Brian Panish

Six People at a Red Light

On Christmas Eve in 1993, a Chevrolet Malibu carrying six people — Patricia Anderson, four of her children, and a family friend — stopped at a red light in Los Angeles. A vehicle driven by an intoxicated motorist struck it from behind. The Malibu's fuel tank, mounted behind the rear axle, was punctured in the impact, and the car burned with the family inside. All six survived; the burns they carried out of the car became the human center of the trial that followed.

Panish served as trial counsel for the occupants in Anderson v. General Motors. Over ten weeks, the plaintiffs presented the tank's location, the object that penetrated it, the release of fuel, the crash forces, the availability of safer placement above the axle, and the injuries the fire caused. Corporate memoranda, design history, testing records, and cost evidence addressed what General Motors knew and why it retained the configuration.

The jury awarded approximately $107 million in compensatory damages and $4.8 billion in punitive damages, finding conduct that met California's fraud-or-malice standard.

Panish organized the liability proof around the fuel system, identified the point of failure, and connected it to a sequence the jury could test. The plaintiffs separated the immediate rear impact — the drunk driver's act — from the design choice that placed the tank behind the rear axle. Engineering, corporate, and crash evidence supported the design claim; the injuries supplied the damages proof.

Engineers described tank geometry, crush space, and puncture resistance. Treating physicians described burns by depth, location, and functional consequence. Company witnesses addressed design constraints and regulatory compliance. In Anderson, Panish placed those disciplines in a common chronology so jurors could decide which design and engineering choices mattered after the rear impact. The $4.9 billion total rested on component placement, testing history, corporate memoranda, witness examination, and damages proof.

The Corporate Record

General Motors argued that the intoxicated driver caused the collision and that the vehicle complied with federal fuel-system requirements. The plaintiffs answered that a foreseeable rear impact should not have produced a fuel-fed fire, and that federal compliance did not resolve the state-law design claim.

Panish later testified under oath before the United States Senate about the internal materials at the heart of the trial. He described engineering documents showing that safer fuel-tank placement had been considered, and financial calculations that affected the design decision. Chief among them was the Ivey memorandum presented at trial, which assigned a $200,000 value to each fuel-fire fatality and calculated an estimated prevention cost of $2.40 per vehicle — alongside evidence that moving the tank would have cost approximately $8.59 per vehicle.

His testimony carried the product-design evidence, the punitive-damages record, and the question of corporate deterrence out of a single courtroom and into the legislative record, where the arithmetic of the memorandum could be weighed by lawmakers as well as jurors.

Aliso Canyon

In October 2015, a well at Southern California Gas Company's Aliso Canyon storage facility failed. For months, natural gas poured from the hillside above Porter Ranch — the largest known natural-gas leak in United States history. Nearby residents reported headaches, nosebleeds, and respiratory illness; thousands of households relocated; property values, schools, and daily routines absorbed the disruption of a release that could be neither seen nor escaped.

More than 35,000 private-party claims entered coordinated proceedings in Los Angeles. Panish served as lead trial counsel for plaintiffs within a broader court-appointed leadership structure.

Common discovery concerned the storage well, facility operations, maintenance practices, regulatory records, and the duration and movement of the release. Individual claimant files addressed exposure, symptoms, relocation, medical evidence, property loss, and household disruption, preserving claimant-specific evidence within the coordinated proceeding.

In September 2021, Sempra and Southern California Gas agreed to a settlement program of up to $1.8 billion for the coordinated private-party claims. The program created a large-scale path for affected residents to translate exposure, displacement, illness, property loss, and disruption into individualized compensation within a common resolution framework. Panish helped coordinate the shared facility, maintenance, regulatory, exposure, and expert record while preserving claimant-specific medical, relocation, property, and household-loss evidence for the settlement process.

The Trials Since

In 2025, Panish tried two cases that ended in eight-figure results within months of each other.

In San Diego, he represented a motorcyclist who suffered a below-the-knee amputation after a collision with a construction laborer's vehicle. The case resolved for $37,025,000 under a high-low agreement finalized with the defense just minutes before the jury returned a $27,727,630 verdict — a result that required Panish's team to litigate the case fully to verdict while negotiating its resolution in parallel, holding both tracks steady until the final moments of trial.

In San Bernardino County, he tried the case of an eighty-year-old pedestrian struck on the sidewalk during his daily morning walk by a driver who ran a red light while traveling on business for her pharmaceutical companies. The defendants admitted liability before trial, leaving only damages for the jury. Panish presented the plaintiff's traumatic brain injury, orthopedic injuries, surgeries, and the round-the-clock care his future required. The jury awarded more than $34.1 million.

The San Diego result combined a fully tried verdict with a high-low agreement finalized before the verdict. In San Bernardino County, liability was conceded and the jury decided damages based on the plaintiff's injuries, surgeries, and future care.

Panish | Shea | Ravipudi

Panish is a founding partner of Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP in Los Angeles. His plaintiff-side practice includes catastrophic injury, wrongful death, product liability, transportation, and disaster litigation.

He played college football at Fresno State before earning his law degree from Southwestern Law School — a background he has credited with teaching him the preparation, conditioning, and composure under pressure that trial work demands. Across Anderson, transportation cases, and Aliso Canyon, Panish’s trial work has required the team to connect technical evidence, witness testimony, damages proof, and defendant-specific conduct to the particular remedy sought.