Public Justice Announces Finalists for 2024 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award
Each year, Public Justice is proud to present its Trial Lawyer of the Year Award to the trial attorney or legal team who made the greatest contribution to the public interest within the past year by trying or settling a socially significant case.
This year’s finalists for Public Justice’s 2024 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award include an incredible group of attorneys across the country, who took on landmark cases that address worker safety, price fixing, human rights violations, and egregious corporate misconduct on an international scale, ensuring that companies can’t get away with putting profit over people.
We’re proud to recognize these extraordinary legal advocates, for their tenacious work on behalf of justice for all.
In re Capacitors Antitrust Litigation:
The legal team in this case secured nearly $605 M in total settlements from 22 Japanese and American corporations that allegedly conspired to fix prices in the multi-billion-dollar capacitor market. Capacitors, which store electronic energy, are an essential part of nearly every consumer electronic appliance, from cell phones to cars.
The legal team filed the case in 2014 on behalf of a class of American companies that purchased capacitors directly from the defendants for resale or use in their own products, thus passing on these overcharges to consumers. The Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP, was appointed lead counsel. Between 2017 and 2020, the plaintiffs reached four rounds of settlements with 17 of the defendants. The final round of settlements was reached only after the case was tried to a jury—twice—once in 2020 and one in 2021.
The first trial before a jury began in March 2020. Class plaintiffs presented their case for two weeks before the trial was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite considerable efforts by counsel and the court to continue with the same jury—including preparations for a remote trial—the court declared a mistrial in June 2020. A new trial took place in November-December 2021, one of the few civil jury trials to be tried during the pandemic. Plaintiffs reached settlements totaling $165 M with the remaining defendants shortly before a verdict was to have been rendered in the second trial. The court granted final approval in January 2023—nine years after the first case was filed—bringing the total settlements in the case to $604.55 M. This exceeded the actual damages incurred by the class by 38%—which almost never happens in antitrust cases.
To achieve these monumental civil settlements, the legal team overcame enormous challenges, which included identifying price-fixing cartel participants without the benefit of public disclosures; reviewing over 40 M documents (most of which were in Japanese); reviewing over seven million transactions to calculate a reliable damage estimate; taking 100+ depositions around the world, including many in Japanese and other foreign languages; surviving three rounds of motions to dismiss, successfully responding to numerous Daubert and summary judgment motions; and obtaining and maintaining class certification notwithstanding a petition for review to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and two subsequent motions to decertify the class. Bringing the case to trial involved synthesizing years of evidence in order to present a cohesive, compelling narrative and a winning argument for a jury of ordinary citizens not conversant in the minute details of capacitors manufacturing, pricing, and distribution, nor with cartel behavior.
The case highlights the importance of private enforcement of the antitrust laws to bring about economic justice. It demonstrates that antitrust plaintiffs, represented by expert antitrust trial lawyers, can and will use the jury system to protect consumers, workers, and small businesses from those who violate antitrust laws in the United States.
Team Members for In re Capacitors Antitrust Litigation:
Joseph Saveri – Joseph Savieri Law Firm, LLP
Cadio R. Zirpoli – Joseph Savieri Law Firm, LLP
Christopher K.L. Young – Joseph Savieri Law Firm, LLP
Eric L. Cramer – Berger Montague
Mark Russell Suter – formerly of Berger Montague
Ruthanne Gordon – formerly of Berger Montague
C. Andrew Dirksen – Cera LLP
Austin B. Cohen – Levin Sedran & Berman LLP
Anupama Reddy – Google (formerly of Joseph Saveri Law Firm)
Joshua P. Davis – Berger Montague
Keith J. Verrier – Levin Sedran & Berman LLP
Michael Jay Kane – Berger Montague
Jason S. Hartley – Hartley LLP
James G.B. Dallal – Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy LLP
Steven Williams – Steven Williams Law P.C.
Adkisson v. Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc.:
Three days before Christmas in 2008, a coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA)Kingston Fossil Plant collapsed. When the pond ruptured, around 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash were spilled into an area covering 300 acres. The coal ash contained concentrated levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, nickel, vanadium, and radioactive materials. It was the largest industrial disaster in U.S. history.
TVA hired private corporation Jacobs Engineering Group to handle the cleanup. Jacobs did not inform its workers about the dangers they faced in the cleanup, and it even falsely told them that coal ash exposure was “safe.” It did not provide workers with adequate protective gear, and several workers were fired for requesting basic PPE like respiratory masks. Jacobs also did not provide areas for workers to “decontaminate” after their shifts, so they brought the coal ash home with them. By the time the job was done, hundreds of workers had developed serious medical conditions directly related to their exposure to the coal ash at the site.
The injured workers began to bring lawsuits against Jacobs. The plaintiffs’ cases were filed in four waves. This case, Adkisson v. Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc., was the first to be filed, on August 22, 2013. Shortly thereafter, many other cases were filed and consolidated with Adkisson, forming the first wave of coal ash cases. In the ensuing years more complaints were filed, forming three additional waves of plaintiffs. In total, the plaintiffs’ team of attorneys—which included seven separate firms—filed 16 complaints on behalf of a total of 338 plaintiffs, including remediation workers, their next of kin (in cases of wrongful death), and their spouses.
The court bifurcated the Adkisson mass action into two phases—Phase I was to address causation, and Phase II was to address liability. After the Phase I trial, the jury concluded that Jacobs’ misconduct had caused 10 different medical conditions suffered by plaintiffs (including coronary artery disease, multiple forms of cancer, peripheral neuropathy, numerous respiratory conditions, and other conditions). Before the trial in Phase II, the parties reached a confidential settlement following months of negotiations. This settlement concluded the litigation for all waves in June 2023, and provided significant monetary relief to all the impacted workers, as well as lasting injunctive relief.
Over the course of nearly ten years of litigation, the plaintiffs’ legal team fought against a multi-billion-dollar global engineering firm and opposing counsel from some of the nation’s best law firms. The legal team engaged in countless briefing and discovery disputes; took and defended hundreds of depositions (including over 200 within a two-and-half-month period enforced by the court during the early stages of the COVID pandemic); won the four-week Phase I trial; worked with numerous experts; engaged in mediation sessions and settlement negotiations over months; and met with and obtained settlement approval from the hundreds of clients. The team also handled briefing and argument on multiple appeals, including two before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and one in the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Team Members for Adkisson v. Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc.:
Gregory F. Coleman – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Adam A. Edwards – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Mark E. Silvey – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Louis W. Ringger, III – Davis, Johnston, & Ringger, P.C.
William A. Ladnier – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Virginia Whitener – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Kelsey Davies – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Gary A. Davis – Davis, Johnston, & Ringger, P.C.
James S. Whitlock – formerly of Davis, Johnston, & Ringger, P.C.
Jeff Friedman – Friedman, Dazzio & Zulanas, P.C.
Keith D. Stewart – formerly of Dunn, MacDonald & Reynolds
John B. Dupree – Bridgefront Law Group
John Tyler Roper – formerly of Market Street Law, PLLC
Jim Scott – formerly of Market Street Law, PLLC
Alex R. Straus – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Arthur M. Stock – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Jonathan B. Cohen – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Ryan P. McMillan – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Justin G. Day – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
Lisa A. White – Mason LLP Attorneys at Law
Alexandra M. Honeycutt – Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, LLC
John Doe I v. Exxon Mobil Corp.:
After 22 years of litigation, a small but tenacious band of litigators succeeded in holding the massive multinational corporation Exxon Mobil (“Exxon”) accountable for atrocities committed by its contractors while it turned a blind eye for the sake of profits. The case exposed horrific human rights abuses, including sexual assault, torture, kidnapping, and murder committed by Exxon contractors in a rural Indonesian village, and is a shining example for how foreign tort law can be used to hold multinational abusers to account in U.S. courts.
In 2001, 11 villagers filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court alleging that Exxon contracted with Indonesian soldiers to guard its operations in rural Aceh, Indonesia, and that those soldiers abused their power for years, inflicting horrific abuses on the villagers and their families. Plaintiffs saw family members shot to death, a woman who was forced to jump up and down repeatedly while eight months pregnant and was then sexually assaulted, and men were detained and subjected to electric shocks, amputation of limbs, and other torture at facilities within Exxon’s gas exploration area. The villagers alleged that Exxon knew about the violence but failed to take reasonable steps to supervise the soldiers.
The case was part of a first wave of cases filed under the Alien Tort Statute and presented many complex novel legal issues—of jurisdiction, justiciability and political question, comity, extraterritoriality, due process, the collateral order doctrine, foreign affairs preemption, forum non-conveniens, and conflict of laws. Its journey through the U.S. court system took two trips to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and one trip to the U.S. Supreme Court (where review was denied). The claims eventually proceeded in U.S. federal court under Indonesian law.
The plaintiffs’ team, led by Agnieszka Fryszman, developed a strategy based on the transitory tort doctrine, which allows lawsuits to be brought in U.S. courts against defendants that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, no matter where the injuries took place. The case pioneered the use of foreign tort law against multinational corporations and has provided a roadmap for litigators ever since.
The plaintiffs also faced significant practical hurdles. Witnesses were afraid to come forward for fear of retaliation. The isolated rural villagers lacked modern communications equipment, and most could not read or write. One judge, four plaintiffs, and several eyewitnesses passed awayduring the course of the case. Then there were natural disasters, including 2004’s deadly Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Defense counsel left no stone unturned: the docket contains close to a thousand filings. Exxon asked the court to dismiss plaintiffs’ claims nine times, filed six motions to stay, and attempted to modify or dissolve the protective order that protected the plaintiffs’ identities six times. The parties briefed summary judgment twice, once under U.S. law, and again under Indonesian law. The summary judgment filings contained over one thousand exhibits, along with testimony from 43 depositions. The parties filed multiple expert reports from seven experts on Indonesian law, former U.S. State Department officials, security experts for extractive industries, and a historian and former Amnesty International staffer who was an expert on the history of Aceh, Indonesia.
When it denied Exxon’s first summary judgment motion in August 2008, the court held that the abuses inflicted by the security guards were foreseeable and that there was sufficient evidence that Exxon had requested security forces who were “dedicated exclusively” to its operations and had a “right to control” those security forces. Then, when the court decided Exxon’s final motion for summary judgment in August 2022, it issued an 86-page opinion in favor of the plaintiffs,documenting in detail the long record of human rights abuses committed by the Indonesian soldiers contracted to provide security for Exxon’s operations.
Trial was set for May 23, 2022. As the legal team made plans to bring the 11 plaintiffs to the U.S.—many of whom had never traveled outside rural Indonesia—settlement talks began. The case resolved just two weeks before trial. The amount of the settlement is sealed for the plaintiffs’ personal safety. The summary judgment opinion and settlement together achieved the plaintiffs’ goals of documenting the truth of what happened, of holding Exxon accountable, and enabling the surviving family members to provide better lives for their children and grandchildren.
The case and its resolution received world-wide press coverage and has been the subject of dozens of law review articles. The comprehensive account of the atrocities in the trial court’s summary judgment opinion contributed to the historical record that was being compiled by the Truth and Reconciliation effort in Aceh, Indonesia.
As one plaintiff said, “the settlement delivers the justice we have spent two decades fighting for and has been life-changing for me and my family. I am glad we did not give up the fight and Cohen Milstein ensured that our voices were heard.”
Team Members for John Doe I v. Exxon Mobil Corp. case:
Agnieszka M. Fryszman – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Paul L. Hoffman – Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes, LLP
Leslie Mitchell Kroeger – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Kit A. Pierson – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Terry Collingsworth – International Rights Advocates
Anthony DiCaprio – DiCaprio Alternative Dispute Resolution
Robert W. Cobbs – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Llezlie Green – Georgetown Law (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Nicholas J. Jacques – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Kathleen M. Konopka – Global Health Advocacy Incubator (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Brent W. Landau – The Public Interest Law Center (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Maureen McOwen – Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Allyson Ford Ouoba – American University Washington College of Law (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Marka Peterson – Strategic Organizing Center (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Poorad Razavi – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Sharon K. Robertson – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
Thomas Saunders – U.S. Attorneys’ Office, District of Columbia (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Bede Sheppard – Human Rights Watch (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Rita Siemion – U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Matiangai Sirleaf – University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (formerly of Cohen Milstein)
Nada S. Sulaiman – Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC
