Chris R. Aitken

Catastrophic Personal Injury & Brain Injury Litigation

Aitken says he takes “the no-stone-unturned approach” to the cases he pursues for injured clients. It is an approach he learned from his father, famed trial lawyer Wylie Aitken, that calls for intense preparation and innovation.

The preparation paid off in his $38.5 million settlement finalized earlier this year for the construction foreman who suffered a traumatic brain injury and full-body orthopedic injuries when a freeway bridge collapsed on him. State safety regulators could not determine why the bridge collapsed, but Aitken’s and other plaintiffs’ teams did, he said. Gillespie v. California, RIC1606486 (Riv. Super. Ct., filed May 26, 2016).

“It was one of the most complicated liability cases I’ve ever been involved in,” he said about the five years of litigation. “We had to employ a team of liability experts.” Those included experts on bridge construction, the hydraulic jack system used to lift and lower the bridge and the effect of the rainstorm the night before the October 2015 disaster.

Innovative thinking, plus hard work, won an $11 million policy-limit settlement from the California Republican Party for a motorcyclist left a quadriplegic by a traffic accident with a paid campaign worker. Ruehle v. Chavez, 30-2017- 00912044 (Orange Super. Ct., filed March 30, 2017).

The worker was a precinct walker for then-state Assemblyman Eric Linder’s 2016 re-election campaign. Aitken discovered the man had minimal insurance and no driver’s license, while the campaign had no insurance at all. But he and his team also determined the state party was largely directing the Linder re-election effort, which it deemed a critical, “targeted” race.

Aitken conducted “dozens and dozens” of depositions of party personnel and dug into how the party used campaign workers to collect voter data. “We were able to prove… that the poll worker was really under the control not only of the campaign but of the California Republican Party itself,” he said.

With that, he argued that the party was in a joint enterprise with the local campaign and so liable for the accident. “It was a very complex legal theory… that to our knowledge had never been advanced before.”

– Don DeBenedictus