Lawrance A. Bohm

Bohm makes no apologies for the eye-popping verdicts he has won.

“I think it accomplishes the intended purpose of punitive damages,” said the principal and lead attorney with Bohm Law Group in Sacramento. “To make punitive damages meaningful, they have to affect the individual whose behavior we wish to correct.”

Bohm and his team certainly grabbed the attention of AutoZone Stores Inc. in 2014, when he obtained $185 million in a pregnancy discrimination and retaliation case. Juarez v. AutoZone Stores Inc., 08-CV417 (S.D. Cal., filed March 5, 2008).

This came two years after he won $167 million in a sexual harassment and retaliation case brought for a physician’s assistant. Chopourian v. Catholic Healthcare West, CV-09-2972 (E.D. Cal., filed Oct. 23, 2009). Plaintiff Ani Chopourian alleged years of rampant sexual harassment, and also said reports she filed about lax hospital safety practices were routinely ignored. The Chopourian verdict was later reduced, and both cases settled for smaller amounts. But the giant verdicts remain a part of the lore of labor law, and Bohm said each continues to send a message to employers.

“Those awards are that big because the defendants’ conduct was absolutely terrible,” Bohm said.

He added, “People who are criticizing these punitive damages don’t understand these verdicts serve two purposes. The first is to compensate the plaintiff. The other is to effectuate social change.”

Bohm started his firm in 2005 after a two-year stint doing civil defense with Jackson Lewis LLP in Sacramento. He said his firm has been extremely busy in the years since the two huge verdicts, but he and his attorneys still investigate every claim made by a potential client.

Those verdicts have also helped make Bohm a bit of a media figure — as have high-profile legal battles against Olympic snowboarder Shaun White and rock star Eddie Money, the latter a cancer discrimination claim after Money fired his longtime drummer.

The firm has also represented some other newsworthy clients, including a transgender prison guard and a CalTrans employee who won $3 million after claiming harassment and retaliation after years of co-workers and bosses ridiculing his chemical sensitivities by, for example, soaking his office chair in perfume.

But Bohm said the firm is also happy to take smaller cases, such as the $62,000 it recently won from a jury including 11 men in a pregnancy discrimination and wrongful termination case.

“A lot of these companies think that because someone has small damages we are going to back down,” Bohm said.

— Malcolm Maclachlan