Alexander R. Wheeler

Trial Before the Trial

Before a Los Angeles jury could put a number on Pablo Scipione's ruined foot, it had to decide whether he was permitted to be in the courtroom at all.

Scipione was an electrical technician for Altech Services, thirty-nine years old. Kinkisharyo International called him to its Palmdale railcar facility in February 2016 for an overnight repair, with a narrow window: begin at 2:00 a.m., finish by 5:00 a.m. Palmdale sits in the high desert, and the roof of the train car had frozen. He slipped on the ice.

The fall caused a micro-fracture. He returned to work the next day and kept working full-time for nearly a year and a half before complex regional pain syndrome ended his working life.

Kinkisharyo's answer was that Scipione had been its joint employee. If the jury accepted that position, workers' compensation would be his exclusive remedy and the jury would never reach premises negligence or tort damages.

Alexander Wheeler and Khail Parris answered the joint-employer defense with records showing who hired and paid Scipione, who directed his work, which company ordered the overnight repair, and how Kinkisharyo had described the relationship when benefits were sought.

The jury rejected the joint-employer defense.

The Wet Roof

Only then could the jury reach the thing that had actually happened: a three-hour window, in the dark, on a frozen surface, on a job someone had decided could not wait for daylight.

Six weeks of trial addressed what it cost. Medical, vocational, and economic evidence connected the chronic pain condition to future treatment, lost earning capacity, and the working life Scipione could no longer continue.

Before trial, the defense had offered $752,000 and turned down a $3 million demand.

The jury returned $54,158,431 in compensatory damages. A separate punitive phase added $4.2 million. The 2024 total was $58,358,431.

Two Hours at Marvin Avenue Elementary

An elementary-school student ran for a ball on the blacktop, fell, and struck her head on asphalt.

The critical period was the roughly two hours that followed, during which the child remained in the care of the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was taken to the nurse and sent back to class as her condition worsened. A family member who arrived to take her home was turned away. She later required emergency brain surgery.

Wheeler and Khail Parris built the trial around a chain of small human decisions: what each adult saw, what the child said, who was told, what that person did next, and how a developing brain injury changes during a two-hour delay in treatment.

After six weeks, the jury awarded $7.1 million.

One Week in Palmdale

In McAlister v. Thompson, a driver failed to yield at a Palmdale intersection and struck the plaintiff broadside. She suffered internal bleeding, multiple contusions, surgery, and lasting complications.

The defense alleged that she had been speeding. Wheeler, Misak Chanchikyan, and Khail Parris persuaded the court to exclude that unsupported allegation, which left the jury one question: the failure to yield.

The trial took one week. The 2025 verdict was $36,420,461.

From Verdict to Enforcement

R. Rex Parris and Wheeler represented two former employees whom Georges Marciano, the founder of Guess, had accused of theft. Five plaintiffs in all pursued defamation and emotional-distress claims. In 2009 a Los Angeles jury returned more than $370 million in compensatory and punitive damages across the group; the two clients represented by PARRIS accounted for $148 million.

Marciano appealed without posting a bond large enough to stay the judgments — which raised a question of whether the judgments could be enforced while the appeal was pending. Three judgment creditors filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition.

The Ninth Circuit held that an unstayed, non-default judgment is not contingent and does not become subject to a bona fide dispute simply because an appeal is pending. The creditors remained eligible to proceed under 11 U.S.C. § 303(b)(1), and the judgments held.

Wheeler's work extended from the verdict into enforcement, bankruptcy, and appellate procedure.

Minutes, Multiplied

Wheeler leads PARRIS's class-action and complex-litigation teams, where a small loss repeated across thousands of people can become a substantial claim.

In one representative matter, hourly employees of a Fortune 500 home-improvement retailer alleged they kept working after clocking out. The certification ruling survived appellate review, and the case resolved for $29.5 million.

Repetition across shifts, stores, and a large workforce made common proof central to certification: the challenged practice had to be answerable through shared evidence rather than thousands of unrelated employment disputes.

He has been appointed lead class counsel in dozens of federal and state class actions.

A Verdict the Insurer Agreed to Pay

A separate 2018 trial concerned a back-seat passenger whose vehicle was struck broadside by a distracted driver. Wheeler helped obtain a $41.6 million jury verdict for the resulting catastrophic injuries.

The defendant's insurer later agreed to pay the $41.6 million judgment in full. Liability, medical causation, future care, and economic loss had all been tested before a jury.

Teaching It

Wheeler joined PARRIS in 2007 after graduating from Pepperdine's law school, and he has taught Advanced Trial Practice there — depositions, witness examination, persuasion, the mechanics of a courtroom. He sits on the Caruso School of Law Board of Advisors, and on the board of Penny Lane Centers, which serves children, young people, and families.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge, awarding PARRIS additional fees on a $20 million verdict in 2024, wrote that Wheeler had shown exceptional ability in examining and cross-examining witnesses and in presenting the plaintiffs' case, and credited him with superior experience, skill, and ability relative to the Los Angeles bar. CAALA named him a finalist for Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2025 and again in 2026.

He has carried more than a dozen of his own cases into published appellate opinions, producing precedent that remains after the individual dispute ends.