Jose Aguirre came to America seeking a better life. Though undocumented, he worked two jobs, paid taxes for a decade, and supported his fiancée and children, aged 11 months to 9 years. In August 2012, he was driving his 2001 Xterra SUV at 15 mph across his employer’s parking lot when, without warning, it suddenly accelerated. Jose’s efforts to brake the Xterra failed; it hit a concrete ramp, vaulted over a ramp, and submarined under a parked semi-tractor. The impact crushed through the A-pillar and firewall, leaving Jose a quadriplegic at age 28. Past medical costs exceeded $5 million and future medical costs were over $10 million. After spending $1 million on expert investigations, the attorneys found a defect in the gas pedal and adjacent parking brake bracket that could cause the gas pedal arm to entrap on the brake bracket, inducing sudden unintended acceleration. Nissan documented dozens of reports of such accelerations, but because the pedal arm dislodged once the driver pushed the gas pedal, Nissan missed the defect, ignored the reports, and blamed the operators, including Jose. Despite Nissan’s parade of experts and $5 million in defense costs, the trial court found Nissan liable under Consumer Expectation, Risk Benefit, and negligence. The attorneys fought Nissan’s losing appeals for another three years before Nissan paid the verdict. The attorneys were especially motivated by Nissan’s attempts to limit Jose’s economic damages to what his income and medical costs would be in Mexico, his native country. Bob Bale raised the issue to Asm. Lorena Gonzalez at a CAOC board meeting regarding a proposed new evidence code excluding this ancient, unfair practice. CAOC took on this fight and sponsored legislation, and Noemi Esparza championed the code by testifying before the Legislature to support the bill that Gonzalez authored. Evidence Code Section 351.2 became law on January 1, 2017, to the future benefit of literally millions ofCalifornia residents.

Harrison represented several victims of horrific sexual battery, harassment and retaliation by famed movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Sandeep Rehal, Weinstein’s former personal assistant, suffered almost two years of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse by Weinstein. Her tasks Included arranging Weinstein’s sexual liaisons and procuring the medication for his erectile dysfunction. She would sometimes deliver the medication to hotels and elsewhere before his meetings with women. Weinstein would press his body against Rehal’s, frequently dictated emails to Rehal while he was naked, used sexist and derogatory language, and threatened to have her younger sister kicked out of college. Rehal and Harrison worked closely with Jodi Kantor of the New York Times as sources for the newspaper’s explosive 2017 articles that brought Weinstein’s horrific behavior against many women to light and sparked the #MeToo movement regarding workplace sexual harassment. Rehal’s was the only employment case filed against Harvey Weinstein or his studio, The Weinstein Company. Her case served as important leverage in the effort toget compensation for all of Weinstein’s victims. In recognition of the case’s importance, Harrison represented Rehal as a member of the Unsecured Creditors’ Committee when The Weinstein Company filed for bankruptcy. Rehal’s case and Harrison’s work was integral to achieving a settlement for all of Weinstein’s victims, despite The Weinstein Company’s bankruptcy. Those victims included a “Jane Doe” represented by Harrison, an ac-tress who was subjected to sexual battery, including forced oral copulation and repeated unwanted touching, by Weinstein, who also threatened to ruin her career. Harrison also represented four other actresses and writers with similar claims who did not file suit but were part of the settlement. Harrison directly assisted in formulating the claims administration process and assisted the Claims Administrator in preparing a trauma-informed approach toward that process.

On October 23, 2015, the largest natural gas leak in U.S. history and one of the largest environmental disasters in California history occurred at one of the natural gas wells located at Southern California Gas Co. and Sempra Energy’s Aliso Canyon Storage Facility near Porter Ranch. Approximately 100,000 tons of toxic chemicals were released into the atmosphere over 118 days, impacting residents, businesses, and properties in the surrounding communities. The smell of the gas could be picked up for miles, with an oily mist falling on neighborhoods. Noxious fumes spilled into the homes of Porter Ranch, making thousands sick with headaches, nosebleeds, dizziness, respiratory problems, and nausea, and SoCalGas had no plan for what to do in the event of such an emergency. Los Angeles County’s health department ordered SoCalGas to relocate residents within five miles of the facility and relocate public schools in the neighborhood. More than 8,000 families were forced to evacuate their homes and thousands of students their schools. Tens of thousands of residents and students filed lawsuits, alleging personal injuries from exposure and property damage. The attorneys argued that the blowout was the culmination of decades of mismanagement and failure to maintain proper facility maintenance and operational procedures. In addition to their dereliction of their duty to prevent the blowout, SoCalGas also bungled several efforts to stop the leak, thereby causing the impact of the blowout to last for significantly longer and be more severe than necessary. After nearly $6 million in discovery sanctions against the defendants and their counsel for willfully violating discovery orders and withholding over 180,000 documents from plaintiffs, and after 585 days of depositions of 470 witnesses, SoCalGas and Sempra agreed to settle claims of approximately 35,000 residents six years into the litigation in what is believed to be the largest settlement ever for a natural gas release, with SoCalGas promising it would not pass the cost of the settlement on to its customers.

After suffering a mental-health crisis, Wesley Alarcio was arrested and processed into the mental health unit at the Los Angeles County Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Twin Towers is the world’s largest jail and the nation’s largest mental health facility. Upon returning to the jail after a court appearance, Alarcio was erroneously placed in a cell with a severely mentally ill inmate who, at the time of the assault, should have been transferred and not have been cohabitating with other inmates. In the several hours the two men were in the same cell, deputies conducted 17 safety checks and two full inventories, but failed to notice or correct the housing error. As a result, a mentally ill man with serious psychiatric issues that made him dangerous to other inmates savagely beat Alarcio, who suffered catastrophic injuries that left him in a permanent vegetative state until his death more than three years later. Alarcio’s family claimed the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department failed to protect Alarcio from a known violent and severely mentally ill inmate. Claims based on inmate-on-inmate violence are vigorously defended and are notoriously difficult and very expensive to prosecute. The attorneys showed that the safety checks were superficial, that no meaningful attention was given to the inmates’ medical conditions, and that information about obvious problems with individual inmate-patients was not being conveyed to incoming staff at shift-change. The more information that was uncovered in this case, the more apparent it became that a lack of policies and procedure and the systemic failures in both the custodial and mental health aspects of Los Angeles County jails created a dangerous situation that left mentally ill inmates like Wesley Alarcio vulnerable to inmate-on-inmate violence. The attorneys proved that Alarcio’s tragic death was caused by the systemic failure of the county’s mental health staff in their policies and procedures regarding the monitoring of mentally ill inmates, resulting in the largest jail-death-related settlement ever against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.