Behind the recent settlements of two high-profile lawsuits against Toyota Motor Corp. are a couple of Orange County’s top trial attorneys.
Mark Robinson Jr. and Wylie Aitken are longtime litigators who have guided their firms to national reputations over the course of decades.
They’ve each spent good parts of the past two-and-a-half years navigating various aspects of cases against the Japanese automaker over sudden, unintended acceleration in its vehicles and subsequent recalls totaling more than 8 million cars worldwide.
The Toyota cases are the latest that highlight the OC lawyers’ areas of expertise.
A deeper look lends some perspective on the local plaintiffs bar.
“It’s vibrant,” according to Robinson, senior partner of Newport Beach-based Robinson Calcagnie Robinson Shapiro Davis Inc. “We’re busy, like with this Toyota case. We’re not L.A., but … even in OC, you can have a larger plaintiffs’ firm.”
28 Lawyers
Robinson started the firm in 1978 and has seen it grow to 28 lawyers, maintaining a focus on personal injury and product liability cases. He will start next month as this year’s president of the OC chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates, a group with 6,700 members nationwide.
Robinson has a leading role in the Toyota case. He is co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the wrongful death and personal injury case against the automaker, which has its U.S. sales and marketing headquarters in Tor-rance. The case, Van Alfen v. Toyota, settled last week for an undisclosed amount.
“We’re proud to have worked on that case,” Robinson said. “This took a lot of work, over 30 months of constant work. Keep in mind, it’s not done yet. There are other cases out there, and I still have an obligation to the court. At least we got this first big hurdle out of the way now.”
Robinson is no stranger to car cases. He won a $128 million jury award for the landmark “Pinto” case against Ford Motor Co. in the 1970s, over what was found to be the automaker’s negligence in regard to a defective fuel system design. Robinson counts other wins against General Motors Co. and Hyundai Motor Co.
He also has represented plaintiffs against pharmaceutical companies, including Merck & Co., a mainstay of Big Pharma.
Philip Morris
Ongoing work includes a consumer-fraud class-action suit against cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris USA Inc., with a trial scheduled for April.
“We’re very careful in our firm about which cases we take,” Robinson said. “We look at thousands of cases to take a hundred. A lot of them are serious injury cases, and more recently we’ve seen that there are multiple cases due to similar defects, like Toyota.”
Robinson’s work on the latest Toyota deal overlapped with Aitken’s.
The founding partner of Santa Ana-based Aitken Aitken Cohn represented plaintiffs in a separate case against Toyota—the “economic side” of things, as opposed to the “individual injury or death cases,” he said.
The class of plaintiffs is comprised of secondary car dealers and individual vehicle owners with claims that they have suffered a loss on the value of their cars in connection to the massive recalls over 2009 and 2010. That case was settled late December, when the automaker agreed to pay $1.1 billion for economic damages.
“So that’s basically been resolved,” Aitken said. “The class will get some cash payments or extended warranties. [Toyota] also paid an additional $200 million toward attorneys’ fees and costs that were incurred during the cases.”
Not Over
These two settlements, though big steps, are far from ending the litigation against Toyota, which involves law firms and attorneys nationwide.
These are “bellwether cases,” Aitken said, referring to an approach utilized by courts when dealing with large numbers of plaintiffs around similar claims. Toyota still faces many other suits, including an unfair business practice case brought by 28 state attorneys general.
“There are cases pending all over the U.S., [including] an action in Texas, Florida, L.A. and New York,” Aitken said. “I’ll continue to be a liaison with the court.”
Aitken Aitken Cohn is an eight-person boutique firm primarily focused on personal injury.
“We often do a lot of crossover work among ourselves,” Aitken said. “Rich Cohn, the son of a doctor, likes medical legal issues and malpractice issues. I do a lot of bad-faith insurance and punitive-damage work.”
Sons
Aitken’s sons, Darren and Chris, who both work at the firm, have handled product liability cases involving unsafe vehicles and amusement park accidents, including the 1998 Disneyland incident, in which a metal cleat that came loose from a ride hit and killed a guest.
“You hear terms like litigators, trial lawyers, and they have a certain meaning,” Aitken said. “Trial lawyers work in the civil field, not in criminal defense or prosecution. They work with plaintiffs, who can be individuals or businesses.”
Another distinction is that trial lawyers primarily work on a contingency basis and get paid only if they win, usually between 20% and 30% of the resulting amount.
The decision by the federal court system to assign the Toyota case to U.S. Judge James Selna’s courtoom in Santa Ana was another reflection of the strength of the OC legal community, Aitken said.
“We’re well-known in this particular field of law, and the case was on our local turf,” he said. “We have a great bench. Many of these big litigation cases have ended up in OC. We’re a big business community, and we have judges who understand these very complex cases.”
Callahan & Blaine has seen no shortage of big business litigation cases. The Santa Ana-based trial law firm has 28 attorneys who work for plaintiffs, as well as on behalf of companies.
“We handle business cases, we handle municipal liability cases, [and] we do a lot of class-action defense for large companies,” said Edward Susolik, a partner at the firm who specializes in insurance law.
The firm counts several record-breaking jury verdicts and settlements, including a $934 million verdict in 2003—the actual settlement was later reduced to $23 million—for Beckman Coulter Inc., a Brea-based medical instruments maker. Beckman won a case that charged Flextronics International Inc. had breached a contract to supply circuit boards to be used in medical testing devices. Callahan & Blaine more recently reached a $38 million settlement for a class of newspaper carriers against the Orange County Register and its Irvine-based parent company Freedom Communications Inc.
Niches
The OC plaintiffs bar includes firms with different profiles and niches.
The local body of lawyers is represented through organizations such as Laguna Hills-based Orange County Trial Lawyers Association. The group is made up of numerous local law firms ranging in size, including the Law Offices of Douglas W. Schroeder in Costa Mesa, Irvine-based Cooper Law Firm and Newport Beach-based AlderLaw PC.
“Looking at trial lawyers as an organization … in the mid-1970s, we were basically a teaching organization, teaching trial skills and how to communicate with jurors,” Aitken said. “They have banded together locally, statewide and nationally a number of years ago, due to the fact you could win in the courtroom but lose in the legislature or Congress. So we got involved politically as well.”
Common Goal
The common goal among trial attorneys remains “helping keep an even playing field for businesses,” according to Aitken.
“One of the benefits of being a trial lawyer is that it’s not just the individual you represent; it’s about their future conduct,” he said. “Toyota will be more careful, keeping with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and inform all that’s going on. So theoretically, if we do a really great job, someday we’ll work ourselves out of business.”
