Driving Force

The woodblock print on the wall behind Christian Patno’s desk is a raw and poignant reminder of one of his most painful—and personal—cases.

“It’s one of my most prized possessions,” Patno says of the artwork, “by one of my closest friends from law school.” After the 2013 death of that friend, Mark Ruf, Patno represented his family in a wrongful death case. Afterward, Ruf’s sister had the print delivered to Patno’s office as a gift. It shows two boxers in stark relief: one crumpling to the mat, the other looming. A tense crowd leans in; a referee waves the count. 

“The Upset is what he called it,” says Patno. “It’s about the underdog fight.”

A principal at McCarthy Lebit Crystal Liffman, Patno oversees the firm’s personal injury and wrongful death practice area. Every client he represents is, in one way or another, an underdog, and he loves being their legal champion. 

“When Monday morning comes and you can’t wait to get up and go to work to do what you love to do,” Patno says, “you have found the right career.” 

In his case, though, it’s more like the right career found him.

Patno went to law school planning to go into corporate law, “maybe,” and return to Vermont. A mountain of student debt and a better paying job offer kept him in Ohio. 

“I started out at the first injury firm because I needed food on my table and to pay for books,” he says. “I would take the bus downtown to Cleveland from Cleveland Heights, where I lived and went to law school. And it wasn’t until I was a lawyer a full year that I was able to afford a $700 car that I bought from my grandfather.”

That was a volume firm, he says, “with soft tissue, auto accident injuries or broken bone accident injuries. I didn’t have a huge passion until this one case where a little girl got struck by this guy who was speeding and struck her and broke her leg. I wanted to try that case. [The firm] didn’t want me to try it; they wanted to settle it. That’s when I decided to leave.”

Ultimately, his cases would span jurisdictions from Puerto Rico to California and include such varied matters as the suicide of his children’s best friend, the alleged carbon monoxide poisoning of his law school classmate, and a case that resulted in the largest wrongful-death verdict in Ohio history at that point, according to Patno.

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Before any of that, though, came hockey, skiing on Vermont slopes, and getting tagged as a “legal eaglet” while he was still in law school. 

Patno’s father, Lee, was a manager at the Killington Ski Area. So, naturally, Patno grew up on the slopes—skiing with the U.S. Ski Team in the mornings before the lifts opened to the public, and working at “almost every job known to mankind” after. That ranged from running lifts and snowmobile shuttles to waving cars into spaces in the parking lot in 50-below weather. He also taught skiing. (Patno still skis every year with his wife, Rolla. Son Tyler, 32, is certified in avalanche rescue. Daughter Becca, 30, has also skied and snowboarded with him, but right now is busy as new mom to Patno’s first grandchild, Teagen.) 

But in high school, Patno’s real love was another winter sport: hockey. “I was the leading goal scorer in the state of Vermont my junior and senior year,” he says. His team won the state championship in his final year. Patno went on to play at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and graduated with a bachelor’s in political science. 

Why go for the J.D.? “My mother always wanted me to go to law school,” he says. “And so my options were: be a professor in political science, go into politics in a think tank somewhere, or go to law school.”

He chose Case Western Reserve University, partly because it was away from the East Coast “urban jungles,” but more because his father could drive him there from Vermont. “I thought I’d have a father-son trip out of it,” he recalls. “We had a great time, as always, although driving through inner city Cleveland on the way to law school, for a guy who grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont, my dad’s eyes were opened a little.” 

Initially, Patno toyed with the idea of going into corporate work. Taking part in the school’s law clinic changed his mind. “I was representing a man who was in dental school, whose wife was a nurse,” he says. “I was able to argue successfully and get him temporary alimony.”

The outraged wife went to the local paper, he says, and the write-up dubbed him a “Legal Eaglet.” 

In the process, he says, he discovered “a passion for trial work. I wanted to defend doctors in med-mal cases.”

That would change. So would his plan to go back to Vermont after graduation.  

“I realized quickly that, with $125,000 in student loans and a 17-grand-a-year position in Vermont, I wasn’t going to be able to go home. I stayed here in Ohio,” he says.

After his less than satisfying experience at that first firm, in 1991 he went to work at Landskroner and Phillips. It was everything he hoped for. Just three years out of law school, he was handling complex trial work and making a difference in people’s lives. 

“I had these major catastrophic complex cases—med mals, railroad grade crossing cases, product liability cases where people were horrifically injured—life-altering injuries. That’s how I first was immersed in that world.”

One of his early cases took him to Puerto Rico. He uncovered a hospital’s undisclosed $30 million insurance policy and forced a substantial settlement to provide long-term comprehensive care for a baby born with cerebral palsy after a botched delivery. And he took on Norfolk Southern Railway after a train killed an Ohio family crossing the tracks in their pickup truck. The result: a $4.25 million jury verdict, upheld on appeal. 

“I love peeling the onion layers back,” he says. “Every case has its complexity, its nuances and its uniqueness. That holds true in every type, whether it’s product liability, whether it’s medical malpractice, medical device. And I love the intrigue. … I love finding when the defense has lied, cheated and stolen and I catch them. That is where I am at my happiest.”

In 1997, Patno moved to Garson & Associates, where he supervised five personal injury attorneys; then, in 2007, to McCarthy Lebit. He met Michael Goodman, managing partner of NFP Structured Settlements, while at Garson.

“We’ve worked on dozens of cases over the years,” Goodman says. “He’s as smart as any lawyer that I work with anywhere in the country. I think that he secures results that are above and beyond what I see from others. And I think that he is able to provide a lot of personal attention to each of his clients because he’s not overwhelmed with too many.”

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It may say something about Patno that he fails to mention an effort that is having a broad impact in Cleveland. It’s another law school friend, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge David Matia, who brings it up. 

“When he was president of the Cleveland Academy of Trial Attorneys,” Matia says, “he developed a program with legal aid to provide representation to tenants who were being evicted, kind of like establishing a civil Gideon.” 

In 2021, the year after it launched, more than 90% of the 650 families with children assisted by the project were able to stay in their homes. The Plain Dealer editorialized that the program was so successful, and so economically beneficial to the city, it should be expanded to the rest of Cuyahoga County.

Around the same time, Patno represented the family of Anthony Ripepi in a complicated and emotional legal fight. Ripepi’s brother died in a highway accident in 2020 when an overpass sign knocked loose by a dump truck crashed onto his car. 

A successful outcome involved more than proving liability. His brother had left behind three children from his first marriage and a widow with three stepchildren. 

“Chris explained this to the family beautifully. He said, ‘Listen, nothing’s going to bring your husband, your father, your stepfather back. But if he was here, he would provide for you. And we’re going to make that happen in a different format,’” Ripepi says. “And it did.”

His brother’s eldest daughter got married in July. “The wedding went off beautifully. His other daughter is now living in Chicago, is successful in fashion, and his youngest is going to college. And so those things, although he won’t be there to take care of them, the foundation we put together with the funds and the money will be.”

Another highway accident, which resulted in a $39 million verdict in 2014, was at the time the largest ever wrongful death verdict in Ohio state history, according to Patno. It involved a 41-year-old paving inspector and father of three, Randy Roginski, killed by a driver who swerved to avoid a dump truck in a construction zone. 

The verdict included $19 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages. Getting to a successful result took more than persuading the jury that the paving company was at fault. 

Ohio law at the time would have capped the punitive damages at under $100. (You read that right. It’s complicated, but it had to do with whether Roginski realized he was about to be hit and, therefore, suffered any “pre-impact terror,” Patno says.) 

“My argument to the judge that then set forth a multipage opinion was that $100 does not punish one of the largest paving companies in America for their bad conduct.” So, as applied, the cap violated the state constitution, Patno says. The court agreed. Otherwise, Patno says, the amount of punitive damage would be too small to effectively punish the defendant or deter any such future conduct. 

“That trial court opinion has been cited and used time and time again now for my brethren and sisters to get punitive damages in situations where it’s unconstitutional as applied because it would be too low,” he says.

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Every case, in its way, is personal, Patno says. “You spend so much time emotionally connected with your clients. You literally become part of their family for a window in their life.”

But some of Patno’s past cases are personal on another level. He handled one medical malpractice case involving a friend’s father; another concerning the suicide of his next-door neighbor’s 15-year-old child, related to psychological treatment and monitoring she had received. 

And then there’s the one he’s reminded of every time he looks at the woodblock print on his wall. Patno believes his friend Ruf was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty hotel pool heater.

“He was a trial lawyer like I am, but he retired early because he couldn’t take the dishonesty and what he was seeing out there ethically,” Patno says. In November 2014, Ruf took a trip to Palm Springs, rode a bicycle up and down the California coast, then returned to Palm Springs to fly back to Ohio.

“I spoke to him the night before,” says Patno. “We had scheduled lunch so he could tell me all about his trip.”

Instead, Patno says, he got a call from another friend who told him Ruf’s dad had gone to pick up his son at the airport, only to find he wasn’t on the plane. 

Ruf’s body was found at the hotel, and his family asked Patno to step in. The case ended in a settlement. 

“I had to look at autopsy photos,” Patno says. “There was a lot that I really didn’t want to see. And, you may have heard this from other injury lawyers, you get PTSD. … And it desensitizes you as a human being, as self-protection.

“So when my mother was dying of kidney failure in a hospital and I sat there with her, I hated myself because I was emotionally disconnected from the moment,” he says. “I didn’t process that grief until about a year later.”

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Whatever life brings, Patno just does what he’s always done: keeps on punching. The motivation comes from his clients. 

“The remuneration is not just economic,” he explains. “It’s also emotional, spiritual, and gives you a feel-good at the end of the day that you’re making a true difference.”

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Gentlemen’s Race Day 

When some lawyers want to get away from it all, they head for the water or the woods. Patno straps himself into a land rocket. Specifically, a McClaren 720S. 

The racing royalty of Formula 1, the 720S goes from zero to 200 mph in about the time it takes to tie your shoes. Patno satisfies his need for speed once or twice a year—on “Gentlemen’s Race Day.” 

“Myself and about six to eight of my friends will literally rent a racetrack where we have an ambulance crew. We’ve got people in the towers. We’ve got people flagging on the corners. 

“On an F1 course that’s about a half hour from my house.” 

And they let ‘er rip.