One of the founding members of the Los Angeles-based legal firm Girardi & Keese is the American lawyer and television personality Thomas Vincent Girardi. Since its founding in 1965, the business has won verdicts and settlements totaling $10 billion. He is regarded as one of the most eminent trial lawyers in America with a career spanning more than four decades. Girardi, a native of Colorado, earned an LLM from New York University in 1965 and an LL.B. from Loyola Law School in 1964. In the same year, he started practicing law and co-founded a firm with his buddy Robert M. Keese. In a lawsuit for medical malpractice, he became the first attorney in the state of California to win more than $1 billion in 1970. The former Lockheed Corp. (now the Lockheed Martin Corp.), Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Hollywood’s seven major film studios are just a few of the multinational corporations he has handled litigation against. Girardi was admitted by the California State Bar into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame in 2003.
Career of Thomas Girardi
The law company Girardi & Keese was founded in 1965 by Thomas Girardi, Keese, and a few other individuals. In 1970, he took on his first important case and prevailed, earning more than $1 billion for his clients in the healthcare sector. Additionally, he obtained judgments of $785 million for toxic tort injuries sustained by workers in Lockheed’s Skunkworks facility and $45.5 million against Ford Motor Company for a defective seatbelt that left a six-year-old kid paralyzed. In addition to these, he has won more than 30 verdicts totaling $1 million or more.
Girardi has successfully negotiated settlement agreements on behalf of his clients with the pharmaceutical behemoth Merck for $4,85 billion in damages related to personal injuries suffered by Vioxx users. He was successful in obtaining $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion in settlements for California consumers who had fallen victim to price-fixing for natural gas.
In the legal battle against utility corporation Pacific Gas & Electric, he was also among the top lawyers. Residents of the Californian desert town of Hinkley accused the corporation of tainting their water supply as a result of a leak in a gas pumping station. Numerous incidences of cancer and other related disorders were the result. In the end, Pacific Gas & Electric consented to pay $333 million to the town’s 650 citizens. The case’s circumstances served as the basis for the 2000 movie “Erin Brockovich.”
The attempt to have a $489 million default judgment against Dole Food and Shell Chemicals entered by a court in Nicaragua enforced in American courts were probably one of his career’s biggest mistakes.
Dibromochloropropane, often known as DBCP, is a pesticide that purportedly had devastating consequences on the exposed workers, who successfully sued the firms in Nicaragua. The translated records of the Nicaraguan court proceedings that Girardi and his team supplied, however, were found to be seriously defective by the US courts. He and his colleagues received a formal reprimand, and Girardi & Keese was required to pay a fine for failing to uphold their obligation to be truthful with the courts.
Disputes and scandals
Between 1992 and 2001, Lockheed was the target of legal action. In 2016, fifteen years after winning the case, plaintiff Paul Kranich and lawyer Peter Dion-Kindem sued Girardi for mismanaging the money obtained in the class-action lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed the claim in March. Girardi asserted that this wasn’t the first time Dion-Kindem had brought a lawsuit against them through a former Lockheed employee.
Individual Life of Thomas Girardi
On June 3, 1939, Thomas Girardi was born in Denver, Colorado. He went to Loyola High School to study (Los Angeles). He received his diploma from Loyola Marymount University in 1962 after graduating in 1957. He graduated from the Loyola Law School with a bachelor’s degree in law two years later, and New York University awarded him a master’s degree in law in 1965.
Girardi has reportedly been married three times. On August 29, 1964, he married Karen Weitzul, his first wife. He married Kathy Riser in September 1993 following their divorce. That union also ended in divorce.
He wed the 32-year-younger singer-dancer Erika Jayne in 1999. The couple and Jayne’s former partner Thomas Zizzo Jr. share a mansion built in the 1920s in Pasadena, California.
In his wife’s reality series, “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” Girardi made infrequent appearances. He played a Kurt Potter role in “Erin Brockovich” (played by actor Peter Coyote).
Tom Girardi’s Net Worth
An American lawyer named Tom Girardi has a $100,000 net worth. Tom is perhaps most known for having been Erika Jayne’s ex-husband on “Real Housewives.” They wed in 1999 and divorced in 2020. Tom put his net worth at the US $264 million in 2015. Tom stated in a 2020 court case that he had recently been worth $50–$80 million but had run out of money by that point. We’ll try our best to explain everything in a moment, but it’s complicated.
Trivia
Girardi formerly held the position of president of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, an elite group of just 500 trial lawyers.
He became the first trial attorney in history to hold a position on the California Judicial Council, the organization that sets court rules in California.