David M. deRubertis

During high school and college, deRubertis worked for a plaintiff’s lawyer doing medical malpractice work. He planned on going into medical malpractice law as well, but when a paralegal left the firm, the employment cases fell into his lap. He was intrigued, and decided to pursue employment law instead.

“Work is so important to me; it’s part of my identity and who I am. I just really related to the losses — in self-esteem, identity, support, putting food on table — the real trauma it could cause to have a career ripped away from you,” deRubertis said.

He opened his firm in 2000, right out of law school, to focus on employment discrimination and wrongful termination. During his career, deRubertis has produced numerous settlements and verdicts in excess of $1 million.

DeRubertis served as lead trial counsel in a whistleblower action in which his client, Kenneth Triplett, passed away from heart disease two weeks before trial. Triplett previously had been evaluated by psychologists and diagnosed with depression. DeRubertis was then retained by the heirs to pursue not only the underlying wrongful termination case, but also a wrongful death case under the novel theory that more than two years of uncontrolled major depression aggravated Triplett’s underlying cardiac disease, causing him to prematurely suffer a heart attack. Triplett v. Golden State Foods, BC524021 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Oct. 9, 2013).

The defendant’s legal challenges to the wrongful death claim were rejected by the court, and the matter was set for trial in July. It would have been the first ever employment-wrongful death case tried in California history, but was recently resolved confidentially.

“In the Triplett case, everyone said, ‘You’re crazy’ to me. There’s no possible way a death could be caused by the termination of employment two and a half years earlier,” deRubertis said. “It was just going back to the fundamentals. We simply had to prove under the law that depression was a substantial matter, meaning it was more than a remote or trivial contribution to him dying earlier than he otherwise would have. Framing it around that went back to the basics of tort law — how tort law looks at medical causation, and applying it to the employment law area.”

— Jennifer Chung Klam