Mohamad Ahmad

What Was Energized?

In April 2019, Kelley Maggio suffered severe electrical injuries — injuries requiring continuing care for the rest of his life — while working at a utility-scale solar construction project near Paso Robles.

Every electrical-injury trial begins with a deceptively simple question: what was energized when the worker encountered it? On a project spanning hundreds of acres, the answer hides in construction schedules, lockout procedures, one-line diagrams, equipment records, and the daily traffic of instructions among contractors. The switch that creates the danger may sit far from the worker who meets it.

Ahmad helped try the case for Maggio and his wife, Kirsty, against First Solar Electric, H-S International, Joshua Tillery, and other project participants. His work ran the length of the case: identifying the responsible parties, driving discovery, building the medical proof, designing the demonstratives, selecting the jury, and delivering the opening statement.

A Map of Control

Jurors could not be handed a pile of engineering documents and left to find the story. So the trial team built them a map.

Drone footage reconstructed the project's geography and placed every person and piece of equipment at the moment of exposure. With the geography fixed, one-line diagrams traced the electrical path; construction witnesses identified the work packages and who issued the instructions; and medical witnesses brought the case back from the project map to one man's body and the care it would need forever. Cross-examination exposed the gaps in the research behind the defense's electrical expert.

California's retained-control rule demanded more than an organizational chart. The evidence had to show authority actually exercised: who directed the operation, who knew the equipment's status, who could have altered the condition — and that neither Maggio nor his direct employer controlled the source of the danger. The jury compared the written hierarchy with the operating one.

In June 2023, the Monterey County jury returned a $51.3 million verdict. An appeal and cross-appeal remained pending as of June 30, 2026, with the trial record Ahmad helped build now doing its work in a second forum.

The Other Direction: Karamooz

Ahmad also knows how to run the machine in reverse. In Karamooz v. Karamooz, he represented a client hit with a $500,000 probate surcharge and took the judgment apart on appeal, component by component.

The estate record mixed categories that could not be collapsed into one number — property held at death, later judgments, money already received, valuations, expenses. Ahmad traced each disputed amount through the findings, testimony, exhibits, and accountings, and showed the Court of Appeal exactly which components the record could not support. Rather than asking the court to retry credibility, he gave it a defined correction to order. The court removed the unsupported components and directed entry of a substantially narrower judgment.

Maggio moved from documents toward a verdict; Karamooz moved from a judgment back through the record to a corrected number. Both are the same skill pointed in opposite directions: organize a complex record into the sequence the decision-maker needs.

Trained on Both Sides

Before building his plaintiffs' practice, Ahmad served as lead defense counsel in federal cases across the country in which health insurers sought nearly half a billion dollars from clinical laboratories and medical providers. He won a complete defense verdict for a multinational corporation against its former president's $20 million wrongful-termination claim, and knocked out a $500 million trade-secrets suit on summary judgment after the case had lingered for four years before he arrived.

That history shows in how he prepares: he has sat where the defense sits, and he builds his cases to survive everything he once would have thrown at them.

Resolutions

In 2019, Ahmad served as co-counsel in a wrongful-death action against a nationwide retailer over the death of a child; the matter resolved for $7.5 million. The same month, he secured a $4.49 million settlement in a partnership-profit dispute on the eve of the summary-judgment hearing — completed before the opposing company entered bankruptcy. His representative matters also include a $3.1 million premises-liability settlement in 2018 and a $2.35 million resolution arising from a freeway incident.

Teaching the Work

Trial Lawyers University selected Ahmad to teach a 2023 New York program built around the Maggio trial — "Voir Dire & Opening: Telling a Simple, Compelling Story Through Action" — and has featured him in sessions on pretrial pressure, motions to compel, evidentiary sanctions, videotaped depositions, and demonstrative evidence.

His method joins the two ends of the case. Voir dire surfaces the assumptions jurors carry into an industrial case — about workplace risk, personal responsibility, corporate safety programs — before the evidence begins. Opening builds the action-centered chronology that gives every expert a defined place in the story. And beneath both sits discovery: the enforceable requests, preserved depositions, and sanctions records that determine whether the jury ever sees the complete sequence at all.

Kermani LLP

Ahmad is a founding partner of Kermani LLP in Santa Monica. He earned both his undergraduate and law degrees at UCLA and served as a judicial extern to Judge Dale S. Fischer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

He is an active California lawyer, admitted May 17, 2011, and is also admitted in Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, and New York, as well as the Ninth Circuit and the Northern and Central Districts of California. He speaks Arabic and Spanish — languages that let him interview clients directly and reach records and witnesses early, with certified interpreters used where court rules require them.