Mary E. Alexander

In March the Carnival Cruise Lines' Grand Princess ship was at sea off the Golden Gate, denied entry to its home port of San Francisco, in quarantine with 2,300 passengers and 1,100 crew as the coronavirus pandemic spread on board and ashore.

In San Francisco, Alexander got a phone call from a passenger who was a former client.

"Mary, help us," she recalled his plea. "He had my cell number on his phone even though I had represented him years ago."

The result was one of the first federal class actions filed over the pandemic. Alexander teamed with Elizabeth J. Cabraser of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP to represent passengers who accuse the cruise line of exposing them to the virus. Archer v. Carnival Corp., 3:20-cv-02381 (N.D. Cal., filed April 8, 2020.).

Alexander, the founder of Mary Alexander & Associates PC, is well-suited to cases of this sort because she has a masters degree in public health and worked as a medical toxicology researcher and the director of environmental health at the Stanford Research Institute before law school.

Alexander is preparing for a major trial in October in which she'll represent parents and spouses of 13 of those killed in the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland.

"The owners of the building, the City of Oakland and PG&E all came together to cause this terrible tragedy," she said. "No, I haven't written my opening statement yet, but I've been cogitating it for three years."

Last year she won $21.4 million for the estate of Gary and Randy Eaves, brothers who died of cancer resulting from their exposure to benzene, a rubber solvent that is a known carcinogen, on the job at a tire manufacturing plant. Indeed, Alexander has said in prior interviews that her first husband died of leukemia after extensive use of benzene in laboratory studies as a civil engineering student. "For me to have a toxic case like the Eaves'--this was right up my alley," Alexander said.

"Those brothers worked in a fog of benzene in that plant," she added. But to persuade a jury of cause and effect can be difficult. "In chemical exposure cases like this you have to show first that the chemical causes leukemia or non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and then that it caused it in your clients. It's a high bar, but they did have a lot of exposure and we had great experts." Eaves v. Ashland LLC, MSC16-00815 (Contra Costa Co. Super. Ct., filed April 11, 2016).

The medical expert explained clearly how benzene causes cancer and that the exposure suffered by the decedents was more than sufficient. "At one point he said it was so obvious, 'I don't even know why we're here,' and the jury just seemed to get it right then."

-- John Roemer