Win-Win Situation

We just missed the opportunity to see Paul Luvera in a courtroom, to watch with our own eyes the mix of brains and authenticity that inspires so many of his peers to call him the best they’ve seen. As happens all too frequently with Luvera, hours before trial the defense offered a policy-maximum settlement. Nothing more to be done.

The opportunity to witness this impresario of personal injury cases work a jury is becoming increasingly rare. Not because at 71 years old he’s too weary or dotty for trial, but because he’s as big a threat as ever. His stunning string of victories and multimillion-dollar verdicts has a way of keeping juries out of the mix.

“When insurance companies get together in their little meeting and the attorney says, ‘I got a notice of appearance from Paul Luvera,’ they are groaning, because he doesn’t even start the negotiation stuff,” says Mark Wagner, a workers’ compensation attorney in solo practice in Tacoma. “He just prepares gangbusters for trial and lets them come to him. Much of his stuff is settled [on the] courthouse steps.”

But at the offices of the Luvera Law Firm, the chief’s not celebrating the settlement. In fact, a week later Luvera seems deflated by the turn of events.

“I feel like a heavyweight boxer might feel who has trained for a fight,” says Luvera, sitting in his corner office on the 67th floor of the Bank of America Tower. “You’ve worked very hard and, just as you were getting into the ring, the fight was called off. You believe you’re invincible. To have it settle is pretty depressing. I would be willing to not charge a fee just to be able to try the case. I’m somewhat irrational at that point.”

Luvera has been compared to Henry Fonda, but a lean Glenn Ford seems closer to the mark. More Northwest rugged, less Down East polish. He has green eyes and keeps his graying hair trimmed in a soft buzz. At 6 feet 2 inches, he looks lean and fit, which may be due to the 15 or so pounds he regularly sheds during his rabid trial preparation.

It’s not surprising that Luvera loves a courtroom. It loves him back. He hasn’t lost a case in at least 15 years, and his trials have resulted in more than a dozen verdicts for multimillions of dollars — many of which shattered records. In 1994 he won a $44 million verdict against a pharmaceutical company in Oregon, after a college student suffered permanent brain damage as a result of medication interactions. The lawsuit claimed the defendants failed to warn of this risk.

In 2001 Luvera won a $16.2 million malpractice verdict for a 25-year-old Spanaway woman who needlessly suffered through three years of surgeries, including a hysterectomy and chemotherapy, after being misdiagnosed with a rare form of cancer. That trial ended with jurors hugging the plaintiff.

Joel Cunningham describes his partner’s courtroom demeanor as more right tackle than boxer. “He’s totally straightforward. Damn the torpedoes. Full ahead. No cleverness or cuteness,” Cunningham says. As a former malpractice defense attorney, Cunningham says he settled many cases with Luvera before joining the firm.

But these comparisons suggest an antagonism that’s not Luvera. He’s down-to-earth, accessible and, these days, a bit grandfatherly. He’s been known to quote poetry in his closings.

His authenticity is no shtick. Wagner remembers a telling moment from the big annual Christmas party at the Luvera family’s Gig Harbor home, when a server dropped a tray and glasses shattered everywhere.

“Paul’s immediate reaction was to run over and grab [the server] and say, ‘Are you OK? We will get through this. I’ll go find a broom,’ ” Wagner remembers. “And I just thought, ‘That is cool.’ And that’s just the person he is. That’s why he gets juries to give him what he asks for.”

“If you’re totally honest with the judge and the jury, they forgive you for the problems in your case because they realize you are a credible person,” Luvera says. “I have said to a witness, for example, when I’m cross-examining, ‘I wish I had never asked that question. You really hurt me with that answer.’ ”

Of course, he can afford to be honest. He carefully vets his cases.

“He doesn’t do slip-and-fall kinds of cases,” Cunningham says. “If he looks at a case and thinks the plaintiff is substantially at fault, he doesn’t like those cases. His favorites are ones wherein he is not just bringing the lawsuit but also trying to establish some accountability, so that something doesn’t happen in the future.”

Case in point

When Emma Farmer sought Luvera’s representation, she had no reason to think he’d help her in her relatively small claim against one doctor. But Luvera had a soft spot for the then 77-year-old

World War II Italian war bride with a halo of white hair, a tough attitude and a thick Italian accent.

Farmer claimed that from 1998 to 2001, she went to her doctor with abdominal complaints and he failed to listen. She said he just prescribed tablets for acid reflux.

When the pain got too intense, she saw another doctor, who discovered a 3-pound cancerous tumor in her colon and called for immediate surgery. She endured intense chemotherapy and now lives with a colostomy.

Luvera discovered in her medical records that, on at least three occasions, they reported that the doctor recommended she see a specialist and she refused. It looked like a classic, hard-to-win, he-said-she-said case. When Farmer saw the records, “she was absolutely incensed, indignant and offended,” Luvera says. “We liked her so well and were so impressed with her, we knew there was something wrong.”

Under oath, the doctor insisted his records were accurate. But Luvera’s faith in Farmer never wavered. “They look at your eyes and the way you talk,” Farmer says about the lawyers at The Luvera Law Firm. “They took my case because they believed in me.”

Luvera and co-counsel Ralph Brindley submitted the records to a former Washington State Patrol forensic handwriting expert. He determined that nine entries had been added at a later date.

At a second deposition, Luvera warned the defense lawyer about the forensics information, and the doctor admitted he had lied. His insurance paid the fully allowed amount, $1 million, and he wrote Farmer an apology. The doctor was also fined and required to write an article for a medical journal about the importance of telling the truth. After Luvera read the article, which blamed the attorneys and failed to mention the falsified records, Luvera hauled him in again before the judge, who fined him again.

Farmer celebrated the settlement by cooking a big dinner for her attorneys. “I was on a crusade and I won. And thank God for Paul Luvera. I love him.”

Switching gears

Luvera didn’t always do plaintiff ’s work. When he started out 45 years ago, his clients included insurance companies. One early case turned it around for him. The plaintiff was a young woman injured in a car accident. He recommended paying the full policy limits, twice what the company wanted to pay.

“My file was just full of memos to the company saying, you know, she’s in pain,” Luvera remembers. When they settled for less, the woman’s attorney sued the insurance company for bad faith. Luvera’s case file, with his memos, became fuel for the other side. At that point, he said he would never again defend a company if he couldn’t do what he knew was right.

“Because of being raised by an immigrant father and mother, my philosophy about people was such that it [the defense work] was incompatible,” Luvera says. “You have to be true to yourself.”

A humble start

Luvera often invokes his heritage as a grounding force. His father emigrated as a young boy from Italy and worked in coal mines in Canada. His mother’s family emigrated to the Puget Sound area from Austria-Hungary. Neither made it past the sixth grade. They met and married in Anacortes, where they operated a small neighborhood grocery store. His father went on to be a state senator and a renowned totem-pole carver.

Luvera worked in the store as a boy and later was a commercial fisherman in Alaska, giving him an appreciation for the difficulties most people face. He attended the University of Washington on a basketball and football scholarship; then, under the sway of a charismatic priest, he transferred to St. Martin’s College in Lacey to pursue a religious vocation.

“They turned the lights off at 10 o’clock at night; got you up at 6 in the morning to go to mass,” Luvera says. “Within about six months, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

He ended up at Gonzaga University, where he went to law school at night. In 1978, he founded his law firm.

His wife, Lita T. Barnett-Luvera, is a partner in the firm. Somehow in the middle of building a gangbusters practice, they managed to raise Paul’s eight children from a previous marriage.

Settling for more

Settlement may not be what Luvera aims for, but it is his bread and butter. In 2001 he negotiated a settlement of $45 million, the largest in the state at that time, on behalf of six adults killed in an explosion at an Anacortes refinery that the plaintiffs blamed on a defective manufacturing process. One year later, he collected $75 million from the Olympic Pipe Line Company for the families of two 10-year-old boys. The boys had died from burns when gasoline that had leaked into a Bellingham river they were playing near caught on fire.

As the settlements ring up, The Luvera Law Firm’s share — in the one-third range — is sizable. But Luvera insists it’s not about money.

“This isn’t a business for him. It’s a profession and a calling, and it just so happens that he’s so good at it, he has received great financial reward,” says Earl F. Martin, dean of Gonzaga University School of Law. “But that financial reward followed the conviction and the effort. It wasn’t what drove him to do this.”

Luvera’s firm inserts into its client agreements a clause stipulating it will not agree to keep lawsuit details secret from the public in exchange for a settlement, except at the client’s request.

“When I joined him, I kind of fought him on it,” Cunningham says. “I thought, ‘Well, gee, if we can settle this case and all they want is confidentiality, why shouldn’t we do it?’ But he’s taught me you’re either in this business for the money or you’re in it for something more than that.”

Luvera grabs from a shelf a small artificial heart valve — about the size of a nickel — mounted on a piece of heart-shaped wood. It’s the actual Bjork-Shiley valve from the heart of a deceased client.

“People died because this little holder broke,” Luvera says, tapping a plastic flap. “People died all over the country, and they settled all the cases with confidentiality agreements. So no one found out about it. Nor did [the company] tell the FDA. Nor did they report it to the physicians. They made changes internally in their weld systems, but they didn’t tell anybody.”

Because of Luvera’s policy, in his settlement with the valve maker details of the flaw were made public.

Of course, most attorneys can’t afford to make a blanket policy like this.

“The only way you can really establish a policy that the other side will [respectfully] recognize is if they go to court and they are worse off than they would have been if they paid the money,” Luvera says, in a matter-of-fact way. “So the next time they say they want confidentiality, and you say, ‘No, we’re going to go to trial,’ they evaluate what happened to them the last time they made that choice.”

It’s no surprise that Luvera is unpopular in some circles. He’s been vilified by the National Rifle Association and on talk radio for representing the families of the victims of the D.C. sniper. In 2003 Luvera went after Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, claiming it had negligently allowed 200 or more rifles to “disappear,” and rifle-maker Bushmaster Firearms Inc., claiming it had shipped the gun to a dealer it knew to be irresponsible. That settlement marked the first time a gun manufacturer agreed to pay damages ($500,000) in such a case.

His is no doubt among the dartboard photos in Big Tobacco’s smoking rooms for his role as lead trial attorney, chosen by then Attorney General Christine Gregoire, in the state of Washington’s lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The 2½-month trial ended with a national settlement — at $206 billion, $4.5 billion of that for Washington state — the largest in U.S. history.

And he’s nobody’s favorite at medical meetings. The American Medical Association has given seminars warning its members about him.

“I learned very, very early that if I was going to be doing the best possible job for my clients, it wasn’t at all important whether I was loved or not. Respected and feared, yes. Loved, no,” Luvera says, adding, tongue-in-cheek, “Of course, I want to be loved by everybody, and it always comes as a shock when I’m not.”

Friendships forged

Among his biggest fans are Lane and Patty Judson, parents of Crystal Judson Brame. In a case that rocked law enforcement nationwide, their daughter was fatally shot by her estranged husband, who was Tacoma’s police chief at the time.

Almost immediately after the April 2003 shooting, stories surfaced that David Brame — who also killed himself — had a long record of sketchy behavior, including a rape charge, emotional instability and reports of abusing his wife and threatening to kill her. Despite many concerns, Brame rose through the ranks to chief and, against the recommendations of some, held onto his badge even as he behaved more erratically.

The stories made a devastating situation worse. “Our thought was, ‘How can this happen?’ ” says Lane Judson, Crystal’s father. “The reason to get an attorney was to know who knew what, when. Who was involved? We didn’t know.”

Their lawsuit against Tacoma, the police department, the mayor, the city manager, Pierce County and others contended that officials never investigated allegations that Brame abused his wife and failed to protect her. Early on, Tacoma offered $8 million to settle, “if we didn’t talk about it,” Patty Judson says. They turned it down flat.

“The Judson family really wanted the truth,” Luvera says, “because they rightfully perceived that city hall was going to draw the curtain down on the facts behind that shooting.”

When the settlement was finalized in November last year, the city paid $12 million in damages. But more important to the Judsons was a laundry list of accountability concessions suggested by Luvera that didn’t contribute to his bottom line. They included requirements that the city clean up its ethics, the police department become accredited and, most astonishing, that those in government who had not yet testified under oath — such as the former city manager and former assistant police chief — could be deposed. This is the only instance Luvera knows of that left open the possibility of evidence-gathering as a condition of settlement.

Now a valued friend of the Judsons, Luvera, along with his wife, joined the family on a rainy day last January at the opening of a new domestic-violence center in Tacoma. The crowning achievement of the Judson lawsuit, the Crystal Judson Family Justice Center will provide to many women and children the services that weren’t available to its namesake.

A moment like that has to feel good. But Luvera rarely celebrates. He says it’s bad for his game. After a case is over, he always questions himself. “The French have a phrase for it; it’s called ‘the spirit of the stairs,’ ” he says. “It’s that feeling after you’ve left the office: As you go down the stairs, you think of all the things you should have said. That happens with all of my cases. I always feel something more should have been done.”