Frank M. Pitre

Frank M. Pitre grew up near San Bruno, and after a PG&E gas transmission line exploded beneath the city in 2010 he became co-lead counsel for victims. Over the next three years, he took roughly forty depositions, from the company's chief executive down to workers familiar with the pipe and its maintenance history. He later described that work as an education in how the utility evaluated risk and made safety decisions.

The exercise also reflected a lesson Pitre says he learned from trying cases: discovery should be built around the evidence that will actually matter at trial. Rather than treating every deposition as an end in itself, he worked backward from the disputed issues—what happened, what the company knew, what decisions followed and which witnesses or records could establish each point.

The San Bruno litigation paired personal-injury and wrongful-death claims with scrutiny of corporate governance. A related shareholder derivative case Pitre co-led resolved for $90 million. The same inquiry into risk decisions later became important in wildfire cases involving PG&E.

PG&E's Bankruptcy and the Fire Victim Trust

After the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire, Pitre served as co-lead counsel for fire victims as PG&E entered Chapter 11. Once the utility was in bankruptcy, liability and loss valuation had to be addressed within a reorganization that would determine how tort claims were funded alongside the company's other obligations.

Pitre served on the Tort Claimants' Committee as the bankruptcy produced a $13.5 billion settlement structure for wildfire victims. He later served on the Fire Victim Trust's oversight body during administration of the fund. As lead counsel for the Trust in a related directors-and-officers case, he also helped obtain a $117 million insurance-funded settlement. Under the bankruptcy plan, those proceeds were used largely to satisfy outstanding federal-agency fire claims, clearing obligations of the Trust rather than becoming direct individual payments to fire victims.

Pitre has explained that disaster clients may be living elsewhere, rebuilding businesses or deciding whether they can return home at all. The statement preserved above reflects that concern: they need prompt resolution because many have lost the property and routines on which ordinary life depended. For those clients, the timing of a recovery affects what the recovery can still accomplish.

Maui's Settlement Process

Pitre is also a member of the plaintiffs' steering committee in the litigation arising from the 2023 Maui fires, where his firm represents individuals and businesses. He and lawyers from other firms helped negotiate a global settlement announced in 2024 at approximately $4.037 billion for individual and class claims arising from the fires.

By 2026, the Maui Circuit Court had granted final approval to the class settlement and approved the individual settlement framework. A court-approved lien-resolution process was also in place for insurance liens against individual recoveries. Appeals involving insurers' separate subrogation claims remained relevant to full implementation, so the settlement process had moved from negotiation into administration without ending every related dispute.

Pitre's utility-disaster docket also includes the Thomas and Woolsey fires and the Porter Ranch gas-leak litigation, where his firm represented more than a thousand residents. Those matters required proof of property loss, business interruption, medical injury and the corporate decisions preceding the event.

The Trial Practice Behind the Disaster Cases

Pitre earned his business degree cum laude from the University of San Francisco, stayed for law school and served a legal externship at the California Supreme Court. He has taken more than one hundred jury and bench trials and arbitrations to verdict or decision. In 1987, he was on the plaintiffs' steering committee and served as co-lead trial counsel in the litigation over the crash of PSA Flight 1771.

His individual results have included a $17.4 million wrongful-death verdict in Mazurek v. American Medical Response and a $45 million verdict for a minority shareholder in a family timber business. In mass litigation, he has served on the plaintiffs' executive committee in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 cases, acted as liaison counsel after the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash, co-led the Toyota unintended-acceleration economic-loss class whose settlement included $500 million in cash plus vehicle-safety and customer-support benefits, and served as co-lead trial counsel in the Pfizer Bextra and Celebrex litigation that resolved for $894 million. He has also held committee appointments in the Volkswagen diesel-emissions and General Motors ignition-switch cases.

Pitre is a past president of the Consumer Attorneys of California and Cal-ABOTA, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and the author of California Personal Injury Proof, which he has updated annually since 1998. He teaches trial advocacy at the University of San Francisco and through ABOTA's Masters in Trial programs, and in 2026 was inducted into the California Lawyers Association's Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame.

Pitre has said courtroom experience helps him identify the real disputed issues and collect the evidence needed to prove them without wasting time. In a disaster case, the same judgment extends beyond discovery: common proof has to be translated into a settlement and claims process capable of delivering individual recoveries while displaced clients can still use them to rebuild.