uncovered. A few weeks after the court's ruling, a former claims manager in State Farm's litigation unit called Bernheim with information that revealed a company-wide scheme of fraud, forgery and perjury. Based on that information, the judge reversed his prior ruling and allowed the case to proceed. Bernheim then forced the insurance giant into a confidential settlement, rumored to be in excess of $7 million. Bernheim's single-handed efforts against State Farm exposed corporate crime and resulted in a great victory for consumers.

•Jon G. Carlson and Eric J. Carlson of Carlson Wendler & Associates in Edwardsville, Illinois; Chicago attorneys Devon C. Bruce and Todd A. Smith of Power, Rogers & Smith; Bruce Kohen and Curt Rodin of Anesi Ozmon & Rodin; Kevin J. Conway of Cooney & Conway; Geoffrey L. Gifford and Gary Laatsch of Pavalon & Gifford; Jeffrey M. Goldberg of Jeffrey M. Goldberg & Associates; William J. Harte of William J. Harte, Ltd.; Keith A. Hebeisen of Clifford Law Offices; Bruce R. Pfaff of Bruce R. Pfaff & Associates, Ltd.; Howard Schaffner of Hofeld & Schaffner; Kenneth Chesebro of Cambridge; Jonathan Massey of Washington, D.C.; Ned Miltenberg, Associate General Counsel for ATLA, Washington, D.C.; and Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe won a major victory for Illinois citizens and created an important precedent for injury victims nationwide by getting Illinois' Tort Reform Act struck down as unconstitutional in Best v. Taylor Machine Works, Inc. and Isbell v. Union Pacific Railroad Co. The law arbitrarily capped non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, at $500,000; abolished joint and several liability; and compelled plaintiffs to disclose all their medical records from the time of birth, regardless of their relevancy to the lawsuit.

The litigation sought a declaratory judgment to strike down the entire statute as unconstitutional, and was successful at the trial court level. Defendants then appealed directly to the Illinois Supreme Court, and the state's attorney general intervened on their behalf. Professor Tribe successfully argued the case before the Illinois Supreme Court.

In a landmark opinion, the court found Illinois' Tort Reform Act unconstitutional in its entirety, ruling that the law trespassed on the judiciary's domain and discriminated against plaintiffs who have suffered the most serious of injuries. This decision will not only benefit the plaintiffs in these cases – one of whom was killed at a dangerous railroad crossing and the other of whom was severely burned after becoming engulfed in a fireball while operating a defective forklift – but will help all injured plaintiffs in Illinois whose rights had nearly been eviscerated by the tort reform law.

•Michael V. Ciresi and Roberta B. Walburn of Robins Kaplan Miller & Ciresi in Minneapolis, and Minnesota Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III won $6.6 billion and unprecedented injunctive relief in the settlement of State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield v. Philip Morris Inc., et al., a milestone in the battle to hold the tobacco industry accountable for its decades-long campaign to deceive the public. Ciresi and his team sued the industry based on unique theories of liability under consumer protection and antitrust laws.

To achieve this remarkable settlement -- finalized the last day of the 4-month trial's closing arguments -- Ciresi's team reviewed more than 30 million pages of documents, the vast majority of which had never been produced in any tobacco lawsuit, and exposed the industry's concealment of scientific evidence of the link between smoking and disease. Ciresi's team also convinced the judge that 40,000 pages of documents withheld by the industry as attorney-client privileged should be made public, fighting the tobacco companies all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The $6.6 billion damages component of the settlement was the highest per capita against the tobacco industry by any state so far. The settlement also prohibited the industry from marketing cigarettes to children in Minnesota, making material misrepresentations regarding the health effects of tobacco, making contracts or conspiring to suppress information about the health effects of tobacco, marketing tobacco promotional items in Minnesota, and paying to use cigarettes in movies.

In addition, the settlement requires the industry to make previously concealed documents public, to dissolve the Council for Tobacco Research (an organization that actually suppressed findings about the health effects of tobacco), to establish a public health foundation in Minnesota, and to establish a national research account aimed at eliminating the use of tobacco products by children.

•Jeffrey P. Foote and Jana Toran of Portland, Oregon won a $7.65 million verdict against Toyota in McCathern v. Toyota Motor Co. for their client, who was seriously injured because of defects in Toyota's 4-Runner. Linda McCathern was a passenger in a 1994 Toyota 4-Runner that rolled over when the driver swerved to avoid a collision with an oncoming car. The roof collapsed on McCathern and she was rendered a quadriplegic. Arguing that the popular sport utility vehicle rolled over because a defective design made it unstable as a whole, they won the first verdict in the nation against Toyota's 4-Runner.

During trial, Foote and co-counsel Toran presented evidence of numerous similar rollover accidents and Toyota's own testing of the 4-Runner. A sole practitioner, Foote worked on the case nearly full-time for a year and a half, battling against a defendant that boasted having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the case. As a result of this victory, Toyota has settled all other 4-Runner cases approaching trial.

Following the verdict, Foote successfully represented McCathern in an effort to reunite her with her two daughters, who were kidnapped by her ex-husband and transported to Libya in 1988. Because Libya is an embargoed country, Foote had to work with the U.S. State Department and obtain permission from Moammar Ghadafi for McCathern to travel to Libya to see her children again.

•Mark Allen Kleiman of the Law Offices of Mark Allen Kleiman and BethAnne Yeager, both of Santa Monica, won justice for the victims of a vocational school's scheme to make profits by preying on the disadvantaged with false promises of quality education and career advancement in Flores v. Phillips College of Los Angeles. Lured to the paralegal program at Phillips College of Los Angeles by promises of high-paying jobs and the ability to transfer credits to public colleges, the nine plaintiffs in this case instead found that they had been defrauded by the school, part of a nationwide chain.

The school induced poor and intellectually challenged students to take out student loans to pay their tuition, enabling the corporation to line its pockets with the federally insured funds. After the students had committed themselves to paying back tens of thousands of dollars to the government, they found out that they could not get jobs or transfer their credits to public colleges.

Kleiman filed suit under common law, contract and fraud theories, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and the Maxine Waters Act. The defendant pursued a scorched earth defense, forcing Kleiman and his co-counsel to respond to nine separate summary judgment motions, file more than thirty discovery motions, take fifty depositions in nine states, review sixty feet of files, and contend with disappearing witnesses and the defendant's destruction of thousands of pages of corporate documents. Kleiman and Yeager labored through discovery for four years before the four-month trial in front of a judge who issued numerous unfavorable evidentiary rulings.

Despite these obstacles, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $4.2 million, including $3.3 million in punitive damages.

•Allan McGarvey and Roger Sullivan of McGarvey, Heberling, Sullivan & McGarvey in Kalispell, Montana, won an extraordinary settlement of more than $97 million for over 1,000 current and former employees of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in In Re Columbia Falls Profit Sharing Litigation.

In this classic David-and-Goliath battle, the employees accused Columbia Falls of welching on a profit-sharing agreement struck when Atlantic Richfield Company sold the struggling plant to one of its executives, Brack Duker, in 1985 for $1. Duker had agreed to share half the company's profits with the workers in exchange for their agreeing to substantial wage cuts. The plant's owners abided by the deal for a few years, but began to shortchange the workers when aluminum prices and profits soared. When one of the plant's accountants brought this to the attention of McGarvey and Sullivan, they went close to a million dollars in debt and spent six years and more than 10,000 of hours of work on the case before winning the $97 million settlement.

McGarvey and Sullivan successfully battled against the company's attempts to hide damaging documents, uncovering key admissions by Duker and fraudulent transfers of disputed assets into sophisticated foreign trusts. They then secured injunctions from both U.S. and foreign courts to prohibit further transfers of assets. Through the heroic efforts of the legal team and the courageous employees who risked their livelihoods, the "mighty men of commerce" were held accountable for their egregious scam.

•Matthew J. Piers and Jonathan A. Rothstein of Chicago's Gessler, Hughes & Socol saved more than 800 Hispanic families from losing their homes in predominantly white Addison, Illinois, in Hispanics United v. Village of Addison. Piers and Rothstein successfully advocated a novel application of federal anti-discrimination laws that also will prevent other municipalities from using similar tactics to force out minority residents.

The Village of Addison, under pressure from white owners of single family homes adjacent to the modest apartment buildings of Green Oaks Court and Michael Lane, designated those communities as "neighborhoods in need of redevelopment." Under this designation, the village created tax increment financing districts (TIFs), giving itself immense power to acquire and condemn these buildings under the guise of implementing its redevelopment plan. By the time Piers filed the lawsuit, the village already had acquired and demolished 11 of the 145 buildings, and 44 families had been evicted.

Over a three-year period, Piers and co-counsel Rothstein developed an original legal theory and advanced the factual side of the case from 100,000 pages of documents, 200 depositions, and over 100 witness interviews, ultimately bringing the village to the settlement table.

Hailed as the largest recovery under the federal Fair Housing Act, the village agreed to a consent decree which enjoins it from engaging in further acts of discrimination; requires it to develop parks, a community resource center, and new affordable housing in the two neighborhoods (collectively worth $20 to $30 million); and requires it to pay almost $2 million in damages.