How a group of attor­neys col­lab­or­ated to land the largest set­tle­ment in L.A. County’s his­tory.

The group of law­yers who worked to secure a $4 bil­lion set­tle­ment from Los Angeles County for vic­tims of sex abuse sit down to dis­cuss how they set aside their egos to work together.

 

 

The mood was upbeat but relaxed, as if this group of attor­neys was reunit­ing for the first time since law school. Between sips of cof­fee and sneak­ing the occa­sional snack, the men traded jokes with each other and embraced one another as more than col­leagues but not quite broth­ers. It was seven lead­ing attor­neys, plus a cross sec­tion of their teams, reunit­ing in West­wood that morn­ing to sit down with the Busi­ness Journal and dis­cuss just how they brought their six firms together to extract a $4 bil­lion set­tle­ment from Los Angeles County earlier this year—the single largest fin­an­cial set­tle­ment in L.A. County’s his­tory.

To hear them tell the story, the true work – mak­ing sure this money mean­ing­fully makes a pos­it­ive impact to their thou­sands of cli­ents who detailed in their law­suits hor­rific sexual abuse while in the cus­tody of the county’s juven­ile deten­tion halls and foster care sys­tem – has only really just begun. And it may not be the last we see of this team, or of other col­lab­or­a­tions like it.

“I think this model, which we had to together for this type of case with these sig­ni­fic­ant injur­ies to these people, it’s much bet­ter to have a pro­fes­sional, col­legial, cooper­at­ive approach, which max­im­izes the res­ults for the cli­ents,” said Patrick McNich­olas of West­wood law firm McNich­olas & McNich­olas. “I think it also brings a lot of dig­nity in the pro­cess.”

 

 

Fig­ur­ing out the puzzle pieces

Every­one had their roles. Jim Lewis from the Beverly Hills office of Slater Slater Schul­man and Blake Wood­hall with the Cala­ba­sas out­post of Her­man Law were coleads for about 3,500 plaintiffs who’d resided at the infam­ous MacLaren Chil­dren’s Cen­ter in El Monte. Ray Boucher of Boucher LLP in Wood­land Hills and Danny Abir from ACTS Law in Encino worked on struc­tur­ing the set­tle­ment and its pay­outs. Todd Becker of Pas­adena-based Becker Law Group was the main point of con­tact with the county’s legal team. Boris Treyzon, also with ACTS, was the trial attor­ney that the county would have had to face in lieu of a set­tle­ment.

Among oth­ers on the team included Michael Car­ney, who man­ages Slater Slater’s local office and assisted Boucher and Abir; and Justin Felton, from Her­man Law, worked with the foster care plaintiffs. Bring­ing the team all together and coordin­at­ing every­one was McNich­olas, one of two broth­ers at the helm of the law firm their father foun­ded.

“Look­ing around the room, I can’t ima­gine this get­ting done without each and every single per­son par­ti­cip­at­ing and at some point adding something extremely valu­able,” Treyzon said. “Every­body here is a known (fig­ure) in this com­munity. This was an unpre­ced­en­ted cooper­at­ive under­tak­ing, because there’s a lot of egos on both sides and we all had to put it away for the bene­fit of the cli­ents.”

Col­lect­ively, this group rep­res­en­ted approx­im­ately 80% of the plaintiffs, who had filed suit with the county over the sexual abuse claims. The law­suits were filed in 2022 – within the con­text of a 2020 state law open­ing a three-year win­dow to file these claims, regard­less of the stat­ute of lim­it­a­tions. While the team never wrote off the pos­sib­il­ity of a trial, it focused on the goal of a set­tle­ment.

“Over a period of time, it became obvi­ous that the lead coun­sel (for the county) was look­ing to facil­it­ate a res­ol­u­tion,” McNich­olas recalled, “and at a cer­tain point in time, it became more cooper­at­ive than adversarial.”

As the team of plaintiffs’ attor­neys coalesced and began to gel, two rules came to define what united them and their approach. The first was obvi­ous: fight zeal­ously for their cli­ents. At the same time, the group came to terms with the fact that it was in no one’s interest to fin­an­cially ruin L.A. County.

“We wanted to max­im­ize the amount of money that we could get without put­ting the county into bank­ruptcy, and so it became a bal­ance of afford­ab­il­ity on one side versus max­im­iz­ing justice for our cli­ents on the other side,” Becker explained. The team spent about 25 din­ners with the county’s legal team from Glaser Weil, “where we really flushed out how much money we could really achieve and then how that would work, and then we came up with that strategy of how to get to the fin­ish line.”

That fin­ish line was this: $4 bil­lion for most of the claims, which occurred primar­ily in the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s within MacLaren or the county’s pro­ba­tion depart­ment facil­it­ies. It will be paid out throughout a five-year period, fin­anced in com­bin­a­tion from county reserves, future budget cuts and bonds – the lat­ter of which the county expects to pay for through 2051.

This amount sig­ni­fic­antly dwarfs prior sex abuse set­tle­ments – Boy Scouts of Amer­ica paid $2.46 bil­lion, while the Arch­diocese of Los Angeles paid $1.5 bil­lion. It is also the single largest fin­an­cial set­tle­ment in L.A. County’s his­tory.

Treyzon said it was a “white-knuckle” jour­ney right up until the moment the Board of Super­visors approved the set­tle­ment. Absent from the set­tle­ment’s announce­ments was of course any indic­a­tion of just how much work this took. Asked for any sort of quan­ti­fic­a­tion of bil­lable hours the team amassed, they all simply laughed.

What is clear is that the team had a line in the sand.

“Can­didly, if (the county) hadn’t come to the point where they did, we would have walked away,” Boucher said. “It was a battle. It was not a couple of swing and misses and then you finally get a hit. It was a battle.”

Keep­ing every­one on the same page

By their own admis­sion, it was out of the ordin­ary to have a group of plaintiffs’ attor­neys – mostly from dif­fer­ent, com­pet­ing firms – come together to close this case. To be clear, it didn’t start out that way. “Our firm was pretty adam­ant that the struc­ture of the set­tle­ment would not be all three group­ings (of law­suits) together,” said Lewis, of Slater Slater, “but over time, based on our con­tinu­ous meet­ings and dis­cus­sions both of the county and then intern­ally with this group here at the table, we all saw the best way for­ward – and maybe the only way for­ward – was to try to resolve all three pieces of lit­ig­a­tion at the same time.”

It appeared to help that, to some degree, every­one was at least famil­iar with each other.

Boucher and McNich­olas actu­ally squared off against each other in a sim­ilar case years ago, when Boucher took the Arch­diocese of Los Angeles to task for its alleg­a­tions of priest abuses. McNich­olas, rep­res­ent­ing the arch­diocese, ulti­mately hammered out a set­tle­ment with Boucher.

“That back­drop was really help­ful to get­ting a deal done with the county,” McNich­olas noted.

This did not stop ten­sions from flar­ing up. When asked about a sub­stan­tial internal dis­agree­ment the team had to work through, Treyzon asked if the answer should chron­icle hourly or daily incid­ents. The table erup­ted in laughter.

Attor­neys – espe­cially plaintiffs’ attor­neys – are known for their egos, Treyzon read­ily admit­ted, and his­tor­ic­ally remain adversarial when they are com­pet­ing in the same large cases. However, this time was a bit dif­fer­ent. Car­ney quipped that this group was a “hip­pie com­mune” as com­pared to the norm. Lewis recalled that when the team wasn’t in the same room together, it remained in con­stant com­mu­nic­a­tion.

That ulti­mately greased the wheel for when dis­agree­ments arose.

It was not a couple of swing and misses and then you finally get a hit. It was a battle.

RAY BOUCHER

Boucher LLP

“I don’t think it’s an exag­ger­a­tion to say every single day we were in nego­ti­ation, internally amongst us, there was some issue that we had dis­agree­ment on – and some very strong dis­agree­ment,” Boucher said, “and it took nego­ti­at­ing, to get­ting up out of the con­fer­ence room and going into one room or going into a dif­fer­ent room. Shuttle dip­lomacy took on a whole new meet­ing.

“I think the biggest dif­fer­ence,” he added, “was that it’s the first massive nego­ti­ation I’ve been in where I don’t think there was any moment in any meet­ing over the last 12 to 18 months where, on either the plaintiff side or the defense side, some­body’s ego got in the way.”

How to move for­ward

Car­ney of Slater Slater didn’t mince words: this case still hasn’t ended.

“It’s nowhere close to end­ing,” he said. “The vast major­ity of our cli­ents are going to get their pay­ments in install­ments over the next five years, and that means we’re going to have to be work­ing with them, watch­ing them, tak­ing care of them, for the next five years, and then bey­ond that as well.”

For myriad reas­ons, some cli­ents will opt for quicker one-time pay­ments, while oth­ers will take the annu­it­ized checks. Many remain in pre­cari­ous liv­ing situ­ations – home­less, incar­cer­ated or in rehab­il­it­a­tion

facil­it­ies. And then there are con­cerns about stew­ard­ship of the funds. Abir recalled a sep­ar­ate, unre­lated cli­ent, who in the span of a year had blown through the major­ity of a set­tle­ment in excess of $1 mil­lion.

Some cli­ents are simply hard to track down. Wood­hall from Her­man Law explained that on the morn­ing of this inter­view, he’d just vis­ited one cli­ent at a rehab hos­pital in Glendora. It was only then that he was able to inform that cli­ent of the set­tle­ment.

The set­tle­ment is not just a vic­tory of award­ing dam­ages to cli­ents. Wood­hall added that it is a val­id­a­tion of the trust they put in each other and their attor­neys to chal­lenge the county.

“They don’t trust any­body because they’ve been failed over and over and over again, con­stantly and con­sist­ently,” he said. “We’ve been speak­ing with the cli­ents recently regard­ing the set­tle­ment; lot of times they don’t believe it. They’ll say, ‘Are you sure? Is this really hap­pen­ing?’ because of, again, that lack of trust, and it’s com­pletely under­stand­able. It’s neat to see that, in a sense, even their abil­ity to trust someone is being renewed because some­body fought for them and gave them that voice, and they’re now going to use it.”

Car­ney added, “They’ve got a long way to go, and so hope­fully they can put that money towards hap­pi­ness, coun­sel­ing, whatever they can do to get their lives back on track. And for all of us here, it may be a set­tle­ment – it may be the biggest one of all time – but hon­estly, our work is just get­ting star­ted. We have more work from here than we’ve put in so far.”

This col­lab­or­a­tion may not be a one-off. Already, dif­fer­ent com­bos of the attor­neys here are work­ing together on other large plaintiffs’ suits, such as those against Edison Inter­na­tional for the Eaton fire.

“I think any­time you have a group of people who are so con­cerned about sur­viv­ors, interests, cli­ent interests, we’re going to end up in a room together work­ing again,” said Felton, of Her­man Law. “And I think the one thing that does bring us all together with our dif­fer­ent back­grounds is cli­ent cent­ric, set­tle­ment focus.”

Abir, who is man­aging part­ner of ACTS Law, con­curred that we were likely to see “the band get back together,” so to speak.

“As a res­ult of this and the way every­body works so well together, there’s no reason why we won’t do this in the future,” he said. “Maybe this is a model of show­ing how well – when you bring dif­fer­ent people with dif­fer­ent back­grounds and dif­fer­ent abil­it­ies together – you’re able to accom­plish something.”

This is an unpre­ced­en­ted cooper­at­ive under­tak­ing, because there’s a lot of egos on both sides and we all had to put it away.

BORIS TREYZON

ACTS Law

Source: Los Angeles Business Journal

Image Source: Los Angeles Business Journal