Brian S. Kabateck

Kabateck, one of Los Angeles’ best-known plaintiffs’ attorneys, largely spent the pandemic doing two things. One was working with courts and bar groups to get the courts open again and to keep them functioning in the meantime.

The other, since he couldn’t go to trial, was settle cases. “We did a little count,” he said. Over the past 18 months or so, his firm brought in more than $50 million in settlements.

Among them were a $4.3 million agreement to end a class action over employee misclassification of truckers and, in a case about two children killed by abusers, a $1.5 million settlement that also included a commitment from Los Angeles County to hire more child protection hotline staff and train them better.

For the courts, Kabateck is a member of the Judicial Council’s advisory committee on civil litigation and part of informal groups formed by local judges to propose plans to keep cases moving.

He also has been involved in drafting and advocating for SB 241 (Umberg, D-Santa Ana), which would allow some witnesses to testify in trials remotely, even after special pandemic rules end. It would apply to first responders and emergency room doctors, for instance, who shouldn’t be pulled away from work to sit in courthouse halls waiting to take the stand. It also would cover witnesses “whose only purpose is to come in and say the light was green or something like that,” Kabateck said.

Lately, he and his firm have filed a number of unusual, pandemic-related lawsuits for restaurants seeking return of a portion of the operating permit fees they paid to the state and county governments covering the times they couldn’t operate. Pizza Ortica LLC v. County of Orange, 30-2021-01178203 (O.C. Super. Ct., filed Jan. 11, 2021).

He conceded there is no statutory basis for the litigation. “It is all new territory,” he said. “We’re making the law as we go along on this one.”

And then there is the “hot potato” case in which he was appointed the replacement counsel for ratepayers in the scandal-plagued class action against the L.A. Department of Water & Power for overbilling. Jones v. Los Angeles, BC577267 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed May 1, 2019).

“That case has consumed two years of my life,” he said.

— Don DeBenedictis