Reporter: David Hicks

Close-Up: Passion for law, advocacy drives David Casey into national spotlight

An abiding desire to protect the rights of victims against large corporations has led San Diego attorney David Casey Jr. onto the national stage.

In July, Casey expects to be elected president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the largest and most powerful group of attorneys in the world.

The election will cap a busy year for Casey, who recently had been near the center of national issues, both in his private practice and as the sitting vice president of the Trial Lawyers.

Just a few hours after Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Casey and a handful of other attorneys worked out a moratorium that effectively blocked lawsuits from being filed in connection with the incidents.

In the days following the suicide attacks, he and others from the association helped work out a deal with the airlines and the U.S. Congress to set up a government-funded victim’s relief fund as part of the $15 billion industry bailout. They also set up an organization to provide free legal representation to the injured and people who lost loved ones.

On top of that, Casey and his firm – Casey, Gerry, Reed & Schenk – have handled series of major lawsuits filed on behalf of United States soldiers held as slave laborers by Japanese companies during World War II. The firm is battling in federal and state courts on behalf of thousands of veterans captured by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines and turned over to private, for-profit companies for exploitation.

Some of these companies have gone on to be phenomenally successful, including Mitsubishi and Mitsui. Casey is arguing that the businesses should pay damages to those soldiers. But the U.S. State Department has sided with the companies, saying international treaties bar the victims from seeking restitution.

Working with several other groups of attorneys, Casey’s firm also has invented a new form of national, plaintiff’s law firm. The new organization knits together five independent law firms; they remain separate, but act as a single 90-lawyer group on large cases that will result in federal court decisions of nationwide significance. The firm is currently handling five matters, including one that seeks to expand the rights of people to sue health maintenance organizations over issues such as medical malpractice.

It is the fight to preserve the rights of individuals to seek redress from the courts that is at the center of what Casey does, he said recently.

“If I had a client in here right now – the reason that person may have rights is because of a lot of lawyers who are not seated in here right now,” Casey said in a recent interview at his small, wood-paneled office in San Diego.

“They’re lawyers who took cases up on appeal, who fought for clients when there were no rights. People who went to the legislature and took on battles when nobody was around who would mind the store. They’re people who fought for statewide initiatives to keep the courtroom open,” he said.

The idea forms the core of almost everything he talks about in relationship to his 25-year career as an attorney.

It starts with his father, a lawyer who opened his San Diego practice two years before Casey Jr. was born in 1949. David Casey Sr. was a plaintiffs’ attorney, a powerful force in the politics of the legal profession and a strong influence on his son.

As he grew up, Casey Jr. heard his father’s opening statements as if they were bedtime stories. Casey St., a fierce advocate, did things like file series of suits over broken shower doors that injured or killed people. That type of legal attack eventually led to safety glass in showers. The end result: no more serious injuries, and no more lawsuits.

“There are people who go to lawyers all over the community to exercise their rights every day. And it makes me feel good that I helped keep that door open,” Casey Jr. said. “Some of us want to run in life for political office, some of us want to just mind our own shop. For me, I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of satisfaction – in the political sense – from being active in the trial bar and being able to effectuate legislative changes. And that’s what I’ve been doing on a national level.”

In the coming years, he’ll probably end up doing even more. If he wins the presidency of the Association for Trial Lawyers of America – and he’s currently running unopposed – he’ll serve as president-elect for a year. That will be followed by a year as president of the organization, which represents 60,000 mostly plaintiff’s attorneys. Only a handful of California attorneys have held the post.

“As president-elect, I’ll be flying around the country speaking to a lot of different trial lawyer organizations and helping fashion our national legislative policy,” Casey said.

“Making sure the courtrooms stay open – it’s a real battle,” Casey said. “You have so many special interests. Every year, there are hundreds of provisions put in bills by industries trying to exempt themselves from liability if they hurt people – be it the pharmaceutical industry, be it General Motors, be it the Ford-Firestone fiasco. We are constantly on the lookout for those provisions … to make sure that they don’t get enacted and hurt individuals.”