Arash Homampour

Arash Homampour, two and a half decades into his career, says he's obtained more than half a billion dollars in settlements and verdicts for clients.

The key to his success? Don't act too much like an attorney.

"My approach is to not be a lawyer first," he said during a recent interview. "I'm foremost a human being."

In courtrooms across California, Homampour says he tries to focus on the human connection in personal injury cases: the relationships between lost family members that resonate with jurors no matter their backgrounds.

"What I do is kind of specialize in getting jurors to understand that everyone on earth has value," he said.

It works.

Just last fall he secured a multi-million dollar verdict in Fresno County for the family of a vendor who was killed during a swap meet while raising his tent. The deceased was a minimally educated laborer who was killed when a flag he was setting up near his tent at the sale hit an overhead power line, which electrocuted him.

"The defendants thought a conservative Fresno jury wouldn't give a lot of money to a seasonal worker," Homampour commented.

They were wrong. In September, jurors awarded $12,250,000 to Homampour's client. Castellano Zuniga v. Cherry Avenue Auction Inc. et al., 15CECG02779 (Fresno Super. Ct., filed Aug. 26, 2014)

"It's a typical case where the defendant doesn't see me coming," the lawyer said, describing his efforts to woo the jury by telling a love story between the deceased husband and his plaintiff wife.

Homampour secured another significant verdict in March, when he won $30 million from a Ventura County jury in a wrongful death case involving a driver who died when she swerved to avoid an erratic driver and crashed into a semi-trailer truck parked improperly on the side of the highway. Plascencia et al. v. Deese et al., 56-2015-00475756-CU-PO-VTA (Ventura Super. Ct., filed May 5, 2015)

"I pointed out to the jury was that there's no worse loss to a parent than the death of child," Homampour said.

The Sherman Oaks-based attorney presents his career as a Horatio Alger story: graduating from Southwestern Law School in the middle of his class with no mentor and no money.

"My moot court teacher said I shouldn't go into litigation and that I wasn't very good, but I had a very healthy ego and wouldn't listen to what people said," Homampour recounted.

So he hung out his shingle and took any case that would come through the door. As the years passed, the cases became bigger. So too did the verdicts.

"It was basically being Kobe Bryant, but nobody knowing you were Kobe and no one giving you the ball," Homampour said.

But with a seven-attorney firm, the plaintiff's lawyer says he's hit his stride and is at the top of his game.

"I'm in the best physical and mental condition I've ever been," he said. "Super loving, super open."

-- Nicolas Sonnenburg