Trial Lawyer of the Year finalists will be honored at the 25th Anniversary Gala July 17 at Chicago's Field Museum.

The Public Justice Foundation has named the attorneys who worked on eight outstanding cases as finalists for its 2007 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award. The nationally prestigious award is bestowed annually on the trial lawyer or legal team who made the greatest contribution to the public interest by trying or settling a precedent-setting case. The winner will be announced on July 17, 2007, at the Public Justice Foundation's 25th Anniversary Awards Dinner and Gala in Chicago.

"The variety of cases and the scope of settlements and verdicts prove, once again, that trial lawyers are vital to the protection of citizen rights and in securing justice for the poor, the wronged and the powerless," said Public Justice Foundation President Alan Brayton of BraytonvPurcell, LLP, in Novato, Calif.

The finalists - 37 lawyers among the eight cases - were nominated for their committed work in cases addressing a broad range of social issues, including workers' rights, environmental protection, juvenile justice reform, and the rights of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita victims.

This year’s finalists and synopses of their cases are listed alphabetically below:

• W. Craig Bashein of Cleveland's Bashein & Bashein Co., L.P.A, along with his co-counsel, Paul W. Flowers of Cleveland's Paul Flowers Co., L.P.A., John Smalley of Dayton's Dyer, Garofalo, Mann & Schultz, and Patrick J. Perotti and Patrick T. Murphy of Painesville, Ohio's Dworken & Bernstein Co, LPA, for Santos v. Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. The Santos team recovered $52 million in a class action on behalf of injured Ohio workers who were required to reimburse the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation for funds they collected from insurance companies or third parties in connection with their injuries - a practice known as "subrogation."
  
  

• Frederick H. Cohen, David J. Chizewer, Chad A. Blumenfield and Ann H. Chen of Chicago's Goldberg Kohn Bell Black Rosenbloom & Moritz, Ltd.; Samuel B. Cole and Michele M. Fox of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago; and Paul Gaynor, David J. Adams and Anne R.K. Reader of the Illinois Attorney General's Office for United States ex rel. Tyson v. Amerigroup Corporation. In a record-breaking verdict, the jury awarded $48 million in damages and found that Amerigroup had submitted 18,130 false HMO claims to the federal and state governments. When the jury's award was trebled and penalties were added by the court, the total judgment against Amerigroup was $334,365,000.
  
  

• Brent W. Coon of Brent Coon & Associates of Beaumont, TX for Rowe v. BP Amoco Chemical Company in which plaintiffs were awarded significant, confidential settlements and BP was required to make charitable donations of at least $32 million to help improve worker safety and health care and release seven million pages of sealed corporate documents exposing BP's misconduct in connection with one of the worst refinery disasters in U.S. history. The March 23, 2005, an explosion and fire in Texas City, TX claimed 15 lives and injured hundreds more. Most of the victims were employees of the J.E. Merit Constructors, a contractor with BP.
  
  

• Kelly M. Dermody of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein LLP in San Francisco, Sidney A. Backstrom of the Scruggs Law Firm in Oxford, Mississippi, and Edward D. "Chip" Robertson, Jr. of Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny in Jefferson City, MO for Dancer v. Catholic Healthcare West. The team won final court approval of a class action settlement providing refunds and discounts worth $423 million to more than 780,000 uninsured patients who had been bilked by the hospital chain.
  
  

• Michael D. Donovan of Philadelphia's Donovan Searles, LLC, and co-counsel Judith L. Spanier of New York's Abbey Spanier Rodd Abrams & Paradis, LLP, and Rodney P. Bridgers, Jr. of Denver's Franklin D. Azar & Associates, P.C. for Hummel v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., winning overtime pay for 186,000 current and former Wal-Mart and Sam's Club employees in Pennsylvania who had been wrongfully denied pay for extra hours they worked. After five weeks of trial, a Philadelphia jury awarded the hourly workers $78 million, covering over eight years of documented off-the-clock work hours and rest break violations.
  
  

• Paula Pearlman, Shawna Parks, and Heather McGunigle of the Disability Rights Legal Center; Robert Mann and Donald Cook of the Law Offices of Robert Mann and Donald Cook; Cynthia Anderson-Barker of the Law Office of Cynthia Anderson-Baker; and Robert K. Lu, Maria P. Hoye, Aaron G. Murphy and Jennifer K. Ing of Latham & Watkins, all of Los Angeles, CA for John Doe 2 v. County of San Bernardino. As a result of settlements in the four-year class action, the three state agencies that are defendants in the case must overhaul how they work together to identify, treat, and educate youth with disabilities who are detained in juvenile halls.
  
  

• Stephen E. Ronfeldt of The Public Interest Law Project in Oakland, California, New York lawyers Howard O. Godnick, Jeffrey S. Sabin and Daniel L. Greenberg of Schulte, Roth & Zabel, and John C. Brittain of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law in Washington, DC for McWaters v. FEMA. On behalf of approximately 42,000 evacuee families living in 4,000 hotels across the country, the team won a precedent-setting ruling in that forced FEMA to continue to pay the hotel bills for hurricane evacuees until they are able to transition to permanent housing.
  
  

• Teresa Tico, a sole practitioner in Kauai, Hawaii, for Marvin v. Pflueger, in which Tico took on one of the state's most powerful land developers for destroying one local couple's home and killing the area's coral reef through illegal grading of land. Tico recovered damages for the couple and, as a result of the lawsuit, developer James Pflueger drew the largest penalty of any individual polluter in the history of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ($7.5 million); the largest fine ever from the Hawaii State Land Board ($4 million); and the most criminal convictions against an individual polluter in state history (10 felony convictions).
  
  To read full descriptions of the cases, click here.