Deborah Chang

As this year’s president of the statewide plaintiffs’ trial lawyers bar association, the Consumer Attorneys of California, Chang has been spending much of her time lately doing everything she can to safely reopen trial courts for business.

“We’ve got to get these courts open, and we’ve got to get them open uniformly so that we can all do what we love, and justice is moving,” she said. “We have clients dying who don’t make it to court because cases are being continued continuously.”

It is one of her major goals as bar president. Chang said she is working with the state Judicial Council, the Legislature, the Los Angeles Superior Court leadership, other judges, defense attorney organizations and other bar groups to come up with ways for the courts to function.

But even as she is making these efforts to bring back civil jury trials, Chang and her partners began a live trial in an Orange County courtroom. The trial was expected to last till the middle of May.

It is the first trial for Athea Trial Lawyers Group, the law firm she founded with five other powerhouse women tort attorneys from around the country just last year. And it is exactly the sort of horrific injury case that has made her and her partners famous.

The injured victim is a 6-year-old girl who, as Chang tells the story, saved money from her lemonade stand to pay for her family’s hotel stay when they visited Disneyland, but then nearly drowned and suffered severe brain injury in an overheated hot tub at the hotel. Hudson v. Northwest Hotel Corp., 30-2019-01052572 (O.C. Super. Ct. filed Feb. 19, 2019).

Two dramatic wrongful death cases Chang is handling also are moving forward. She defeated a demurrer last year for the families of women buried under a sudden hillside collapse at a state beach in Encinitas. Davis v. California, 37-2020-00030315 (S.D. Super. Ct., filed Aug. 25, 2020).

And she has filed a government claim and will soon file a lawsuit on behalf of the widower of Esther Nakajjigo, the 25-year-old Uganda Ambassador for Women and Girls, who was killed when an entrance gate at a national park in Utah crashed through their windshield.

— Don DeBenedictis