Niall P. McCarthy

As his high-powered firm’s managing partner, McCarthy focuses on plaintiff-side business and tort litigation involving some of the state’s biggest cases. Last year he was co-lead counsel for condominium owners at the ill-fated Millennium Tower in who obtained a confidential settlement said to have been well above $100 million after the luxury 645-foot skyscraper tilted and sank on unstable soil in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The outcome was widely reported to have been the largest settlement of an inverse condemnation case in the U.S. after McCarthy and co-counsel in part successfully pinned blame on local and regional officials for undermining the tower by constructing a massive public transit hub next door.

“The money came in and went out and repairs have begun,” he said. Pamela Buttery, Trustee of the Pamela Buttery 1990 Trust v. Millennium Partners Management LLC, CGC-17-556292 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 10, 2017).

In late May 2021, McCarthy was in an eight-week Zoom trial in which he represents the City of Oroville plus farmers and business owners suing California’s Department of Water Resources over the 2017 failures of the main spillway and the emergency spillway at Oroville Dam on the Feather River, the nation’s tallest dam. McCarthy and his firm are also liaison counsel for numerous additional plaintiffs. The event led to crop loss, tree death, business damage and the evacuation of more than 180,000 people living downstream. Oroville Dam Cases, JCCP 4974 (Sacramento Co. Super. Ct., filed Jan. 17, 2018).

Among other issues, McCarthy’s lengthy trial brief objects to holding the proceedings remotely. “A highly complex, lengthy, document and expert intensive trial is inappropriate for trial by videoconference,” he wrote.

He said his objections are proving to be well-founded as the bench trial moves ahead before Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James E. McFetridge. “I can live without Zoom,” he said. “There have been technical problems and it’s difficult to show documents to witnesses.”

Last year McCarthy was lead counsel for small dairy farmers who successfully fought off an effort to end a milk pricing and income pooling system that had been in place since the 1960s to equalize revenue to producers. The so-called Quota Implementation Plan, or QIP, developed into an active financial asset market with a multi-million-dollar value. Dairymen who supported elimination of the system sued; McCarthy prevailed for his clients in Superior Court and at an administrative hearing. Stop QIP Tax Coalition v. California Department of Food and Agriculture, 34-2019-80003273 (Sacramento Co. Super. Ct., filed Dec. 4, 2019).

“They called it the milk civil war,” McCarthy said. “Our clients were intervenors, and I had to put on an affirmative case as if we were plaintiffs. It was procedurally unusual, but at its core we represented individual milk producers against powerful moneyed interests wanting to end their way of life.” The matter is on appeal.

— John Roemer