The five finalist cases for Public Justice’s 2019 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award include landmark cases dealing with school negligence of students with disabilities, a twenty-year fight against Dark Money in politics, illegal straw purchasing of firearms used in a murder, industrial pollution in the San Francisco Bay, and factory farms ruining the quality of life of low-income communities of color.
In 1999, the law firm of Lieff Cabraser, along with co-counsel, filed a nationwide class action in Illinois state court accusing State Farm of using lower-quality automotive parts from non-brand manufacturers to repair the vehicles of about 4.7 million policyholders. In 1999, the legal team won a $1.2 billion verdict against the insurance company, which was largely affirmed by the intermediate appeals court before State Farm asked the Illinois Supreme Court to revisit the decision. While the company’s case was being reviewed by the state supreme court, plaintiffs began to suspect that State Farm was providing significant funding to the successful 2004 state supreme court campaign of Judge Lloyd Karmeier. In wake of those concerns, the team filed a motion requesting that Karmeier recuse himself from the case. In opposing that motion, State Farm argued that it had not contributed money, directly or indirectly, to the judge’s campaign. Justice Karmeier ultimately refused to recuse himself, and, by his own account, “broke the deadlock” when he voted to overturn the billion-dollar verdict in its entirety, at which point the case appeared to be over.
Lisa Page has been an attorney with the FBI's Office of the General Counsel. Prior to her position with the FBI, she worked as a trial attorney in the Organized Crime and Gang Section of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Page has prosecuted a number cases involving eastern European organized crime.
Some the cases Andres oversaw include the prosecution of Robert Allen Stanford, who was convicted of operated an $8 billion Ponzi scheme, and the prosecution of several members of the Bonanno crime family, one of whom plotted to have him killed.
He has spent most of his career at the Department of Justice. During the 1990s, Weissmann worked on a case related to the mafia and Russian organized crime that involved Felix Sater, a Trump business partner who is now a focus of Mueller's probe.
Several of the team's lawyers came from Wilmer-Hale, where Mueller was recently a partner. Some are veteran federal prosecutors who have tried terrorism cases against al Qaeda operatives or mafia bosses. Others bring white-collar criminal expertise.
Elizabeth Prelogar left her post as an assistant in the U.S. solicitor general's office within the Justice Department to join Muller's team. The Harvard Law School graduate previously worked at Hogan Lovells, a private international law firm, and was formerly a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. Prelogar brings Russian language knowledge to the team, as she participated in a graduate student Fulbright Scholar program in Russia from 2002 to 2003. She was also crowned Miss Idaho in 2004.