Brian Panish and Adam Shea have been named among the 2024 Top 100 Lawyers by Daily Journal. The annual publication honors the top-performing 100 attorneys in California.
Mr. Panish, who served as co-lead counsel in both the Thomas Fire and the Woolsey Fire litigations, is no stranger to representing plaintiffs who have suffered loss due to utility company negligence. As highlighted in Mr. Panish’s featured profile, the firm serves among liaison counsel in the Maui Fires litigation where a proposed $4.037 billion settlement against Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. and other defendants was announced in July 2024. The proposed settlement would resolve hundreds of lawsuits resulting from the August 2023 wildfires in Maui that killed 102 people and destroyed the town of Lahaina.
“The goal was to get it done within a year of the fires,” Mr. Panish said, citing the work of mediators from the mainland and Hawaii. “Now, we’re fighting with the insurers who are coming at us with $3 billion in subrogation claims.”
The Daily Journal feature profile of Mr. Shea, who has obtained more than 230 verdicts and settlements over $1 million since forming PSR with Brian Panish in 2005, highlights his recent results including a $42.5 million settlement obtained from Caltrans for a motorcyclist who suffered catatrophic injuries when a state vehicle made an illegal left turn directly into the path of the rider.
The case was set for trial, but weeks before, the defense “began begging us to come back to mediation,” Shea said in an interview the Daily Journal. He was told that the final resolution was “significantly more than they’d ever paid to any individual plaintiff” in a Caltrans case.
Currently, Mr. Shea is working on a handful of products liability wrongful death cases involving portable generators absent of a carbon monoxide sensor and shutoff valve. “This has been going on for decades,” Mr. Shea said. “And yet the manufacturers continued to manufacture portable generators without this safety device,” he said. “We’re aiming to hold these manufacturers accountable.”
Read more about Mr. Panish and Mr. Shea in their featured profiles in the Special Reports section at dailyjournal.com.