Robert A. Clifford

“My wife and my mom-in-law knew they were going to die,” Paul Njoroge wrote in the statement he submitted to the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on July 17, 2019. “I think about their last 6 minutes a lot.” Four months earlier his wife, Carolyne, 34; their three children, Ryan, 6, Kellie, 4, and Rubi, 9 months; and Carolyne’s mother, Ann Karanja, a retired teacher, had boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in Addis Ababa, bound for Nairobi. Rubi was the youngest person on the plane.

Njoroge had stayed behind in Canada. The family had been living in an apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, and the children were to stay with their grandparents in Kenya while he found full-time work and a home; Rubi, born in Canada, was to meet her grandfather, Quindos Karanja, for the first time over Easter. In his statement Njoroge wrote that the two women “had to somehow comfort the children during those final moments.” He wrote of his son Ryan’s fascination with the galaxy, of Kellie’s singing, and of “little nine-month-old Rubi, a baby who sat on her mommy’s lap who I wish I could hold just one more time.”

Flight 302 took off from Addis Ababa bound for Kenya on March 10, 2019, and crashed six minutes later near Bishoftu, killing all 157 people aboard, citizens of 35 countries. The airplane was a Boeing 737 MAX 8, the same model that had crashed minutes after takeoff in Indonesia five months earlier. Shortly after takeoff the left angle-of-attack sensor read 74.5 degrees while the right one read 15.3, and the stick shaker activated. The crew twice reported flight-control problems. The flight data recorder logged four automatic nose-down trim commands that neither pilot had made; the crew ran the runaway-stabilizer checklist, moved the stabilizer trim cutout switch to cutout, and found that manual trim was not working. In both crashes, faulty activation of the flight-control software known as MCAS forced the airplane into a nosedive. News footage of the field afterward showed a torn corner of the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! fluttering among the debris.

Four years later, in federal court in Chicago, Boeing argued to Judge Jorge L. Alonso that the families could recover nothing for those six minutes. Its lawyers contended that “undisputed evidence shows that death was instantaneous, and any speculation about what the passengers might have felt as the plane made impact is unfounded.” Because everyone aboard died instantly, Boeing said, the estates were not entitled to damages for what the passengers suffered before impact. Illinois courts had not fully addressed whether an estate could recover for a passenger’s fear before a crash. Boeing’s reply brief said: “[N]o Illinois case has ever allowed the recovery of pre-impact emotional distress damages on a survival claim.” Its lawyers pressed the point at a three-hour hearing in May 2023.

On May 30, 2023, Alonso ruled for the families and denied Boeing’s motion. Boeing had stipulated that expert testimony would describe the “history of the flight” and “the aircraft’s movements,” and Alonso held that even a bare-bones account of that evidence would let jurors infer that the passengers felt distress as the airplane “rose and fell, rose again, then plunged.” On the estates’ survival claims he wrote: “A jury could reasonably infer from the evidence that will be presented at trial that the passengers on ET 302 perceived that they were going to crash, horrifically, to their certain death.” On the families’ wrongful-death claims he wrote that “there is sufficient evidence to support a reasonable inference that these passengers experienced pre-impact fright and terror, and that experience is part of the process or manner of death.” Relatives could tell jurors that imagining those minutes had deepened their grief. Alonso wrote that “contemplation of what the passengers must have experienced as the airplane crashed is hardly mere speculation.”

Robert A. Clifford, the Chicago trial lawyer Alonso had appointed lead counsel for all plaintiffs in the consolidated cases, described what that evidence would be. The passengers, he said, “endured extreme G-forces, braced for impact, knew the airplane was malfunctioning, and ultimately plummeted nose-down to the ground at nearly 600 miles per hour, leaving a crater 30 feet deep.” He told the Associated Press that he wanted to call the crater a crime scene. Boeing had already admitted that its airplane caused the crash. After the ruling, each family could ask a jury to award damages for the terror of the descent as well as for the death.

Ethiopian Law or American Law

The families sued in the Northern District of Illinois, in Chicago, where Boeing then had its headquarters. In 2019 Alonso appointed Clifford lead counsel on behalf of all plaintiffs and named Tracy A. Brammeier of Clifford Law Offices liaison counsel; Clifford’s request to lead the litigation drew no opposition. Steven C. Marks of Podhurst Orseck and Justin T. Green of Kreindler & Kreindler co-chaired the plaintiffs’ executive committee. By that September the consolidated action, In re Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 Crash, No. 19-cv-02170, held 97 individual lawsuits against Boeing and other defendants. Clifford’s firm represented the families of more than 70 of the 157 people killed. Discovery would be shared by every plaintiff, and damages would be proved separately for each of the 157 people who died.

The plaintiffs aimed their discovery at the five months between the two crashes. A Lion Air 737 MAX 8 had gone into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, killing 189 people. Once that happened, Clifford said in September 2019, “you know doggone well that there was talk going on between Boeing and the [Federal Aviation Administration] in Washington, D.C., about grounding of the plane” or about explaining what had occurred. He called the difference between the two crashes “a matter of prime importance to all of the plaintiffs” because it went to proving that “the ET 302 crash was entirely preventable.” His committee and Boeing were negotiating a protective order for Boeing’s documents on the design and development of the 737 MAX 8.

The first fight concerned which country’s law would measure the losses. Boeing’s lead lawyer, Michael Scoville, had said the company was willing to pay “full compensatory damages under applicable law.” A foreign family suing an American manufacturer in an American court can face a motion under the doctrine of forum non conveniens to send the case to a court abroad, where damages may be far lower. In mid-2019, with 47 suits on file, Clifford took up those last three words. “We are now talking about compensatory damages, not punitive damages,” he said. “And we are talking about ‘under applicable law.’ What does that mean? Is that the law of Ethiopia where the crash occurred and we offer people a pittance of what they would be entitled to under American law?”

When Boeing’s counsel asked the court to order mediation for all of the families, Clifford spoke against it, telling Alonso that probably a majority of the families had no interest in early mediation. “In fact, what they want is the information from Boeing showing what Boeing knew, when they knew it, what they did with the information,” he said, and what the company would do with it “to prevent a similar occurrence to other families going forward.” He said Boeing was in direct contact with some families, and he objected to a rule that bound only one side. “I am a firm believer in the goose gander rule,” Clifford said. “If the plaintiffs’ lawyers are prohibited from contacting the families, so should the manufacturers, so should the operators.” At the September hearing Boeing agreed to voluntary mediation for families who wanted to settle, and Clifford said that “there are families who feel very strongly about pursuing this case to the end against Boeing.”

What Boeing Knew, When It Knew It

Eight months after the crash, Clifford sat in his firm’s 31st-floor office in the Loop behind a desk that held a replica 737 MAX 8. Models of a United DC-10, an Asiana 777 and an American 767 stood around the room; he kept such replicas, he said, as reminders “of the obligations we have on behalf of those who have perished in them.” About ten of his lawyers worked only on the Boeing cases. He had flown to three continents to meet the families. In Beijing he spent hours with a young widow whose husband died on their first anniversary. In Kenya he met the four grandparents of an 18-month-old girl who lost both parents on the flight; they had been waiting at the Nairobi airport to greet the couple. He flew to Rome to meet a widow and returned to Chicago the same day. “I want to have a relationship with a client,” he said. He had worked with hundreds of families who lost relatives in air crashes, and of these families he said, “I can tell you the depth of the trauma has a different feel to it.”

On November 14, 2019, a burial was held at the crash site on 48 hours’ notice, and only two families made it there. Clifford called the notice “appalling and inexcusable.” When Boeing pledged $50 million, he said, “I feel it was a publicity stunt designed to try to turn the tide of the bad media that they are receiving.” Dennis Muilenburg, who had been Boeing’s chief executive, “has been awarded an $80 million discharge package,” Clifford said. “Families are having buttons made with the number 80 on them.”

In January 2020 Clifford and Dan Webb of Winston & Strawn, Boeing’s lead lawyer and a former U.S. attorney, argued over Boeing’s document production before Magistrate Judge M. David Weisman in Chicago. Clifford said Boeing was moving too slowly and was holding back documents that he believed showed the company knew about the MCAS flaw before the Ethiopian crash. “We want to know what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did about it,” he said in court. “But I believe we are at loggerheads.” Webb answered calmly that his side understood the families’ concerns, and he pointed to the volume of documents involved. The two men had known each other for years; they had taught trial advocacy together at Loyola University.

In February 2021 the families’ lawyers asked to depose David Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive, and Muilenburg, along with other current and former employees, between May 3 and June 18. The lawyers were focusing on “what Boeing knew about the causes of the first crash and why the plane continued to fly.” Boeing then faced more than 100 lawsuits in Chicago over the second crash. A year earlier Clifford had described the families behind those suits. “I can assure you that there are families who are determined to make Boeing admit what it did was wrong,” he said.

Illinois Law and an Admission of Fault

In November 2021 Boeing and the families’ lawyers filed a joint motion in which Boeing admitted that it “produced an airplane that had an unsafe condition that was a proximate cause” of the plaintiffs’ compensatory damages and stated that it did “not ascribe fault to the Pilot (Captain), Co-Pilot (First Officer) or seek contributory or comparative negligence against them.” Boeing agreed not to try to force overseas families, many of them in Africa, to seek damages in their home countries; the families could pursue individual claims in U.S. courts. In return, punitive damages left the case: no evidence or argument about them would be the subject of discovery or be admitted. Boeing said it was “committed to ensuring that all families who lost loved ones in the accidents are fully and fairly compensated for their loss.”

The stipulation also chose the law that would measure the losses. Boeing and the families agreed that “the measure and elements of Plaintiffs’ damages are to be determined under Illinois law,” that the families were entitled to recover “the full measure of damages permitted under Illinois law,” and that their evidence could include, as Illinois law permitted, “the pre-impact, pre-death pain and suffering and emotional distress of the decedent.” Each family would try mediation first; if mediation failed, the family could present its case to a jury. Clifford, Marks and Green said the agreement would “ensure they are all treated equitably and eligible to recover full damages.” From then on, each family’s case in Chicago turned on the amount of its compensatory damages.

Proving What Each Family Lost

With liability conceded, the remaining proof concerned what each family had lost. In November 2022 Clifford, his partner Kevin P. Durkin, and associate John Kalantzis traveled to Tel Aviv and to Kenya to take depositions of the firm’s clients, the relatives of people killed on the flight. Clifford had already hired an animator to recreate the six-minute flight and a former ABC News producer to make video profiles of the people who died. When Alonso ruled on pre-impact damages the following May, six cases were set for trial on June 20, 2023, and about 75 of the 157 deaths remained unresolved.

In a December 2021 column for Chicago Lawyer, Clifford wrote about putting a dollar value on a life, the task those juries would face. He recalled that Kenneth Feinberg, special master of the fund Congress created for the families of September 11 victims, had first set up formulas he thought could apply across the board and then came to treat each victim as an individual. “Somehow 12 minds come together to decide how the loss of a two-year-old is different” from the loss of a family’s main earner, a single mother of three or a first responder, Clifford wrote. “I have always advised and mentored lawyers that our clients are not looking for a shoulder to cry on, and they are not looking for a friend,” he wrote. “They have people to rely on for that.” What clients needed, in his account, was sound legal judgment and a legal team working to hold the wrongdoer accountable and to maximize each client’s recovery. “That is the only way the civil justice system knows how to operate,” he wrote.

Roselawn, 1994, and Winnetka, 1995

Clifford had built that kind of proof before. On October 31, 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184, operated by Simmons Airlines, went down in a cornfield at Roselawn, Indiana, and all 68 people aboard were killed. Clifford was lead counsel in the litigation over the crash in federal court in Chicago. To understand the icing at the center of the case, he flew with pilots studying ice in snow clouds, with high-speed cameras mounted on the wings. “I made sure my estate was in order before I did that,” he said. His team videotaped every deposition and traveled to France, England, Scotland and Sweden to take testimony and interview families. They deposed Robert Crandall, American’s chief executive. Asked what American and Simmons had done to investigate icing problems on the ATR aircraft, Crandall answered, “Well, I suspect, nothing.”

For damages, Clifford prepared PowerPoint presentations to explain the case, videotaped testimony, and professionally produced day-in-the-life videos of the 16 victims he represented. With an injured client he would film the client’s daily life with the disability. “But in a death case, how do you do it?” he asked. His answer was a set of films built from interviews with relatives, teachers and employers, each ending with the family describing how they learned of the crash; focus groups watched them before trial. Judge Ruben Castillo set a firm trial date. Chief Judge Marvin E. Aspen mediated through a weekend, and less than an hour before opening statements the defendants agreed to a $110 million settlement. The cases of the families Clifford represented settled for $64 million combined. With many of the families in the courtroom, Clifford made a short statement on their behalf and showed the films he had made of the people they had lost, and Anton R. Valukas of Jenner & Block, American’s lawyer, apologized to the families in open court.

On January 16, 1995, Rachel Barton, a 20-year-old violinist who had played with the Grant Park Symphony and the Lyric Opera Orchestra and as a substitute with the Chicago Symphony, stepped off a Chicago and North Western commuter train at the Winnetka stop while the strap of her violin case was still caught inside. The train began to move. She testified that she was dragged “in a half-sitting position, bumping along gravelly ground next to the wheels.” Her left leg was amputated above the knee, and she underwent about 25 surgeries over the next three years. Clifford and Durkin tried her case against the railroad and Metra for a month. The railroad employee who closed the doors had not looked up and down the train first; the railroad used a door-light system without the second look that Metra used on its own lines; and the jury heard evidence of 14 earlier, similar incidents from 1990 to 1994. On March 1, 1999, the jury returned a verdict of $29.6 million, including punitive damages. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed in 2001, the Illinois Supreme Court declined to hear the railroads’ appeal in February 2002, and the railroads agreed to pay Barton $35 million in place of the award and the interest it had accrued.

He joined Philip H. Corboy & Associates in Chicago in 1974, two years before he received his law degree from DePaul University, practiced there and at Corboy & Demetrio until 1984, and then practiced under his own name. He represented plaintiffs after American Airlines Flight 191 crashed at O’Hare in 1979. He and Durkin represented victims of the fire at the Cook County Administration Building in downtown Chicago, where six people were killed and 16 injured in a smoke-filled stairwell; those claims settled for $100 million in 2008. He was lead counsel for the property-damage and insurance-subrogation claims against the airlines and security companies after the September 11 attacks, which settled for $1.2 billion. In September 2001 he had just become chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation. “I was quickly appointed by the ABA President to chair its Task Force on Terrorism and Law,” he wrote two decades later, and “I was involved on behalf of the ABA to help advise Feinberg and his team on the structure of the fund.”

Trial Dates Before Judge Alonso

Before November 2025, four trials set before Alonso settled shortly before they were to begin. In April 2025 Clifford was to try two cases together: those of Antoine Lewis, 39, a U.S. Army captain from suburban Chicago who was on military leave and left his wife, Yalena Lopez Lewis, also a soldier, and their two sons; and Darcy Belanger, 46, of Denver, a founding member of an environmental nonprofit who was flying to speak at a United Nations environmental assembly. Antonio M. Romanucci and Mark Lindquist, lead counsel for those families, were to try the cases with him, and jury selection was set for 8:30 a.m. on Monday, April 7, at the Dirksen Federal Building. On the Sunday night before, both cases settled on terms that were not released.

Paul Njoroge’s case was another. He had met Carolyne in college in Nairobi. Testifying before Congress in 2019, he described imagining how his family suffered during the flight. “I stay up nights thinking of the horror that they must have endured,” he said. “The six minutes will forever be embedded in my mind. I was not there to help them. I couldn’t save them.” In his written statement he added: “It never leaves me that my family’s flesh is there in Ethiopia mixed with the soil, jet fuel, and pieces of the aircraft.”

Clifford, with Durkin, Brammeier, and Kalantzis, was to try Njoroge’s damages case, with jury selection set for Monday, July 14, 2025, at the Dirksen Federal Building; eight jurors would hear it. On June 18 Alonso ruled that testimony about the G-forces the passengers experienced could be presented, including for passengers such as Rubi, who was ticketed as a lap infant. Clifford said Njoroge, once a financial analyst, had been unable to work since he learned of the crash and had devoted his time to a foundation in his family’s memory. “He has never been able to re-enter the family home that once was filled with children’s laughter and then suddenly became silent,” Clifford said. “He’s got complicated grief and sorrow and his own emotional stress. He’s haunted by nightmares and the loss of his wife and children.” Clifford said his client would seek “millions” in damages. On Friday, July 11, the case settled on terms that were not disclosed. Clifford said his team had been working “round-the-clock” on trial preparation and that a mediator had helped the parties reach agreement.

Alonso next set two cases to be tried side by side in November 2025. Clifford was to try the first: the estate of Mercy Ngami Ndivo, a 28-year-old mother from Kenya who left a daughter, her parents, and four siblings; her parents brought the suit. The second, the estate of Shikha Garg, a 32-year-old woman from India, was represented by Kline & Specter of Philadelphia. Among the cases waiting behind them were the estates of Abdul Jalil Qaid Ghazi Hussein, a 38-year-old man from Yemen and Kenya who was the sole support of his wife and seven children, six of them minors, and Nasrudin Mohammed, a 30-year-old businessman from the United Kingdom and Kenya who left a pregnant wife and three minor children. “We are fully prepared to begin selecting a jury November 3 on behalf of the families from around the world,” Clifford said.

Five cases could have gone to trial that week, and Alonso said only two could proceed because of the federal government shutdown. As jury selection began on Tuesday, November 4, Clifford said attempts at mediation had failed in recent months. “Boeing accepted full responsibility for the senseless and preventable loss of these lives, yet they have not been mediating in good faith to come to a resolution for these devastated families,” he said. “We are determined to achieve justice for every one of them.” A jury was selected over the whole of that Tuesday. That night the Ndivo, Hussein, and Mohammed cases settled, each on confidential terms. “Our clients are very appreciative of the court allowing them to use its resources to achieve the justice they required,” Clifford said. The Garg case went forward to trial, and seven cases would remain after these concluded.

The case set for trial in January 2026 belonged to Manant Vaidya of Brampton, Ontario, outside Toronto. The crash killed his parents, Pannagesh and Hansini Vaidya; his sister, Kosha Vaidya; her husband, Preritkumar Dixit; and their daughters, Ashka and Anushka Dixit. The family, who lived in Canada, were traveling during the girls’ spring break to show them where their mother was born, and they were flying on to Kenya for a safari they had spent years saving for. Clifford would try the case against Dan Webb of Winston & Strawn, Boeing’s lead counsel. “We are fully prepared to begin selecting a jury January 12 on behalf of the Vaidya family,” Clifford said.

Jury selection was set to begin at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, January 12, 2026, in the Dirksen Federal Building. By the end of Tuesday, January 13, eight jurors had been selected, and Clifford was to give his opening statement Wednesday morning. Late that Tuesday the Vaidya family’s claims settled; the amounts are confidential. Clifford said that “this corporate giant has now been held accountable to this family, especially to this good man who lost his dear mom, dad, and sister.”

The Potomac Collision and a Claim Against the United States

On January 29, 2025, American Eagle Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter collided over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport, and 67 people were killed. The next day Clifford told the Associated Press, “I can’t get over how stunningly clear it is that this was a preventable crash, and this should never, ever have occurred.” Talking with Law.com, he compared the airline’s public response with Boeing’s: “Do you think for one minute that the head of American Airlines would be so upfront and out there right now, but for what went on with [the lawsuits surrounding] Boeing’s [Dennis] Muilenburg?” He also said, “That’s one of the positives of litigation because, without it, there’s no penalty.”

A suit against the United States follows its own rules. “You have to file a notice of claim with the government, and the government has six months to decide if they’re going to honor the claim or not,” Clifford said in February 2025, and a case against the government “involves a trial before a federal judge.” On September 24, 2025, at a news conference in Washington, Clifford announced that his firm had filed the first wrongful-death suit over the collision, against American Airlines, the parent company of American Eagle; PSA Airlines; and the United States, for the family of Casey Crafton, who was killed aboard the jet. The $250 million claim alleges negligence in operations and training and alleges that the Federal Aviation Administration knowingly allowed dangerous conditions at Reagan National. The firm filed it in cooperation with Kreindler & Kreindler and Speiser Krause, and Clifford called it the “guiding complaint for the rest of the families to follow.” “The crash of American Eagle 5342 was predictable, preventable, and caused the needless loss of 67 lives,” he said.

In October 2025 U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes set a consolidated trial of the first suits for April 2027. “We are not going to dishonor the people who lost their lives, their family and friends,” she said at the hearing. On December 17, 2025, the Justice Department answered the Crafton complaint. “The United States admits that it owed a duty of care to Plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident on January 29, 2025,” it wrote. The government admitted that “the pilots flying PAT25 failed to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid other aircraft,” and its filing stated: “The Army crew negligently flew off the flight route towards the center of the Potomac River at too high an altitude.” It also admitted that a tower controller had not followed an air traffic control procedure. Clifford said the government had admitted “the Army’s responsibility for the needless loss of life.” “The government, however, rightfully acknowledges that it is not the only entity responsible for this deadly crash,” he said.

In February 2026 Reyes declined to dismiss American Airlines from the case, pointing to American’s name on the ticketing, the airport lounges, the airplane’s logo, the flight attendants’ uniforms and the baggage claim. Clifford is co-chair of the plaintiffs’ steering committee in In re Mid-Air Collision in Washington, D.C., pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and his firm represents multiple families who lost relatives that night.