The Lessons of Lahaina

On the morning of Jan. 7, 2025, Jesse Creed stepped from a deposition at the Panish Shea Ravipudi office in West Los Angeles and looked out the 7th-floor windows to see a dark plume of smoke coming from the Santa Monica Mountains near his home in the Pacific Palisades. When his wife had called earlier to discuss what she should do—there was no evacuation order yet, and their boys, 4 and 7, were at a school in the neighborhood—they were both thinking of Lahaina. 

As lead attorney in litigation stemming from the 2023 Maui wildfires that killed 102 people, Creed represented thousands of fire victims. A few weeks before, in fact, he had submitted his last brief to the Supreme Court of Hawaii to save their $4 billion settlement from being blocked by the insurance companies; oral arguments were set for Feb. 6.

“Everyone said in Lahaina the winds came down from the West Maui Mountains so strong that it was just unbelievable,” Creed recalls. “They couldn’t believe how fast the fire moved. That was driving all of my decisions to get ahead of the fire. You can’t wait. You can’t try to forecast how a fire moves. So I was like ‘Get a bag, pack up, and get out of there.’”

Creed left work to pick up his kids and take them to his parents’ house, also in the Palisades but further from the fire, while his wife, employment civil rights attorney Mia Munro, packed her bag. Then he went to do the same while she got the kids and relocated to colleague Brian Panish’s house. He filled a suitcase with five days of clothes, thinking he’d be back within that timeframe. He turned off the gas line and considered hosing down his home like his neighbors were, even though he knew it would be futile.

“It doesn’t do anything,” he says. “The wind wicks away the water, so it dries instantly. You really are thinking on such a small scale when a wildfire is so massive and so hot like an inferno. There’s nothing you can do.”

As he left his home and turned onto Sunset Boulevard, two cars crashed in front of him.

“I’m thinking I could die trying to escape the fire, so I’m trying to be a little more careful, but there’s fire and smoke right in front of me, and it’s total gridlock,” Creed recalls. “That was scary. If the fire comes, what do you do? Try to run?”

In the gridlock, he again thought about Maui.

“In Lahaina, they were blocking streets which caused people to die,” he says. “They were directing people toward the fire. It was complete incompetence on the part of the government. And it was the same in the Palisades. They issued the evacuation order way too late. People were panicking. They had to abandon their cars. That should never have happened.”

A drive that usually takes 10 minutes lasted an hour and a half. Later, when he saw on the news that the fire had jumped Sunset and hit Radcliffe Avenue, he realized his home would be lost, along with his parents’ home—where he’d grown up—and his kids’ school, and their synagogue, and the park and library and recreation center. Their entire community. 

A few weeks later, when he stood before the Supreme Court of Hawaii to deliver oral arguments, he did so with a fuller understanding of what his clients had been through; and he decided to share with the justices his personal experience as a fire victim in a different state.

“I definitely had my doubts,” he says of the pivot. “But the lawyers from Hawaii felt I should. Everyone was saying it’s a legal issue. Yes, but there’s a human element here, and so I ended up talking about it because the decision before them was basically if you agree with us, more money will get to the community of Maui and the people. If you agree with the insurers, more money is going to go to Illinois where State Farm is, or Japan where Tokio Marine is, or London where Lloyd’s of London is; so we were saying not only should you go with us on the law, but as a matter of policy, when your community is destroyed like I experienced, you need as many resources as possible to bring it back.”

Creed had been appointed lead counsel, along with two other attorneys, in the Maui fire litigation in late 2023. Though his home office is Los Angeles, he has a practice in Hawaii, where his wife and her family are from, and he and his firm represented roughly 2,000 victims of the fire that destroyed Lahaina. 

Like his California wildfire cases against Southern California Edison in the Thomas and Woolsey fires, the utility Hawaiian Electric was sued for failing to maintain power lines, while Kamehameha Schools, the state’s largest landowner, was sued for not tending to fire-prone grasses. 

In 2024, the parties reached a $4 billion settlement, but the insurance companies refused to settle their own subrogation claims, which sought to get back from defendants the money the insurance companies had paid to policyholders.

“They were trying to tank our settlement, and so we came up with a creative structure to settle around them, based on Hawaii law,” Creed says. “The defendants said if you want to do that, you need to get the Hawaii Supreme Court to bless your view of what Hawaii law does or does not allow, and so we created this procedure to get the Hawaii Supreme Court to decide that.”

Creed argued that the insured have a right to settle, which the insurance companies cannot disrupt.

“In a lot of states, both the insurer and insured can bring direct claims,” Creed says. “Hawaii has a statute that says they cannot. If the insured settles, then the insurer can only recover, if at all, against the policyholders’ settlement. They can’t bring direct action against the defendant. The rules there also, we believe, prioritize the policyholder victim’s recovery over the insurance company’s recovery, so ultimately it means most money will go to the policyholder. In some cases, it will be all the money. I think that’s the rule that makes the most sense because the policyholders have paid premiums for many decades to these companies to protect them and give them money to rebuild at that very moment. They should not be competing for the same funds. The policyholders should get completely made whole before insurance companies recover anything. That’s essentially the rule Hawaii set up, and I think that’s the right rule for the country.”

The Supreme Court agreed—unanimously—in a win Creed hopes will not only help Maui rebuild but provide a precedent for other states.

More importantly, he hopes there’s never a fire case again.

“That’s ultimately the goal,” he says. “It’s shocking to me that the utilities don’t get it right and that we had another utility-started fire. That’s beyond negligence. It’s recklessness at this point.”

In addition to the parallels Creed shared publicly in court, he says his experience as a fire victim adds to his credibility as a personal injury lawyer—a path he chose to “help the little guy go up against wealthy interests” after starting his career in defense at Munger, Tolles & Olson, which happens to represent Hawaiian Electric.

“I think that experiencing hardship is something that makes you more empathetic,” he says. “I always want my clients to trust me, and I think going through this experience does help win that trust: I know what it feels like and how difficult this is for you, and I’m going to fight as much as I can to protect your rights and get you justice.”

For Creed’s family, that difficulty is ongoing, but they plan to rebuild with a goal of moving back to the Palisades in 2027.

“The aftermath is picking everything up, figuring out where to live, how to get resources, how to deal with the insurance, when to rebuild, how to rebuild. There are environmental and toxicity questions, and then doing your day job and parenting at the same time. It’s a huge burden,” he says. “What people don’t realize is it’s not just my house; it’s a whole community. I can rebuild and move back and be surrounded by a bunch of burned-down abandoned lots. That’s the real challenge. The real challenge is about how to make the community come back.”