Gerald Singleton

The Trust divided each loss into seven categories, real property, personal property, personal income, business loss, other out-of-pocket expenses, wrongful death or personal injury and emotional distress, and a single family's questionnaire could carry all seven: the house and what was in it, months of rented housing, lost wages, medical care and the harm of the fire itself. BrownGreer processed the claims, the claims administrator ran the review, the trustee, Cathy Yanni, directed the Trust, and each claimant received a Determination Notice stating the full value the process assigned to the loss, with reconsideration and appeal available on new evidence. The money did not match the notices. The Trust's assets could not pay every finalized award in full, so the bankruptcy orders required every eligible claimant to receive the same fraction of the award, whenever it was approved and however large it was: thirty cents on the dollar at first, then 45 percent, 60 percent, 66 percent and, from October 24, 2024, 70 percent, as the Trust sold its PG&E shares, the last of them in December 2023, and collected what else it was owed. Singleton's committee work concerned that shared machinery, the speed of payment, the consistency of the reviews, the cost of running the Trust and the resources left for distribution; survivors and public officials pressed the same questions, and the trustee and the committee answered them with the numbers.

By August 31, 2026, all 71,787 claimants who had filed questionnaires held final Determination Notices, 66,530 of them were eligible, 66,171 had been paid, and the Trust had approved about $19.57 billion in awards and paid about $13.72 billion. On June 26, 2026, the bankruptcy court found that the payment conditions of the Trust's settlement with Davey Tree Surgery Company and related parties had been met, and on September 10 Yanni announced that every dollar of it had arrived: a final distribution of 1.25 percent on October 14, 2026, bringing every eligible claimant, Singleton's clients among them, to 71.25 percent of the value in the notice, with no further pro rata payments to follow.

Nearly Two Hundred Plaintiffs

Between the Trust's fires and the ones that came after, Singleton was appointed liaison counsel in one coordinated wildfire proceeding after another. The role came first in the 2013 Powerhouse Fire. It came again in the Thomas Fire, which began on December 4, 2017 in Ventura County and for which his firm filed in Ventura County Superior Court on January 9, 2018; in the Woolsey Fire of November 8, 2018; in the Kincade Fire that began in Sonoma County on October 23, 2019; in the Bobcat Fire of September 6, 2020 in the Angeles National Forest; and in the Zogg Fire, which started in Shasta County on September 27, 2020, killed four people, burned more than 56,000 acres and destroyed more than 200 structures. The February 5, 2021 petition asking the Judicial Council to coordinate the five Zogg actions then pending in Shasta and San Francisco counties, brought by more than 200 individuals and the County of Shasta against PG&E, rested on Singleton's declarations describing the coordinations he had helped to build before it: the Butte Fire cases (JCCP 4853), the North Bay fires (JCCP 4955), the Southern California fires (JCCP 4965) and the Woolsey Fire (JCCP 5000). The Dixie Fire followed on July 13, 2021, when a tree leaned into PG&E's Bucks Creek 1101 twelve-kilovolt line in Butte County; with the Fly Fire that joined it on July 22 it burned more than 960,000 acres and more than 1,300 structures, Greenville among them. On September 15, 2021, Singleton filed two suits in San Francisco Superior Court for nearly 200 named plaintiffs, Judge Prouty granted coordination, and a coordination trial judge was assigned on March 18, 2022. "Why they didn't shut the power off really is beyond me," he said when the suits were filed. On August 1, 2023, he and his team filed Wheeler v. PG&E Corporation in the same court for residents of ten Northern California counties who had breathed the Dixie and Fly smoke, which rose to 40,000 feet and sat over their towns for three months, reaching an air-quality index of 834 in Plumas County: a medical-monitoring claim, the first of its kind for wildfire smoke, over the carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile compounds and particulate matter in it.

Sacred Land

Lahaina burned on August 8, 2023. Six days later Singleton filed the first individual action against Hawaiian Electric Industries, Hawaii Electric Light Company and Maui Electric Company, for Darlene Gomes, Paula Jelsma, Anderson Byrne and Saif Shaban, in the Second Circuit Court of the State of Hawaii, District of Lahaina, alleging that the utilities had left their lines energized through Hurricane Dora's winds despite a warning of extreme fire danger on August 6, had re-energized lines too soon, and had let trees and line tension go unmanaged until trees came down on the wires. Maui, he said, is "sacred land to the people who live there," and he set the terms of the representation at the start: "This is not a class action." The global settlement announced in August 2024 came to about $4 billion, $1.99 billion of it from Hawaiian Electric and $872.5 million from Kamehameha Schools, with the State of Hawaii, Maui County and the other defendants paying the rest, and it waited on one question: whether the insurers that had already paid more than $2.3 billion in property claims could sue the same defendants separately. On February 11, 2025, the Hawaii Supreme Court held that they could not, and Singleton said what that meant in nine words: "Now the settlement can take the next step forward." His firm's clients from the Marshall Fire, which killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Louisville, Superior and Boulder County on December 30, 2021 in winds of 100 miles an hour, settled with Xcel Energy for $640 million on September 24, 2025, the day before jury selection was to begin before Judge Christopher Clayton Zenisek of the Boulder County District Court; more than 2,000 people had signed by November 5. In Los Angeles, where at least 130 complaints over the Eaton Fire of January 7, 2025 were before Judge Laura A. Seigle by March 14, 2025, Singleton was named liaison counsel for the individual plaintiffs with Rahul Ravipudi and Amanda L. Riddle, alongside a steering committee of forty-five firms. When Southern California Edison, having said in public that its equipment likely caused the fire, opened a compensation program of its own that fall, he wrote in the Daily Journal on November 6, 2025 that it undervalued damages, left out categories of property loss and deducted insurance money survivors had never received, and that it "lacks neutrality, transparency, and legal grounding"; the plaintiffs' joint case management statement of November 14 recorded Edison asking to put the trial off to 2027.

Federal Defenders

Singleton graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College with high honors and the Government department's prize for his senior thesis, took his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000 and spent his first three years as a trial attorney at Federal Defenders of San Diego, representing people charged with federal crimes in the Southern District of California and before the Ninth Circuit. He opened his own practice in 2003; the wildfire work began with the October 2007 fires in San Diego County, and over the decade that followed his firm represented thousands of individuals against the utilities whose lines had started fires. The sole proprietorship became Singleton Schreiber, with more than ninety lawyers and four hundred employees in more than a dozen offices, and he is admitted in California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota and the District of Columbia, in several federal district courts, the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States. He chairs the American Association for Justice's national wildfire litigation group. The firm's environmental docket now runs to PFAS contamination claims for individuals and public entities, and in 2024 he joined with the NAACP to bring claims for thousands of women who developed cancer or uterine fibroids after using hair relaxers containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals. He gave the rule of the practice when the Maui suit was filed: each client's damages are unique, and each client is represented individually.