Frank M. Pitre

What the depositions taught him, he has said, was "the corporate culture of PG&E, which sacrificed safety for the sake of profit": how the company weighed risk and made its safety decisions. The record served two sets of claims. The San Bruno families' personal-injury and wrongful-death cases drew on it, and so did a shareholder derivative suit in San Mateo County Superior Court in which Pitre and Mark Molumphy were co-lead counsel, charging the board with failing to oversee the gas system. On March 15, 2017, the parties settled: the directors' and officers' liability insurers would pay PG&E $90 million, and the utility would adopt governance changes and gas-operations measures estimated to cost up to $32 million, with the first approval hearing set for April 21. "It is an unprecedented settlement in this type of case," Pitre said when it was announced.

Butte, North Bay, Camp

The 2015 Butte Fire brought Pitre back to PG&E with Steve Campora, a colleague from the San Bruno litigation; on the utility's electrical distribution lines they found the practices they had documented on its gas system. The North Bay fires began on October 8, 2017, and burned through twenty-two counties, with damage Pitre has put at seven to eight billion dollars; the utility, in his account, had not adopted the power-shutoff program San Diego Gas & Electric used in dangerous weather and had let its tree inspections lapse. He was appointed co-lead counsel for the North Bay fire victims in January 2018. On November 8, 2018, a worn hook on PG&E's Caribou-Palermo transmission line, part of a system built in the early 1900s, failed, and the Camp Fire killed eighty-five people and destroyed 18,804 structures, most of them in Paradise. Pitre became co-lead counsel for its victims as well.

PG&E filed for Chapter 11 on January 29, 2019, and the fire claims moved into the bankruptcy court. Pitre sat on the Official Committee of Tort Claimants, which represented the victims in the case. On December 6, 2019, the committee and the utility agreed on $13.5 billion for the victims of the 2015, 2017 and 2018 fires, half in cash and half in stock of the reorganized company. Judge Dennis Montali confirmed the plan on June 20, 2020, and on July 1 PG&E funded the Fire Victim Trust with $5.4 billion in cash and 22.19 percent of its shares, with further cash due in January 2021 and January 2022. Pitre then served on the Trust's oversight committee. By August 31, 2026, the Trust, under trustee Cathy Yanni, had issued determination notices to 71,787 claimants, found 66,530 of them eligible and paid $13.72 billion, bringing each eligible claimant to 71.25 percent of the award determined for them.

Twenty Former Officers and Directors

The Trust also inherited PG&E's own claims against the people who had run it. In San Francisco Superior Court it sued twenty former officers and directors, among them Geisha Williams, the chief executive at the time of the Camp Fire, alleging that they had breached their fiduciary duties by failing to keep vegetation clear of the company's equipment, failing to install the equipment needed to shut off power before the 2017 fires, and failing to replace century-old transmission equipment before the Camp Fire. Pitre was the Trust's lead counsel. The parties reached agreement in principle in May 2022 and finalized it in July, and on September 29, 2022, the Trust announced a $117 million settlement.

The money had a destination. Federal agencies that had fought the fires and assisted their victims, among them the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, held claims against the Trust, and the settlement went to satisfy, in Pitre's words, "the vast majority of outstanding fire victim claims held by certain federal agencies." With those claims cleared, the Trust's later recoveries on the claims PG&E had assigned to it could go to the fire victims themselves.

Lahaina

On August 8, 2023, wind-driven fires burned through Lahaina and Upcountry Maui, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 structures. Pitre joined the plaintiffs' steering committee in the coordinated Maui fire cases in October 2023; his firm represents more than 300 individuals and businesses. By August 2024 more than 600 suits had been filed against Hawaiian Electric, the State of Hawaii, Maui County, Kamehameha Schools and a group of telecommunications and land companies, and that month a mediated global settlement of $4.037 billion was announced: $1.99 billion from Hawaiian Electric, about $800 million from the State, $872.5 million from Kamehameha Schools, $10 million from Maui County, and roughly $337 million from Spectrum, Charter Communications, Hawaiian Telcom, Cincinnati Bell, the West Maui Land Company entities and the Launiupoko Water Company.

Insurers that had paid policyholders sought a share of the same fund. Judge Peter Cahill of the Maui Circuit Court denied their motion to intervene in June 2025, and on February 13, 2026, the Hawaii Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, holding that economic interests alone confer no right to intervene and that the insurers' remedy is a lien on the settlement funds. "Prompt settlement is vital," Justice Todd Eddins wrote. In April 2026 Judge Cahill approved a lien-resolution agreement under which the insurers accept ten percent of standard claim payments and fifteen percent of certain policy-exception payments, about $249 million in all, instead of filing liens against individual recoveries; by mid-April, 21,750 claimants had filed 94,816 claims. Hawaiian Electric deposited its first annual installment of $479 million on April 10, 2026, and about $1.1 billion was in the settlement trust when, on September 30, 2026, the Supreme Court upheld Judge Cahill's authority to limit attorneys' fees in the settlement, removing the last appeal between the fund and the claimants, whose payments were expected to begin within two months.

His utility-disaster docket has also included the Thomas and Woolsey fire cases of 2017 and 2018, on the plaintiffs' steering committee, and the Aliso Canyon litigation: Southern California Gas's storage well SS-25 released gas over Porter Ranch for 111 days from October 23, 2015, about 8,000 households were moved into hotels and corporate housing, and in September 2021, 35,717 plaintiffs settled with the company for $1.8 billion. Pitre served on the steering committee, and his firm represented more than 1,400 of them.

Zucchini Boxes at Two in the Morning

Pitre's father came from Sicily in 1954 and built a produce delivery business serving corner and independent grocery stores around the Bay Area. His mother kept the books, his father bought the merchandise, and Frank loaded trucks and made deliveries before school. He has said that he decided on law school at seventeen, counting boxes of zucchini at two in the morning, after watching the men around him work themselves into disability. He earned his business degree cum laude and his law degree at the University of San Francisco, served a legal externship at the California Supreme Court, and went to work for Joseph Cotchett, who made him a partner. The firm had six lawyers when he joined; it is now Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy.

In his first decade, by his own account, he tried a dozen cases of four to ten weeks each, in personal injury, medical malpractice, antitrust, fraud, product liability and intellectual property, in state and federal court. In 1987 he served on the plaintiffs' steering committee and as co-lead trial counsel in Los Angeles County Superior Court in the cases arising from PSA Flight 1771, on which a fired USAir agent used credentials no one had revoked to carry a revolver past screening at Los Angeles International Airport; all forty-three people aboard died when the plane came down in the hills between Paso Robles and Cayucos. His verdicts include $17,440,564 on May 20, 2011, in Mazurek v. American Medical Response in San Diego County, for the wife and three children of a Navy officer killed on his bicycle when an ambulance-company van turned across his path, and more than $45 million in Sutter County Superior Court for a minority shareholder frozen out of his family's timber business. In coordinated cases he was co-lead counsel for the economic-loss class in the Toyota unintended-acceleration litigation, whose settlement Judge James V. Selna approved on July 24, 2013, installing brake-override systems on recalled Toyota and Lexus vehicles and creating a $250 million fund for owners' depreciation losses; co-lead trial counsel in the Bextra and Celebrex litigation that Pfizer settled for $894 million; liaison counsel after the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214; a member of the plaintiffs' executive committee in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 cases against Boeing; and a committee member in the Volkswagen diesel-emissions cases before Judge Charles R. Breyer and the General Motors ignition-switch cases before Judge Jesse Furman.

He has written California Personal Injury Proof for Continuing Education of the Bar since 1998 and updates it each year, teaches in the University of San Francisco's trial advocacy program and at the Hastings College of Advocacy, and co-chairs and teaches the ABOTA Foundation's Masters in Trial programs. He was president of the Consumer Attorneys of California in 2005 and 2006 and of Cal-ABOTA in 2023.

The trials shaped the way he runs discovery. Courtroom experience, he has said, tells a lawyer which issues will be disputed and which evidence will prove them; "lots of what you do in discovery is really meaningless," and "taking 16-hour depositions is not the way" he wants to practice. The reason is the client. People who have lost loved ones or, as in the California fires, everything they owned, "their home and all of the personal items they accumulated over their lifetimes," need prompt resolution, and a recovery that reaches a family while it is still deciding whether to rebuild can still be used to rebuild.

An Eighty-Eight-Year-Old Client

The San Bruno families were from the community where Pitre had been a teenager, and he counts the rebuilding of that community among the work he looks back on. The cases a lawyer takes, he has said, form "a mosaic of who you are as a person."

The one he describes with the San Bruno cases drew no notice at all. An eighty-eight-year-old woman who had paid her mortgage for thirty-five years was threatened with foreclosure by a lender whose methods, in his account, violated the law. He kept her in the house and had the mortgage extinguished. It was, in his words, "the only home that she had lived in for all those years," and she sent him a thank-you card.