Daniel McGee

Three Impacts

An unidentified vehicle dropped a ladder onto Interstate 10 in Riverside. The car ahead stopped. A wife driving with her husband in the front passenger seat struck that car. A big rig then struck them from behind.

The vehicle that caused all of it never stopped and was never identified.

The wife suffered a fractured and dislocated elbow. Her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury.

The trucking company disputed responsibility and attributed the injuries to the earlier impact.

Two Collisions, Two Causation Records

The causation defense mattered because two collisions occurred within seconds. Both involved force. If the injuries came from the first, the trucking company would not be responsible for them — and the first collision was one in which the plaintiff was the striking driver. The defense relied on that first collision as an alternative cause.

The answer is not argument but physics and medicine, assembled separately for each impact.

The firm developed distinct accounts of speed, force, occupant movement, vehicle damage, and medical consequence for the front-end collision and for the later tractor-trailer strike. A front impact and a rear impact move a body in opposite directions, load different structures, and leave different signatures on both the vehicle and the person inside it. An elbow driven into a steering wheel and a brain injured by rearward acceleration are not interchangeable, and the crush pattern on the sheet metal is evidence about which event delivered what. Seconds apart on the highway, the two collisions were separable in the record — and separating them was the case.

Accident reconstruction, medical chronology, neuropsychological evidence, and future-care proof were presented over a four-week Riverside County trial in November 2022. The jury returned a $14 million verdict against the trucking company.

As co-founder and managing partner, McGee directed the staffing, expert coordination, document systems, medical preparation, and trial resources used to separate the causation questions and carry the matter to verdict.

The Products Case He Tried Himself

McGee served as principal counsel in a products-liability trial in Rancho Cucamonga that produced a $3.3 million verdict.

The case required engineering, corporate, warning, and medical evidence connecting the product's design or failure to the client's injury. In building that record, McGee placed design, production, testing, warning, and corporate documents beside engineering and medical testimony, so the claimed technical failure could be followed link by link — from a decision made in a design review to a specific harm in a specific body.

He later applied the same expert-management experience to automotive, toxic-tort, spinal-cord, brain-injury, and other catastrophic-injury matters.

Sixteen Years Inside a Larger Trial Firm

Before opening his own practice, McGee spent sixteen years at a California personal-injury firm, serving as firm manager, associate attorney, and partner. His work there included automotive-product cases, multi-party toxic-tort litigation, spinal-cord injuries, and brain injuries.

Managing a firm while trying its cases exposed McGee to the operational work that precedes trial: expert scheduling, records requests, medical coordination, and the document systems that determine whether the right exhibit can be found on the right morning.

In 2001, McGee and his wife, Catherine Lerer, founded a smaller firm built around direct attorney contact and a concentrated serious-injury docket.

As managing partner, McGee oversees staffing, calendars, experts, document systems, medical coordination, and trial and appellate planning.

Why the Lawyer Takes the Call

McGee and Lerer personally handle client communications, from initial fact preservation through explanations of expert work, depositions, liens, settlement structure, and trial risk.

That direct contact is not only a service commitment. It is evidence preservation.

The first conversation after a catastrophic injury is often the only chance to capture things that disappear on their own schedule. Where is the vehicle or product being stored, and is the yard about to crush it? Which photographs or recordings exist, and on whose phone? What treatment has begun, and under which provider's records? Who witnessed the event, and can they still be located? Is there surveillance footage that will be overwritten in thirty days? Which insurer is making the first claim decisions, and what has already been said to an adjuster?

A client cannot know which of those questions matters. A lawyer who takes the call on day one can ask all of them before the answers expire.

The Scooter Behind the Trash Can

Sara Hacala and her daughter were walking on a Los Angeles sidewalk after twilight in November 2019. The back wheel of a Bird scooter extended from behind a trash can. Hacala tripped, fell, and sustained serious injuries.

Bird's dockless rental system allowed users to leave scooters anywhere in public. Its app allowed the company to locate each one. The operating permit Bird obtained from the City required emergency-removal availability, removal of improperly parked scooters within two hours during operating hours, and customer education about parking standards.

Rowena J. Dizon and Dean Ogrin handled the appeal for McGee Lerer & Associates.

In 2023, the California Court of Appeal reinstated the claims against Bird under California Civil Code section 1714. Its duty analysis relied on Bird's deployment and monitoring of the scooters and on the responsibilities the company had assumed under the City operating permit, including locating and removing improperly parked scooters that could create sidewalk hazards. The court also allowed Hacala to pursue a private action for public nuisance.

The decision connected digital control to physical responsibility. A company that can deploy a product, locate it in real time, rent it by the minute, and is permitted to operate on the condition that it retrieve it does not stand in the position of a stranger when one of its scooters blocks a pedestrian path. The published opinion made that reasoning available in later cases presenting the same defense.

Fourteen Clients Inside a 124-Person Resolution

McGee's firm represented fourteen people in a 2023 Santa Monica settlement involving 124 claimants and $122.5 million.

The claims concerned child sexual abuse by Eric Uller, a City information-technology employee who volunteered with the Police Activities League. The civil cases focused on the organizations that had given him access to young people and on the supervision and safeguards surrounding that access.

Earlier rounds included a $54.9 million qualified settlement fund for sixty-one claimants. By the 2023 round, the City and PAL had paid approximately $229.825 million to 229 claimants.

McGee's firm participated in the common negotiations while separately documenting each client's period of access, damages, and privacy preferences.

The resolution structure allowed compensation without forcing every claimant to recount private experiences in a public trial, while preserving that option for those who wanted a public record.

Santa Monica also adopted a youth-services code of conduct, expanded mandated-reporter training for employees, volunteers, and contractors, and created child-protection functions involving a designated officer and a committee — changes directed at the access that made the abuse possible, so that the settlement altered the conditions and not only the ledger.

The Lawyer He Hired First

Dean Ogrin joined the firm in 2020 and later became its head of litigation and a named partner.

McGee had hired Ogrin for his first legal job more than thirty-five years earlier.

The firm now operates as McGee Lerer Ogrin. Ogrin and Dizon handled the published Hacala appeal, while McGee and Lerer continued to lead the firm's trial and appellate work.

McGee's founding role included building the trial systems the firm still runs on and mentoring lawyers who later carried complex matters through verdict and appeal — including the lawyer who returned three decades later to run the litigation department.