Lawyers of the Year 2009
By:
Justin Rebello
Published: December 15, 2009
Tags: Lawyers of the Year, Lawyers of the Year 2009
Each December, Lawyers USA selects our Lawyers of the Year. These are individuals who have made a significant impact on the law during the year just past.
This year, we are honoring 10 individuals. The men and women selected as Lawyers of the Year for 2009 include an attorney who won a record-setting verdict against the tobacco companies, a lawyer who fought for gay rights in Iowa, and the man who took the reins for the ABA as it tried to keep the FTC’s “red flags rule” from applying to the legal profession. All made news in their profession and earned the title Lawyer of the Year.
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Jeffrey Fisher: Confronting the Confrontation Clause
Jeffrey Fisher is confronting the Confrontation Clause, one U.S. Supreme Court case at a time. Fisher is hooked on the Sixth Amendment – and for good reason. He has won three groundbreaking Supreme Court cases on the subject that will be cited for generations. |
Angela Ford: Solo exposes fraud in $200M diet-drug settlement
Angela Ford’s five-year fight to expose one of the worst cases of attorney fraud in U.S. history culminated this year with the federal convictions of two high-profile lawyers who had attempted to pocket most of a $200 million diet drug settlement.
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David C. Frederick: Success in two pivotal preemption cases
When David C. Frederick took on the task of trying to persuade the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court that federal law preempts neither state law claims against drug makers nor claims alleging deceptive cigarette labeling by tobacco companies, there were some betting against him. |
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Dennis W. Johnson: Equality in Iowa
In April 2009 Iowa became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage when the state’s highest court ruled that a statute prohibiting gay marriage violated the constitution. The winning lawyer, Dennis W. Johnson, was a commercial litigator who had never worked on a serious constitutional law case in his 34-year career. |
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Robert W. Kelley: Record-setting tobacco verdict
Lawyers in Florida have been fighting over individual tobacco trials for more than a decade. But when cases finally started being tried this year, the verdicts ranged from just over a million to $30 million – pocket change for the tobacco industry. That changed in November, when Robert W. Kelley won $300 million for Cindy Naugle, a 61-year-old suffering from severe emphysema. |
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Steven C. Krane: Red flags rule
Steven Krane, a partner at the New York office of Proskauer Rose, headed a multi-office litigation team that represented the ABA in its effort to block the Federal Trade Commission from applying its “red flags rule” to lawyers. Under the rule, businesses that accept deferred payments from clients are required to create written policies outlining how they will prevent, detect and address identity fraud. |
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Randy Nassau: New York attorney wins huge med-mal verdict
In June, medical malpractice attorney Randy Nassau of Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, P.C. in Yonkers, N.Y., won the largest verdict of its kind in the history of New York’s Westchester County, a $77.4 million award to the parents of 3-year-old Diego Baizan. Nassau admitted she hadn’t anticipated such a large verdict, despite the severity of the injuries suffered by her clients’ child. |
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Sonia Sotomayor: First Latina justice
If ever there was a judicial Cinderella story, it belongs to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. And this year, Sotomayor was tapped as President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court pick, becoming the first Latina justice on the High Court. |
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Lori Swanson: Leveling the playing field for consumers
She toppled the dominant player in debt arbitration in the country and changed the face of consumer credit card arbitration overnight. Lori Swanson, Minnesota’s Attorney General, filed a consumer fraud suit against the National Arbitration Forum in July, alleging that the firm worked closely with creditors and debt collectors behind the scenes, against the interests of consumers while claiming to be a neutral forum. |
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Sean Tracey: Won first Paxil birth defect case
Sean Tracey, who practices at the Tracey Law Firm in Houston, triumphed over the drug maker in the case, representing the family of a three-year-old Pennsylvania boy who was born with a defect in his aorta that restricted blood flow to his lungs. |
See last year’s list: Lawyers of the Year 2008
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