Arash Homampour

Seven Hours

A guest at a hotel needed help. Someone asked the hotel to check on her.

The welfare check did not find her. Roughly seven hours passed before she received medical treatment, and by then the injury was permanent.

The hotel's written procedure called for two trained employees to conduct an occupied-room welfare check. Instead one maintenance worker who had never conducted one was sent alone, looked into what he described as darkness, and reported that the room was empty.

The trial court granted summary judgment for the hotel. A published 2018 Court of Appeal ruling reversed and returned the claim for trial, holding that a jury could decide the scope of what the hotel had undertaken to do and what that undertaking was worth.

After the published reversal reopened the claim, Homampour tried it as lead counsel with Matthew B.F. Biren and John A. Roberts. The proof was a chronology — the calls in order, set against the hotel's own written procedure and against the medical evidence establishing what each of those seven hours had cost.

The trial theory separated the underlying medical emergency from the harm that followed it. The hotel had not caused the emergency. It had accepted a task necessary to the guest's safety, performed it without reasonable care, and thereby extended the period before treatment.

In January 2022 the jury returned more than $60 million in compensatory damages. The judgment reached approximately $90 million; the amount ultimately paid exceeded $100 million. Jeffrey I. Ehrlich joined the plaintiffs' appellate team, and in November 2023 — twenty-two months after the verdict — the Fourth District affirmed, unanimously.

The Heater

A Holmes radiant quartz heater made by Sunbeam Products was in a house when the house burned and a family was destroyed.

Homampour built the case around the object itself and how people actually use it. The claims were design, warning, and foreseeable use, and the demonstratives let the jury watch the thing behave.

The automatic shutoff did not eliminate every foreseeable fire condition. Which left the warning: whether the packaging told a buyer what could happen if the heater ran while the household slept.

The jury returned $58.65 million, producing a judgment of approximately $46.92 million. In June 2017 the Ninth Circuit affirmed the inadequate-warning finding, the bystander claims, and the emotional-distress damages.

Bollards

A driver backed out of a parking space and into the outdoor food court at a Costco, where a family was sitting.

Costco argued that cars do not usually drive into seating areas, so there was no duty to plan for one. Homampour's answer was that other Costco locations had already installed bollards.

The jury assigned Costco twenty-five percent of the responsibility, and judgment against it came to $1,319,093.50. The Court of Appeal held that a vehicle entering the food court was foreseeable, that Costco owed its patrons a duty to take reasonable protective measures, and that the low cost of a bollard could not support a rule of no duty. It affirmed and modified the judgment to add $7,500 in noneconomic damages to each of two family members.

The Word "Domestic"

Cortez was hurt during extensive demolition and reconstruction at a house in Pasadena — walls and a deck torn out, a bedroom, a bathroom and a garage added, the roof replaced, all of it performed for hire.

The homeowners argued that because they intended to live in the finished house, the work was domestic service, and domestic service sits outside Cal-OSHA's workplace-safety protections. The trial court granted them summary judgment. The Court of Appeal affirmed.

Homampour briefed and argued Cortez v. Abich in the California Supreme Court, which reversed in 2011. Extensive demolition and residential construction performed for hire does not become excluded domestic service merely because the owner plans to move in.

The categorical exclusion was gone. Cortez's claims went back for further proceedings, and every construction worker on a residential job in California was inside the statute's protection.

What the Line Fell Into

An energized power line came down into a backyard in Panorama City and killed a father and his daughter.

Homampour and Danielle Lincors, with Frish Law Group, represented the surviving family. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power resolved the case for $38 million, acknowledged serious failures, and then completed a corrective-action plan that rebuilt its pole-and-crossarm inspection program — including, for the first time, inspection timelines that actually complied with state requirements.

In Ruvalcaba, the City of Victorville stipulated to liability and agreed that no fault would be assigned to the man who died, which left the jury one question: what his life was worth. Homampour and Ronan Duggan tried that question and the jury answered $33.85 million.

In Hortencia Andrade v. Norman S. Wright Climatec Mechanical, a driver backed out of a driveway into a motorcyclist's path. Homampour, Duggan and Jason Halpern used accident reconstruction to establish what the rider could not have avoided, and his parents were awarded more than $36 million.

In a pedestrian case, Homampour and Danielle Lincors used expert depositions and animation to connect a collision to a torn knee, a necessary surgery, and the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome that followed — a condition juries find hard to credit because it does not appear on a film. The parties accepted a mediator's proposal of $20 million before trial.

There Is a Light

Homampour is a first-generation American; his father emigrated from Iran. He paid his own way through USC, where he took a degree in economics and finance in 1989, and through Southwestern Law School, where he graduated in 1992 while working nearly full-time for a solo practitioner. He was admitted in California and the Central District of California in 1993 and founded The Homampour Law Firm, which takes a deliberately small number of cases at a time.

The Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles named him Trial Attorney of the Year in 2010, has nominated him every year since 2004, and gave him its Ted Horn Memorial Award in 2018. The Ventura County Trial Lawyers Association named him Trial Attorney of the Year in 2017; the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association named him its product liability Trial Attorney of the Year in 2018.

He teaches the mechanics of the work, and he is also a DJ and record producer who runs a label and releases tech house. The belief underneath both is that abundance in any area obliges you to share it.

His foundation, There Is a Light, gives grants and coaching to individuals trying to get to a next stage in their lives. In 2024 it gave Southwestern Law School $1 million to fund twenty-five $10,000 public-service scholarships a year for four years. That June, Southwestern named him its Outstanding Alumnus of the Year.