Brian S. Kabateck

Many residents were elderly, disabled, or living on fixed incomes. They owned their homes but not the land beneath them, and affordable vacant spaces capable of receiving a mobile home were scarce. The instability of the park made staying difficult and leaving impractical.

Brian Kabateck led the trial team with Shant Karnikian, Natalie Pang, and Gary Fields. The first phase involved thirty-one families and fifty-five residents. On November 19, 2018, a Los Angeles jury awarded $5,566,156 in compensatory damages. Eight days later, jurors added approximately $34.1 million in punitive damages after findings involving negligence, unfair business practices, retaliatory eviction, and financial elder abuse.

Then the defendants' ownership entities entered Chapter 7 — during trial. A verdict against an insolvent owner can be a piece of paper. Kabateck expanded the representation from verdict work into asset preservation, sale, and distribution. More than one hundred additional families had claims, and his team developed a bankruptcy strategy capable of converting the jury's findings into funded relief for a much larger group of residents than the one that had gone to trial.

Bankruptcy, Sale, and Distribution

In November 2019, a bankruptcy judge approved a $42.5 million settlement for 151 families. Plaintiffs had already received $6.9 million through earlier settlements. The agreement also required the park itself to be sold, with at least $7 million of the proceeds distributed among residents — including some who had never joined the lawsuit. Together, those components produced a $56.4 million resolution.

In March 2021, a nonprofit public-benefit corporation bought Friendly Village for $11 million. The proceeds helped fund the settlement, and the purchaser assumed responsibility for stabilizing operations, monitoring landfill gas, repairing infrastructure, and preserving the community as affordable housing.

Kabateck remained lead plaintiffs' counsel through the verdict, the bankruptcy case, the sale, and the distribution, working with the bankruptcy trustee, court-appointed financial advisers, bidders, the nonprofit buyer, and the court as the property and the settlement moved through approval. His role connected the jury's findings to a structure capable of doing two things at once: paying the residents, and changing the ownership of the community where many of them still lived.

Forty-Five Dollars per Printer

The Epson Ink Cartridge Cases concerned losses too small to litigate one printer at a time. Purchasers alleged that certain Epson inkjet printers displayed an empty-cartridge warning and stopped printing while measurable ink remained in the cartridge. A single user might lose part of one cartridge — a few dollars of stranded ink. Repetition across many models, many years, and many purchasers created the economic case that no individual owner could bring alone.

Kabateck Brown Kellner and Chitwood Harley Harnes served as lead class counsel with other firms. The coordinated proceeding covered qualifying printers purchased between April 8, 1999 and May 8, 2006.

Each qualifying class member could select one of three benefits for every eligible printer: a $45 Epson Store credit; a $25 check plus a $20 credit; or a twenty-five percent Epson Store discount capped at $100. The notice identified the covered models, claim rules, deadlines, releases, and appeal procedures.

What each claimant received depended on the benefit selected, the submission of a valid claim, and — for credits and discounts — later use. The settlement compensated purchasers through individual claims rather than one undivided payment, tying the remedy to eligible printers and documented purchases, while the three-option structure made recovery available without requiring thousands of separate lawsuits over partially unused ink.

Parkview's Evidence on Appeal

Parkview Villas Association owned a twenty-six-unit condominium complex damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. State Farm estimated total repairs at $214,289.90 and paid $16,798.11 after applying the policy's building deductibles. Parkview later alleged structural damage and relied on experts who placed the loss near $1.5 million — a gap of nearly two orders of magnitude between what the insurer paid and what the association's engineers found.

The trial court never reached that gap. It excluded Parkview's supporting evidence over a filing defect and entered judgment for State Farm.

Kabateck and Richard Kellner represented Parkview in the California Court of Appeal. The court distinguished a curable defect in Parkview's filing from a failure of proof, emphasized that State Farm had answered the evidence in detail, and ruled that terminating the action without permitting correction was an abuse of discretion.

The Court of Appeal returned the case for rulings on the evidentiary objections and the summary-judgment motion with Parkview's engineers, estimates, and physical-damage evidence restored to the merits process.

Successor Counsel in the LADWP Billing Litigation

Los Angeles ratepayers had already reached a settlement over inaccurate Department of Water and Power bills when the representation itself became the subject of judicial scrutiny. The court discovered undisclosed conflicts involving lawyers connected to both the ratepayer class and the City — a structural compromise at the center of a case meant to protect the public.

In April and May 2019, Judge Elihu Berle appointed Kabateck as new class counsel. The assignment ran in three directions at once: protect the settlement relief the class had already secured, investigate the conflicted representation that preceded him, and pursue discovery into how the case had actually been handled.

The trial court ordered former class lawyer Michael Libman to return the $1.65 million fee he had received and imposed issue, evidence, and terminating sanctions after findings of ethical and discovery misconduct. In 2023, the Court of Appeal affirmed the fee disgorgement and the nonmonetary sanctions.

The Twin Hill Uniform Trials

American Airlines introduced uniforms manufactured by Twin Hill in 2016. Flight attendants alleged that chemicals in the garments caused rashes, respiratory distress, neurological symptoms, allergic reactions, and lasting occupational harm — injuries inflicted, they contended, by the clothes they were required to wear to work. Twin Hill denied that the uniforms were defective or caused the illnesses.

Daniel Balaban led the California trials. Kabateck, Anastasia Mazzella, and Sheri Lalehzarian served as co-counsel, with Kabateck helping to develop the claimant-specific exposure, medical, occupational, and damages proof on which each verdict would rest. A 2023 bellwether jury awarded approximately $1.085 million to four flight attendants.

In June 2025, a second jury awarded more than $18.6 million to five current and former flight attendants, assigning ninety percent of the fault to Twin Hill and ten percent to American Airlines. The court finalized the verdict in September.

At the time of the second verdict, more than 300 other clients remained in discovery for later bellwether trials, each still required to establish the garments worn, the duration of use, symptoms, diagnosis, causation, work restrictions, and damages through an individual record. The two completed bellwethers tested the same liability framework through entirely separate claimant records: each jury considered garment identification, exposure chronology, medical testimony, and occupational consequences for its own group of plaintiffs.

Maui Wildfire Claims and the Global Settlement

The August 8, 2023 Maui fires killed more than one hundred people and destroyed homes, businesses, and much of Lahaina. Kabateck LLP represents hundreds of residents and businesses in the coordinated settlement process that followed.

In August 2024, seven defendants announced a $4.037 billion global settlement framework covering approximately 2,200 affected parties and roughly 450 lawsuits. The State of Hawai'i, Maui County, Hawaiian Electric, Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Company, Hawaiian Telcom, and Charter/Spectrum agreed to contribute. The parties executed individual and class settlement agreements in November 2024, and the circuit court approved the individual agreement and settlement plan in June 2025.

Under Act 301, Hawai'i created the Maui Wildfires Settlement Trust Fund and appropriated $807.5 million as the State's contribution. The broader arrangement also included a $135 million class settlement fund.

Property insurers sought to intervene in the settlement proceedings. In February 2026, the Hawai'i Supreme Court affirmed the denial of insurer intervention, held that the settlement extinguished separate subrogation claims against the contributing defendants, and confined insurer recovery to the statutory-lien process. In April 2026, the court approved the lien-resolution agreement governing individual plaintiffs.

Individual allocations must still account for deaths, physical injuries, destroyed homes, business losses, personal property, displacement, and other economic harm. Kabateck LLP's clients remain part of that claims and lien-administration process.

Founding Partner and Leadership Transition

Kabateck was admitted in California in 1991 after studying at the University of Southern California and Loyola Law School. He founded the firm now known as Kabateck LLP and built a practice spanning insurance disputes, consumer claims, catastrophic injury, disasters, class actions, and mass torts. His work in those matters has involved common proof, class procedure, trial records, and the enforcement and administration of recoveries.

In June 2024, the firm elevated Shant Karnikian — his co-counsel from the Friendly Village trial team — to managing partner. Kabateck remained founding partner and shifted from daily management toward selected complex and high-value matters.

He has served in leadership roles with the Consumer Attorneys of California, the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the Loyola Law School Board, and Loyola Marymount University.