Alexander R. Wheeler

Personal Injury

When Alexander R. Wheeler joined the Parris Law Firm in 2007, it didn’t have a dedicated class action department. He immediately set about building one. By the time he made partner in 2012, he had added several attorneys to the team and was handling class actions full time. But he wasn’t getting much trial experience.

“I knew that if I didn’t broaden my practice, I would end up being a lawyer with decades of experience that did not know how to try a jury case,” Wheeler said.

In addition to expanding into personal injury and wrongful death, he also grew an environmental practice and got the trial experience he was looking for.

“I do class actions to this day, but the value of a class action case goes up exponentially when the other side knows they’re going up against a trial lawyer, not just a great litigator,” he said.

Wheeler also studies areas outside of law that he said can give him an advantage in the courtroom. He uses techniques from cognitive science, neuroscience and neuro-linguistic programming in the framing of facts, the presentation of evidence and word choice. The strategies of persuasion that work for political consultants and advertising directors, he said, also work for attorneys.

“We took that really minute study of language and framing and use it in every case,” Wheeler said. “I’m always looking for that 5% edge because in the aggregate–over the course of a career, over the course of a year–it makes a huge difference for the people that trust us with their cases.”

Throughout his career, he has obtained more than $500 million in verdicts and settlements for Parris clients. Most recently, he and colleague Jason P. Fowler represented the parents of two brothers killed by a wrong-way driver. Kent and Sherrill Hubbard v. Rodney Deshone Wright, BC703219 (L.A. Sup. Ct., filed April 24, 2018). In the early morning hours of Jan. 21, 2017, Rodney Deshone Wright drove his Ford F-150 the wrong way on the I-405 North and collided head-on with Aidan and Ainsley Hubbard in their Dodge Caravan, fatally injuring the brothers. Both musicians and bandmates, the brothers were on their way home from a gig when the crash occurred. In October, a Los Angeles jury in Van Nuys handed down a $10.6 million verdict in the wrongful death case.

“The reason I’m so proud of that case is that we had no economic damages. It was all non-economics,” Wheeler said.

The brothers were not wage earners and had no spouses or children. As a result, the defense valued the case well below what the jury ended up awarding, he said.

“We thought if we showed the jury who this family was and just how profound the parents’ loss of two adult children was, that they would value these losses appropriately,” Wheeler said.

“If you have the courage to try a case that’s uncertain, where the prevailing wisdom is ‘that case isn’t worth that much,’ sometimes you have to settle those, absolutely; but sometimes you have to realize you’ve got a special case with a special client.”

– Jennifer Chung Klam