Brian Panish

Kiontra ran from the car crying because her back and legs were burning, he told the senators, and then went back to help get her sister out. All six survived. Anderson and her children had third-degree burns over large parts of their bodies and years of skin grafts ahead of them; Alisha, the most severely burned of the children, lost the fingers of one hand and had undergone more than seventy surgeries by 2024.

Two Dollars and Forty Cents

Panish, whose father, Howard R. Panish, was a trial lawyer in Los Angeles, had played in the defensive backfield at Fresno State from 1976 to 1979 and coached high school football for two years at St. John Bosco in Bellflower before taking his law degree at Southwestern Law School. In 1999 he was a partner at Greene, Broillet, Panish & Wheeler in Los Angeles. He tried Anderson v. General Motors to a Los Angeles Superior Court jury for ten weeks. GM's lawyers told the jurors that a drunk driver had caused the crash and that the Malibu met the federal fuel-system standards. The plaintiffs' position, as Panish later put it, "was that this was clearly a survivable impact."

Panish answered with General Motors' own files. In 1973 a GM engineer, Edward Ivey, had written a "value analysis" of fuel-fed fires. Assuming that "each fatality has a value of $200,000" and that as many as 500 people a year died in such fires in GM cars, he divided the cost of those deaths by the number of GM cars on the road and arrived at $2.40 per automobile. The safer design, with the tank over the axle, would have cost $8.59 a car, Panish later told the Senate. Ivey wrote that his analysis had to be tempered by the thought that "it is really impossible to put a value on human life."

On July 9, 1999, the jury awarded the six plaintiffs about $107 million in compensatory damages and $4.8 billion in punitive damages, $4.9 billion in all, after finding that GM had acted with fraud or malice. Legal experts called it the largest verdict ever returned in a personal-injury case. "GM has no regard for the people in their cars, and they should be held responsible for it," said the foreman, Coleman Thornton. "How would you feel if your kids were in a burning car and you couldn't help them?" Patricia Anderson said.

Seventeen Inches

In April 2005 Panish left Greene, Broillet, Panish & Wheeler, where he had been a partner for eighteen years, to found Panish, Shea & Boyle, the firm now called Panish | Shea | Ravipudi. The next March he took the Malibu's history to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had called a hearing titled "Defective Products: Will Criminal Penalties Ensure Corporate Accountability?" GM had known since 1966, he told the committee, that a fuel tank needed at least 17 inches of space between it and the rear bumper. On November 17, 1970, the company's Safety Review Board, which included its chairman and its president, had directed that designs beginning with the 1973 models carry the tank over the axle. In 1978 a GM fuel-system engineer proposed three ways to improve the system, and when Anderson's car was put on the market on April 6, 1979, none of them had been made.

He urged the committee to consider criminal penalties. "The threat of criminal sanctions could help corporate executives, like those at GM, make better and safer choices," he testified.

Well SS-25

On October 23, 2015, Southern California Gas Company discovered gas escaping from SS-25, a storage well drilled in 1953 in the hills above Porter Ranch, in the San Fernando Valley. The well had once had a safety valve below ground. SoCalGas had removed it in 1979, when it was old and leaking and parts were hard to find, and had never replaced it, because the company did not consider SS-25 a critical well. For 118 days, until the well was sealed in February 2016, nearly 100,000 tons of methane poured out, and about 8,000 families moved into temporary housing. Christine Katz and her husband, Brian, who lived about a mile from the well, sued in December 2015, after their two-year-old daughter spent four days in the hospital with breathing problems. "I think it's poisoning our family," he said.

More than 35,000 people sued, and their cases were coordinated in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Panish was the plaintiffs' lead trial counsel. In May 2019 Blade Energy Partners, the engineering company state regulators had hired to find the cause, reported that microbes in the groundwater had corroded the well's seven-inch casing from the outside until it burst, and that Aliso Canyon had had more than 60 casing leaks since the 1970s without a single failure investigation. The plaintiffs took 585 days of depositions from 470 witnesses. The court imposed more than $5.7 million in discovery sanctions on SoCalGas, Sempra and their lawyers for withholding about 150,000 documents, conduct it called "willful, intentional and in bad faith."

On September 27, 2021, Sempra and SoCalGas agreed to pay up to $1.8 billion, to be divided among the plaintiffs under a protocol set by neutral allocators. "Our goal has always been obtaining justice for the men, women and children who were failed by SoCalGas throughout every turn of this catastrophe," Panish said.

A U-Turn and a Red Light

On August 27, 2021, a Griffith Company employee made a U-turn on State Route 94 in San Diego County directly into the path of Michael LaPlante's motorcycle. LaPlante, who was 42, went through eighteen surgeries and lost his leg below the knee. When his case was tried in 2025, Griffith argued that the going-and-coming rule, which generally keeps an employer out of cases arising from an employee's commute, protected it. The jury put 80 percent of the fault on Griffith and returned a verdict of $27,727,630. Minutes before it did, the parties had agreed to a high-low settlement with a floor of $37,025,000, and that is what LaPlante received.

On August 7, 2023, an eighty-year-old man was on his daily morning walk to get coffee in San Bernardino County when a pharmaceutical executive driving on company business ran a red light, hit a truck, lost control and jumped the curb onto the sidewalk where he was walking. The driver and her companies admitted liability, and in October 2025, after a three-week trial on damages, a San Bernardino County jury awarded him $34,146,940, including $14,146,940 for his past and future medical care. He had been left with a severe brain injury and needs inpatient care around the clock.

Triunfo Canyon Road

On September 29, 2020, Nancy Iskander and her sons Mark, 11, Jacob, 8, and Zachary, 5, were in a marked crosswalk on Triunfo Canyon Road in Westlake Village when a car struck and killed Mark and Jacob. Its driver, Rebecca Grossman, was convicted of two counts of second-degree murder in 2024 and sentenced to fifteen years to life. The family's civil case against her and Scott Erickson, a former major-league pitcher who was driving a second car, was tried in Van Nuys in 2026 with Panish as lead trial counsel. On June 3 the jury awarded $176 million, and after finding that both drivers had acted with malice it added punitive damages on June 10: $21 million against Grossman and $1.17 million against Erickson, more than the $20 million and $1 million Panish had asked for. The jurors had heard Nancy Iskander describe the moment in the crosswalk: "I heard the roaring engines in two cars, one black, one white, coming towards us."