John Fiske

On the morning of November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire came down out of the Feather River canyon and erased most of the Town of Paradise, California. Residents lost homes. Businesses lost everything. But something else was destroyed that no homeowner's policy would ever cover: the town — its roads and water lines, its parks, its tax base, its ability to function as a government at all.

That is the client John Fiske represents. A shareholder in Baron & Budd's San Diego office, Fiske built a practice around a deceptively simple idea: when disaster strikes, the public entity is a victim too, with losses as real as any resident's and a recovery no one else was fighting for. The public-entity matters he has led since 2018 account for more than $2.5 billion in resolutions for counties, cities, school districts, hospitals, water districts, and fire districts; in wildfire cases alone, he has served as lead counsel to 104 public entities.

Paradise was where the model proved itself. Fiske was lead counsel for the town and for Butte County against PG&E, representing them in state court and then inside the utility's Chapter 11 — where he served as lead counsel for eighteen public entities from the Camp, North Bay, and Butte Fires. His mediation work produced a $1 billion cash settlement written into the bankruptcy plan confirmed in June 2020: money for a town to rebuild itself as a town, secured without displacing a single resident's private claim.

Fire by Fire, Across a Burning State

The ledger of Fiske's wildfire recoveries reads like a decade of California disaster maps: $582 million in the Camp Fire, $415 million in the North Bay Fires, $230 million in the Woolsey Fire, $150 million in the Thomas Fire, $100 million in the Bobcat Fire, $31 million in the Kincade Fire, $28.4 million in the Butte Fire, $12.36 million in the Zogg Fire, $7.25 million in the Mill Fire — approximately $1.7 billion recovered from PG&E and Southern California Edison for more than seventy public entities statewide. In the Southern California fires and the Montecito debris flows, he represented twenty-three cities, counties, and special districts, and multi-day mediation with Edison produced a $360 million resolution in 2019.

The Dixie Fire settlement shows the craft up close. The CPUC's investigation established the ignition: a decayed Douglas fir across PG&E distribution lines, a fault heating and arcing in dry fuel for roughly ten hours. CAL FIRE and the CPUC also documented maintenance, inspection, vegetation, hazardous-tree, and outage-response issues. But causation was only the beginning. Fiske's ten clients — five counties, a city, a hospital district, two utility districts, and a recreation authority — each documented their own anatomy of loss: failed road segments, extraordinary staff hours, lost revenue, damaged facilities, watersheds and forests needing restoration. The January 2023 settlement delivered $24 million allocated by each entity's relative damages, with the FEMA and Cal OES assistance squared away so recovery money actually stayed with recovery.

The Only Lawyer in the Hearing Room

After the 2017 fires, the utilities took the fight to Sacramento, spending millions lobbying to narrow inverse condemnation — the constitutional doctrine that lets fire victims recover from the utilities whose equipment ignites their losses. When the Legislature convened a special committee to examine the issue, one attorney was called to testify on behalf of thousands of property owners, businesses, and public entities: Fiske.

He led the plaintiffs' legislative effort through 2018 and 2019, and the rights survived. The Consumer Attorneys of California gave him its Presidential Award of Merit for the work — recognition that some of the most consequential advocacy of his career happened in a hearing room rather than a courtroom.

PCBs in the Water, Vapes in the Schools, Opioids in the Counties

The wildfire model — public losses, publicly proven — travels. In the national litigation over Monsanto's PCBs, chemicals that outlived their manufacture in building materials and equipment and migrated through stormwater into the nation's rivers, bays, and harbors, the federal court in City of Long Beach v. Monsanto appointed Fiske lead class counsel for more than 2,400 public entities. Final approval in November 2022 created a $537.5 million nationwide settlement, with relief directed at Clean Water Act and stormwater-permit compliance costs; Long Beach's expected $7.5 million was the largest individual allocation. Across the PCB litigation he has resolved more than $800 million, representing cities from San Diego to Seattle — and serving as a Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Washington.

When JUUL's products swept through California campuses, a judge appointed Fiske and Rahul Ravipudi co-lead counsel for public entities in the coordinated litigation. Fiske represented twenty-three California school districts enrolling more than one million students, translating an epidemic into the districts' own ledgers: vape detectors and surveillance, investigation and discipline hours, prevention programs, health-related absences draining attendance-based funding. And in the opioid crisis, he helped organize the California Opioid Consortium — thirty counties at its founding in 2018 — building a structure in which shared corporate evidence supports locally measured relief for very different communities.

Across all of it, his California public-entity practice has represented thirty-seven counties and cities serving more than eleven million residents.

The Rescue Ranch

Fiske's shorthand for the whole enterprise is "protecting what's right," and he applies it well beyond his caseload. In 2016 he founded the San Diego Farm Animal Rescue, a nonprofit sanctuary for horses, pigs, hens, and roosters that doubles as environmental education — San Diego Magazine named it the county's Best Animal Encounter Experience. He rides horseback, snorkels, hikes, camps, and tests himself in Spartan Beast, Ragnar Relay, and Tough Mudder races. Television audiences know him as a legal commentator on wildfire policy, and he has been featured by CNN and HBO's Vice News.

He graduated cum laude from San Diego State University and from California Western School of Law, and is admitted in California, all four of the state's federal districts, and the Ninth Circuit. He has become the attorney California's local governments call on the worst day in their history — the one who knows that when a community burns, the community itself deserves a lawyer.