Alex Calfo, a partner at the downtown outpost of Chicago-based King & Spalding, has distinguished his litigation career in consumer products liability, particularly in the automotive and transportation space.
As one of the earliest partners to join King & Spalding when it expanded to Los Angeles, the firm views Calfo as instrumental in its courtroom success and in building out the West Coast litigation practice.
Calfo discussed his career and views on new developments with the Business Journal.
What sparked your interest in a legal career, and how did you land on product liability – particularly in the automotive and aircraft space?
We hear a lot of lawyer jokes, but the legal profession is one of the most respected careers. I got into it because I believed – and my father instilled this in me – that the harder you work, the luckier you get. I knew that if I worked hard as a lawyer, I’d either become a strong trial lawyer or a leader in business.
I became a trial lawyer because I was drawn to the challenge of taking complicated facts, developing a compelling story, and convincing a jury, even at 24 or 25 years old, that my version of the facts was the correct one. I’ve also been fortunate in that I have never taken a case to trial that I didn’t genuinely believe I was on the right side.
As for how I landed in automotive and aircraft product liability — the law finds you. You don’t go into this thinking, ‘I’m going to be an automotive products trial lawyer.’
Right out of law school, I started representing large corporations. Automotive product liability was considered the premier trial work in the field at the time, and I always found it fascinating. As fate would have it, the law found me, and I ended up representing virtually every Japanese, American and European automotive company as a first-, second- and third-year associate.
Why Los Angeles for your career?
I spent my early childhood in in Denver – one of nine kids. My father was then transferred to Los Angeles, and I grew up here. I went to Crespi High School in Encino, played football and our whole family put down roots in Los Angeles.
I was very lucky because Los Angeles is one of the best places in the country to be a trial lawyer. The Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown has more trials than virtually anywhere else in the U.S. So as fate had it, my father’s move out here set me on a path that turned out to be a tremendous professional advantage.
How has King & Spalding enhanced your career trajectory?
King & Spalding is the premier firm for product liability defense. I helped start the Los Angeles office, which has rapidly grown to nearly 80 attorneys.
What King & Spalding has allowed me to do is take my practice to another level – trying cases against the best plaintiff lawyers in Los Angeles and across the country. Practicing in L.A. has helped evolve me into a top national trial lawyer.
I’ve had the privilege of working alongside truly exceptional first-chair trial lawyers here, as King & Spalding has more mass tort and product liability trial lawyers than any other firm in the United States. That environment has sharpened my own trial practice. Being with King & Spalding has genuinely reinforced our credibility with judges, with the courts here in Los Angeles, and ultimately with juries.
Tell me about your first trial win.
I can’t talk about my first trial win without first acknowledging a mistake. As a second-year lawyer, I was thrown into a courtroom here in Los Angeles to try a lemon law case for Honda – like a baby thrown into a pool. I made a lot of mistakes. I had an old, crusty judge yelling at me in front of the jury. But those early stumbles were invaluable; young lawyers today rarely get the opportunity to make mistakes like that and learn from them in real time.
The first big case I tried on my own was in federal court in Los Angeles. I was a young lawyer, and I received the case just two weeks before trial. I had one associate and a first-year attorney from the firm we took over. I walked into that courtroom and found myself across from Dan Petrocelli of O’Melveny & Myers – one of the finest U.S. trial lawyers and the attorney who won the civil O.J. Simpson case. He had 14 or 15 attorneys at his table. It was intimidating.
The case was enormous.
The plaintiff was seeking $128 million. My client was Crane Corp., and the opposing party was National RV. National RV had gone bankrupt – this was nearly 20 years ago, as the economy was beginning to deteriorate – and they claimed their bankruptcy was caused by defective sidewalls our client had manufactured for their motorhomes.
But I realized we had a real chance to win if I just kept pushing. We argued that the bankruptcy was driven by the economy, not the product, and the jury believed us. We won – including on punitive damages.
Which trial victory are you most proud of, and why?
About 15 or 16 years ago, I was brought into an airplane crash case approximately three weeks before trial. My opposing counsel was Tom Girardi, who at the time was one of the most formidable plaintiff’s attorneys in the country. In the first few days on the case, I attended a mediation presided over by a very well-known retired judge serving as mediator. He looked at us and said, in no uncertain terms, that we should pay whatever it took to settle, because we were going to lose – and lose big.
I tried the case anyway. It involved a crash off Catalina Island. A husband had died, leaving behind a beautiful wife and two young children, all of whom were present in the courtroom throughout the trial. The emotional weight of that case was immense. But we tried it, and we won, a complete defense verdict for our client.
How have you and your team incorporated artificial intelligence into your practices and work?
AI is a starting point, not a substitute for legal judgment. Every output is reviewed, and we operate within strict confidentiality and ethical guardrails. That’s non-negotiable.
The most significant impact I’ve seen in my trial practice involves transcript review. When I was a young lawyer, we would spend hours – sometimes days – reading deposition and trial transcripts, page-lining testimony so the trial lawyer could quickly locate the exact passage needed to impeach a witness on cross-examination. That process cost clients enormous amounts in attorney time. With AI, you can load thousands of pages of testimony, enter keywords and instantly retrieve the relevant page and line. What once took weeks of attorney preparation can now be done in a fraction of the time.
Another fascinating development is AI-assisted jury selection. Trial lawyers are now using AI to analyze voir dire transcripts and identify patterns that inform jury selection decisions. It’s a remarkable tool, and one that teams across our firm have begun incorporating into their practice.
Does the growth of so-called “nuclear verdicts” and their damage awards concern you?
Nuclear verdicts concern me – particularly here in Los Angeles. We recently saw a $1 billion verdict in a single cancer case involving a talc product. That kind of award is simply unheard of.
At the same time, for my practice, it has created significant opportunity. Clients, who have lost billions of dollars in verdicts, have come to us and asked us to analyze trial transcripts and demonstratives to understand what went wrong and what they can do differently in jurisdictions like Los Angeles to not just limit damages, but to win these cases outright. That’s been both a major challenge and a major opportunity.
Los Angeles is prone to unfair nuclear verdicts for several reasons. This is the entertainment capital of the world, and people’s attention spans have shortened dramatically, from 5 minutes to under 45 seconds, driven by YouTube and other social media. What I’ve observed is that lawyers coming into Los Angeles from other states often aren’t storytelling effectively. They’re not using their time in front of the jury efficiently. When you represent a large corporation in a city like Los Angeles, you have to get to the point immediately, within the first 40 to 60 seconds. You need to look those jurors in the eye and tell them exactly where you’re going, right away. Lead with the lead. I don’t think enough lawyers are doing that.
How are you approaching the era of autonomous vehicles? Will that present any specific shifts or challenges for your practice?
We represent automotive companies in autonomous vehicle cases, and I’ve approached this space both professionally and personally. I recently purchased a Level 2 autonomous vehicle, and I now commute into Los Angeles – about 45 minutes – almost entirely in autonomous mode.
This October, I’ll be trying an autonomous vehicle case here in California – a death case in which a driver was operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol in the early morning hours, fell asleep and struck an emergency vehicle with flashing lights. The claim is that the vehicle itself was responsible for the crash. Cases like this illustrate the central challenge of this emerging area of law: establishing the boundaries of what the technology is designed to do and that the driver’s full supervisory responsibilities remain.
The technology keeps improving, and the accident data support the conclusion that these vehicles are saving lives. Over time, autonomous vehicles will result in fewer lawsuits, fewer deaths and fewer serious injuries. The data already points in that direction, and the technology will only continue to advance.
