Arash Homampour

The Missed Welfare Check

At about 10:30 on the night of March 29, 2014, Michael O’Malley called the front desk of a hotel in Capistrano Beach. His wife, Priscilla, had stopped answering both her cell phone and the phone in her room. He told the clerk that he feared she was hurt and unable to reach it. He asked the hotel to go inside and check.

The hotel had a written procedure for entering an occupied room. Two trained employees were supposed to perform the welfare check. The clerk sent one maintenance worker supplied by an outside staffing company. He had worked at the property for a year but had never conducted a welfare check. He knocked, opened or partly opened the door, looked into what he said was darkness, and reported that the room was empty.

Priscilla was on the floor. A brain aneurysm had ruptured at approximately 6:30 that evening. Michael continued calling through the night because the hotel had told him she was not there. At about five the next morning, he drove to the resort, entered the room, heard labored breathing, and found her unconscious. She survived. She lost the ability to form new memories.

The case eventually placed Arash Homampour before an Orange County jury as lead trial counsel. The central event occupied only minutes: a request, a promise to check, a worker at a door, and a false report. The legal work had to account for the seven hours that followed.

Seven Hours of Medical Causation

The O’Malley litigation had already survived one appeal before Homampour entered as lead trial counsel. In 2018, lawyers from Biren Law Group reversed summary judgment for the maintenance worker’s employer. The published opinion held that a person who undertakes to assist another must use reasonable care, and that a jury could decide what the worker had agreed to do, whether Michael relied on the report, and whether the failed check worsened Priscilla’s injuries.

The ruling restored the plaintiffs’ path to trial. Homampour then had to connect the ruptured aneurysm, hydrocephalus, delayed treatment, and Priscilla’s permanent anterograde amnesia through the hotel’s undertaking, its written procedures, and the medical evidence describing what the delay changed. The defense contested each link and argued comparative fault.

Homampour tried the case with Matthew B.F. Biren and John A. Roberts. The plaintiffs used the phone chronology, the hotel’s two-person rule, the worker’s first welfare check, evidence about whether the room was dark, and medical testimony about the effect of earlier drainage and treatment. Their theory focused on the hotel’s undertaking to check Priscilla’s safety and whether the manner of that check prolonged the period before treatment.

The jury returned a compensatory verdict exceeding $60 million in January 2022. The later Court of Appeal opinion described the judgment, including prejudgment interest, as approximately $90 million. Diamond Resorts challenged duty, instructions, causation, evidentiary rulings, privacy, and comparative fault. The Fourth District unanimously rejected each argument and affirmed the judgment in an unpublished opinion in November 2023.

O’Malley: Verdict, Judgment, and Payment

The O’Malley result grew after the verdict because the trial team had served a statutory offer to compromise before trial. California Code of Civil Procedure section 998 changes the economics of a rejected offer when the plaintiff later obtains a more favorable judgment. Here, the rejected offer added recoverable expert costs and prejudgment interest running from the offer date. The unsuccessful appeal then left postjudgment interest accruing on the unpaid judgment.

Jeffrey I. Ehrlich joined the plaintiffs’ appellate team. Twenty-two months after the jury returned its verdict, the affirmance ended Diamond’s challenge. The amount ultimately paid exceeded $100 million.

The jury fixed compensatory damages. The trial court then entered a larger judgment that included statutory interest and other recoverable amounts, and additional interest accrued during the appeal.

The Heater Judgment

Amy Shinedling died in a house fire started by a radiant quartz heater manufactured by Sunbeam Products. Homampour presented the product, its packaging, internal knowledge, warnings, and engineering evidence for Shinedling’s husband and daughters.

The jury found negligent design, strict failure to warn, and negligent failure to warn. The resulting judgment was approximately $46.92 million. In June 2017, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment, including the failure-to-warn determination and the daughters’ bystander emotional-distress claims.

Damages after Liability Was Admitted

Jose Ruvalcaba was forty-five when he died after an altercation with three City of Victorville street workers in 2018. One worker struck him in the head with a shovel. Early accounts portrayed Ruvalcaba as the aggressor. As the litigation developed, inconsistencies emerged in the workers’ statements. The City stipulated to liability and agreed that no contributory negligence would be assigned to him.

Liability had already been established before the September 2022 trial. The jury had to measure what Ruvalcaba’s death had taken from his five daughters, whom Homampour and Ronan Duggan represented. Defense counsel emphasized that their father had experienced homelessness, used methamphetamine, and had periods of separation from his children, and asked the jury to award $2.5 million. The City’s highest settlement offer had been $3.5 million.

With liability admitted, the trial focused on the value of the family’s loss. The plaintiffs presented photographs, family history, testimony, absence, reconciliation, and the daughters’ lives. The jury rejected the claim that addiction, housing instability, or an imperfect family history made that loss inexpensive and awarded $33.85 million.

The Motorcyclist the Defense Blamed

Another 2022 trial involved a twenty-six-year-old motorcyclist killed when a driver backed from a driveway into his path. In Hortencia Andrade v. Norman S. Wright Climatec Mechanical, the defense argued that the rider had been traveling approximately eighty miles per hour on a road posted at thirty-five, that he was inexperienced, and that trace methamphetamine contributed to the collision.

Homampour, Duggan, and Jason Halpern used accident reconstruction to separate a bad fact from a causal fact. The presence of a drug or an allegation of speeding did not answer whether either condition helped produce the collision. The backing movement, sight lines, distances, timing, and point of impact had to carry that question.

The jury found that the motorcyclist was not a causal factor and awarded his parents more than $36 million. Contemporaneous reporting placed interest at approximately $8.7 million, bringing the expected total near $45 million. The driver carried a $10 million policy; the carrier had repeatedly declined efforts to resolve the case within those limits.

The defense placed the motorcyclist’s conduct at the center of the case, making reconstruction the means of separating allegation from causation. The plaintiffs had to establish what the rider did and whether that conduct actually produced the crash.

The Roof under Cal-OSHA

Octoviano Cortez climbed onto the remaining roof of a Pasadena house undergoing extensive demolition and reconstruction. A section collapsed. He fell and fractured his spine. The homeowners had designated themselves owner-builders and hired an unlicensed contractor, who in turn hired Cortez.

The trial court entered summary judgment for the homeowners. The Court of Appeal affirmed on the ground that work on the residence fell within Cal-OSHA’s exclusion for household domestic service. Homampour briefed and argued the case in the California Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reversed in 2011. A project involving demolished walls and deck, a new bedroom and bathroom, a garage, roof replacement, framing, flooring, plumbing, and other construction did not become domestic service because the owner intended to live in the finished house. The statutory language expressly included demolition and construction performed for hire.

The Court did not decide whether an employment relationship existed or whether Cortez would recover damages. Because the defendants had declined to seek review of the employment issue, the Court assumed that relationship for the matter before it and returned the case for further proceedings. Homampour’s appellate victory removed the categorical exclusion without yet producing a damages judgment for Cortez.

Reconstructing Cause and Sequence

Homampour’s firm uses accident animation, product demonstration, timelines, and courtroom presentation technology. Their value depends on whether they illustrate admitted proof or substitute confidence for it.

In O’Malley, the critical sequence ran from the unanswered calls to the failed welfare check, delayed discovery, hydrocephalus, and memory loss. In Shinedling, the heater, shutoff, warning, fabric placement, and fire had to support several liability theories independently. In Andrade, distances and timing separated alleged intoxication and speed from legal causation. Each reconstruction answered a defined question the verdict form would later ask.

His firm uses animations, timelines, and other demonstrations to show the facts jurors must decide and to create a record that can withstand appellate review. The same preparation extends to comparative fault, section 998 offers, remittitur, interest, and appellate standards.

A Restricted Docket

Homampour earned an economics and finance degree from the University of Southern California in 1989 and graduated from Southwestern Law School in 1992. He financed his education and worked nearly full time for a solo practitioner while attending law school. He was admitted in California and the Central District of California in 1993 and later founded The Homampour Law Firm.

The firm accepts a limited number of catastrophic-injury, wrongful-death, public-entity, product-liability, employment, and insurance cases. A restricted docket makes room for experts, demonstratives, motion practice, trial, and appellate work without forcing unrelated cases through the same schedule. It also makes the distinction among verdict, judgment, and payment an operating concern rather than a matter for the final press release.

Homampour has taught discovery planning, expert depositions, jury selection, public-entity litigation, demonstrative evidence, trial technology, and closing argument. In 2024, the There Is a Light Foundation he founded gave Southwestern Law School $1 million to fund twenty-five $10,000 public-service scholarships each year for four years.