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 co-leads 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.
“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.”
