Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP is pleased to announce attorney Jesse Creed has been elevated to Firm partner, effective January 1, 2025.
“Jesse is not only a tenacious and fierce advocate for our clients, he is an incredibly skilled trial lawyer with a brilliant mind,” said Brian J. Panish. “We look forward to Jesse’s continued dedication to the growth and success of the Firm and congratulate him on achieving this milestone.”
Mr. Creed joined the Firm in 2018 and is based in Los Angeles where he focuses his practice on complex and catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, sexual abuse, and product liability cases. Admitted to practice in Arizona, California, Hawai’i, and Nevada, he has obtained billions of dollars in recoveries for plaintiffs.
As Individual Plaintiffs Co-Liaison Counsel in the Maui Fires litigation, Mr. Creed is among attorneys in leadership who recently negotiated a proposed $4.04 billion global settlement for plaintiffs. Earlier this month, he successfully won an appeal before the Hawai’i Supreme Court, wiping out $2.3 billion in subrogation claims by insurance companies that would have reduced the Maui Fires victims’ recoveries.
Mr. Creed’s work in the Southern California Gas Leak Cases was instrumental in securing a settlement of up to $1.8 billion for thousands of plaintiffs who filed suit against Southern California Gas Company and Sempra Energy as a result of a 2015 gas well blowout in Porter Ranch, California. Due to his tenacity and persistence, Mr. Creed obtained a court order ordering the defendants to produce hundreds of thousands of withheld documents, finding the oil and gas defendants’ violation of multiple court orders was willful and in bad faith and obtained approximately $6 million in sanctions against defendants and their counsel.
He was also instrumental in securing a $380 million settlement for hundreds of survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of disgraced doctor, Lawrence Nassar. The lawsuits were brought against USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. When USAG filed bankruptcy, Mr. Creed was the only attorney who fought on behalf of his clients to lift the automatic stay of litigation against the Olympic Committee in an effort to proceed to trial for his clients.
Mr. Creed also represented a class of students with disabilities in a class action lawsuit against ACT, Inc., the administrator of the standardized college entrance exam, challenging the company’s improper disclosure of students’ disability status to schools. As a result of this representation, he secured a consent decree on behalf of a nationwide class preventing ACT from engaging in the alleged discriminatory practices, as well as a $16 million settlement for a California subclass of examinees.
Mr. Creed recently represented a child who swallowed a button battery from a defective remote control made by a China-based global multi-billion-dollar manufacturer of air conditioners, Midea. In this matter, he obtained over $600,000 in sanctions against the company and ultimately the “death penalty” sanction of striking the company’s answer because the Court found the company willfully violated multiple discovery orders on multiple times, including during trial.
Additional results obtained by Mr. Creed include a $31 million settlement for a former high school football player who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of a negligently maintained field by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and a $23 million settlement for a couple whose home was left uninhabitable twice due to catastrophic flooding caused by two separate water main breaks in the City of Newport Beach, among others.
Prior to joining Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP, Mr. Creed fought passionately on behalf of homeless and disabled military veterans in a decades-long, high-profile battle with the VA over the use of the 388-acre campus in West Los Angeles. As its Executive Director, he led Vets Advocacy, a legal and policy advocacy nonprofit, formed out of the landmark Valentini v. Shinseki class action litigation where he represented a class of homeless and disabled veterans that led to a commitment from the VA to build at least 1,200 homes for homeless veterans at the West LA VA campus, Congressional legislation for his clients, and an unprecedented public-private partnership involving the federal government, the City and County of Los Angeles, and attorneys for the Valentini plaintiffs. This litigation also led to a wholesale uprooting of corruption at the VA, resulting in the criminal conviction of a high-level VA official for bribery, a wide-ranging VA Inspector General report, and the indictment of an individual stealing millions from veterans.
Mr. Creed has received numerous awards for his work. He is a two-time recipient of the California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) Award — the first recognition for his work on securing massive governmental reforms for homeless veterans against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a second recognition for his work on the Southern California Gas Leak Cases. He also has been recognized twice as a finalist for Consumer Attorney of Year by the Consumer Attorneys of California.
Recognized as a Southern California Super Lawyers Rising Star and among the Best Lawyers in America®, Mr. Creed graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and received his Juris Doctorate from Columbia Law School in New York City, where he was a James Kent scholar all three years (top 1-3% of his class) and earned prizes for achieving the highest marks in constitutional law and property. He taught constitutional law to first-year students, served on the Columbia Law Review, and was a research assistant to former Commissioner of the Securities & Exchange Commission, Harvey Goldschmid.