Paul R. Kiesel

Kiesel & Larson

Specialty: Personal injury

Law School: Whittier Law School, 1985

Though just 38 years old, Paul Kiesel is widely considered to be one of the top personal injury attorneys in California. Last September, California Business Law named him as one of the state’s “100 Most Influential Attorneys.”

Key to such accolades was his role as lead attorney in a highly publicized case in which two school children were killed and 36 injured when a faulty municipal garbage truck arm crashed into their school bus. Of the 18 lawsuits filed after the incident, Kiesel’s was among the most closely watched.

Kiesel, who represented the family of one of the dead boys, sued the city of Los Angeles for $3.2 million and the truck manufacturer for $5 million. The family received that entire amount, $8.2 million, through a mediated settlement.

The nature of the case was not unusual for Kiesel and his five-attorney firm, which works solely on a contingency basis and focuses on catastrophic personal injury and disability cases. Usually, his clients have become permanently disabled in some way.

Kiesel said the school bus case was significant because, historically, awards for children’s lives had not been as high as those for adult lives. The reasoning has been that parents can always have more children, if they so choose. But Kiesel argued that he would gladly risk his own life to save the lives of his children, so that makes their lives more valuable than his.

Not all of Kiesel’s big cases deal with death or permanent disability. In one recent national class-action suit, Kiesel represented 53,000 African Americans who had purchased a hair-straightening product from World Rio Hair.

The product, widely advertised on TV infomercials, caused hair loss to many users, and unwanted hair-color changes to others. Not only did Kiesel win $4.5 million for his clients, the company was put out of business, and its hair straightener was taken off the shelves.

In one unusual case, Kiesel represented a family who sued a funeral home for accidentally burying the wrong body in the plaintiff’s mother’s grave. In that case, won by Kiesel, the family discovered the mistake several days after the funeral had taken place.

Victoria O’Guinn