Irwin M. Zalkin

Watchtower and the Files It Would Not Produce

In October 2014, a San Diego courtroom went forward without the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society at its own defense table.

The case belonged to Jose Lopez, who was seven years old in 1986 when Gonzalo Campos was recommended to his mother as a Bible study teacher by the Linda Vista Spanish Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The evidence Zalkin presented was that congregation elders had known since 1982 of allegations involving Campos, did not report him to law enforcement or warn parents, and later sent him into the Lopez home.

Zalkin’s discovery focused on Watchtower’s own files. He sought letters the organization had received in response to a 1997 internal directive concerning known abusers—records capable of showing how reports were handled across congregations. Superior Court Judge Joan M. Lewis ordered production, and the California Supreme Court left the order in place. Watchtower refused to produce the files.

Judge Lewis struck the organization’s answer and required Lopez’s side to prove the case. Over six days, Zalkin’s team presented testimony and documents to an empty defense table. The resulting judgment was $13.5 million, including $10.5 million in punitive damages.

Zalkin’s firm later filed more than thirty cases involving local Jehovah’s Witness congregations and Watchtower in states including California, Oregon, Connecticut, New Mexico, Washington, and Ohio. That litigation also became part of national investigative reporting by the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Oxygen documentary series The Witnesses.

The McVeigh Appellate Decision

McVeigh v. Does involved allegations that a former student had been abused by a teacher decades earlier. The complaint was filed during California’s 2003 revival period for certain older childhood-abuse claims. Because the plaintiff was older than twenty-six, the statute also required supporting declarations from counsel and a mental-health practitioner.

The threshold dispute arose before testimony or organizational records could be weighed. California’s Certificate of Merit requirements screened an older claim at the filing stage; the question was whether those requirements imposed a deadline the Legislature had not written, not whether the alleged abuse occurred.

The plaintiff filed the complaint before the revival window closed, then submitted the required declarations and an attorney explanation within the statutory sixty days. On appeal, Zalkin organized the chronology around that sequence and the Legislature’s text.

The Court of Appeal adopted Zalkin’s reading and reversed. It held that the explanatory declaration could accompany the later-filed merit certificates so long as the statutory sixty-day period was met. The ruling restored the survivor’s claim, preserved the statutory screening process, and established a workable rule for later revival-window filings.

The decision made the statutory sixty-day period operative as written and returned the claim to the ordinary civil process, where evidence could be developed. It preserved screening without allowing an unwritten filing requirement to close the courthouse.

Mediation Leadership in San Diego

In 2007, the Diocese of San Diego paid approximately $198 million to resolve 144 childhood-abuse claims. A federal magistrate appointed Zalkin mediation liaison counsel and a lead negotiator for the claimant group.

Zalkin coordinated survivor counsel, maintained communication across the individual matters, presented the group’s negotiating position, and helped move the mediation toward terms capable of resolving the full docket.

The 144 matters involved individual histories separated by decades, different assignments and organizations, and different supporting records. Resolving claims against the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego required a shared negotiating structure without erasing each survivor’s place in the process.

His court-appointed role combined collective negotiation with individualized treatment of the histories and records needed for allocation and administration. The process carried 144 claims to a completed resolution.

Orange County and Los Angeles

Before the Los Angeles litigation, Zalkin was part of the team representing survivors in the Diocese of Orange cases that produced a $100 million global clergy-abuse settlement.

Los Angeles Trial Preparation and Global Resolution

Zalkin later served on the trial team preparing a fourteen-claimant Los Angeles clergy-abuse trial. His work included witness preparation, organization of survivor and clergy records, damages development, and sequencing the cases selected for presentation.

The trial team had to make each selected claim against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles ready on its own facts while the larger docket remained in coordinated proceedings. Moving a smaller group toward courtroom presentation gave the wider negotiations a concrete alternative to continued delay.

Before the trial began, the archdiocese reached a $660 million global resolution. The agreement followed preparation of the individual claimant record and created a collective remedy for the broader group of claims.

Zalkin’s trial-team work connected claimant-specific evidence to the coordinated proceedings and settlement process, helping carry prepared cases toward the completed global resolution.

Current Practice

Zalkin is the founding partner of The Zalkin Law Firm. His practice includes childhood sexual abuse, complex injury litigation, appellate access, coordinated mediation, and trial preparation.

Zalkin’s assignments have included satisfying threshold filing rules, organizing records across decades, preparing individual testimony and damages proof, coordinating counsel, and negotiating terms capable of being funded, allocated, and administered.

The work also requires continuing communication with survivors about privacy, testimony, settlement, eligibility, and allocation—questions that remain individual even when litigation moves through a coordinated docket.

His complex-injury work has also included an $8 million judgment after a six-week jury trial for a woman rendered paraplegic by a fall from an unguarded pier.

He earned his undergraduate degree from UCLA in 1976 and his law degree from California Western School of Law in 1979. He is admitted in California, New York, and the District of Columbia.

At California Western, he received the American Board of Trial Advocates Trial Attorney’s Award for moot court. His practice has also included pro hac vice admissions in Utah, Indiana, Oregon, and Colorado.