Going into its 36th year, plaintiff’s law firm Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team LLP has built a foundation to stick around for the long haul.
Having launched in 1988 with just three attorneys, the Westchester-based firm now has 45 lawyers spread across four offices, including in the Bay Area, Las Vegas and Montreal. With a track record of numerous high-profile victories in the personal-injury sphere, founder and managing partner Mike Arias said he’s now building the long-term vision for the operation.
“I’m building this firm in a way that whoever I hand it off to will continue its legacy and its work,” he said in an interview. “There’s enough leadership within our firm now that the person who will take over my role as managing partner will do it naturally. Everyone will want it to happen. I am building a structure within the firm that no one lawyer’s leaving will devastate it.”
Part of that effort has been to build a firm diverse in both practice specialties and the composition of its attorneys. Arias said he deliberately sought to develop practice groups to make his firm a one-stop shop for plaintiff’s work.
“Our firm is probably one of the most diverse plaintiffs’ firms in the states, from a practice-area perspective,” he said. “We do so many different areas, and there’s not too many plaintiffs’ firms that do that, because they usually specialize.”
And incidentally, Arias said, the firm’s staff largely reflects the diversity of Los Angeles County’s population. This is a boon for the firm, he said, because its attorneys can better relate to clients more often victimized by societal structural problems.
“I tell my people, everybody who comes to us has had something happen in their lives you wish never happens to you, and those clients tend to be really diverse,” Arias said. “Our firm seems to truly reflect the diversity of our clients. I never intended it to be that way, and it’s nice to know that it happened naturally to us.”
In recent months, Arias Sanguinetti added about 4,000 square feet to its Westchester headquarters. The firm in December also added three new attorneys to that office and named its first new partner – Sahar Malek – in years.
The firm has scored a number of prominent victories in recent years, including a $852 million settlement against USC for the sexual misconduct case filed against the school’s former gynecologist, George Tindall, as well as $243 million from UCLA over a similar case filed against gynecologist James Heaps. Additionally, in the wake of the wildfires that ravaged Maui, the firm first pitched in for relief funding and eventually to represent homeowners whose properties were destroyed.
The firm’s Las Vegas team in November also scored a victory for the family of a child with autism, winning a $10 million from the boy’s school district to settle a lawsuit claiming that a teacher had struck the youth on numerous occasions.
Arias said he hopes these sorts of results and actions serve to improve the reputation plaintiff’s firms and prevent them from being associated with so-called ambulance chasers and other opportunistic attorneys.
“I have spent a lot of time trying to educate, mentor and hopefully get some of these lawyers who weren’t necessarily trial lawyers – they were processing cases, but very few tried cases – to actually try cases,” Arias said. “When you start trying cases, then your whole outlook changes. We’re getting more and more of these lawyers to try cases, to get the full value for the client. I’ve spent the last couple of decades doing what I can to change that view,” he continued.
“We’re getting more and more of these lawyers to try cases, to get the full value for the client. I’ve spent the last couple of decades doing what I can to change that view,” Arias said. “I think the image has gotten better. We get a lot of notoriety when we do something that has a societal impact. When we do stuff like that and people see the dramatic change, it’s helping us.”
