Adam Shea

Shea is a founding partner of the personal injury litigation boutique. He, Brian J. Panish and Kevin R. Boyle left the firm now known as Greene Broillet & Wheeler LLP in 2005 to open their own shop. Shea has obtained more than 200 settlements and jury verdicts in excess of $1 million for clients who have been harmed by negligence, wrongful conduct, violations of safety rules and defective products.

“I started as Brian Panish’s law clerk when I was in law school,” Shea said. “At Greene Broillet he made partner and so did I. We’re still friends with the Greene Broillet guys, but we’ve had a fantastic 16-year run on our own.”

In February 2021, Shea, Panish and colleague J. Patrick K. Gunning negotiated a $39.5 million settlement for college student Marissa Freeman. Their client suffered a severe brain injury, cardiac arrest and multi-system organ failure after collapsing with heat stroke while on a required five kilometer run in a Cal State San Bernardino activity class when the temperature was 95 degrees. Freeman v. The Board of Trustees of the California State University, CDS1902640 (San Bernardino Co. Super. Ct., filed Jan. 25, 2019).

The defense contended that Freeman was comparatively negligent because she overextended herself during the run.

Shea said the trial had been postponed from April 2020 due to the pandemic. “The defense fought us the whole way. We tried to get the trial going again in October, and we went through two and a half weeks of motions with super-strict social distancing. But then the Covid numbers were shooting up and the ICU capacities were down.” Again, the judge postposed the trial

During the in-person courtroom litigation, one of the defense lawyers contracted Covid and had to quarantine while he observed the trial via Zoom, Shea said. “His catching of the virus was believed to be unrelated to the trial,” Shea added.

Despite that setback, and the eventual postponement, Shea said the trial was going very well. “Sure, we had to wear masks all day, but it was great to be back in court. The jurors didn’t seem particularly concerned. Covid changed things, but it didn’t mess things up in court.”

The defense, however, kept pushing for delays, Shea said. “The guy who eventually got Covid kept reciting the latest infection stats, trying to get us to cancel the trial. It seemed a very calculated effort to slow us down with delays. Of course, they had a huge exposure, and we had a strong case, and they knew it.”

That reality forced the settlement. “They could see their defense theories weren’t holding up and they were facing a monster verdict. We had a fault-free client who now had the capacity of a young child. This was way up there among the cases I’ve had in my career.”

— John Roemer