Amy M. Zeman 

Amy M. Zeman is a partner who practices plaintiff-side class action and mass tort law in personal injury, financial fraud and product liability cases at Gibbs Law Group LLP. She joined the firm in 2014.

She was a member of the plaintiff team that won a Daily Journal Top Verdict award in 2022 for her work on the Pacific Fertility Center litigation.

That work continues. Atop the $14.975 million jury verdict she and colleagues obtained in 2021 for bellwether patients whose genetic material was destroyed when a cryo-preservation tank failed, in 2023, she negotiated further settlements for remaining clients. In re: Pacific Fertility Center Litigation, 3:18-cv-01586 (N.D. Cal., filed March 13, 2018).

“The incident occurred in 2018,” Zeman noted, “and concluded this year. For complex consolidated litigation, that’s actually on the shorter end of mass tort timing. For our patients and clients, it’s been a long, frustrating wait. But it’s just the reality we have.”

Zeman now concentrates her efforts as lead trial counsel on a class action that contends a regional bank aided and abetted a massive Ponzi scheme that caused more than $300 million in damages to 1,250 members of an investment group. Camenisch v. Umpqua Bank, 3:20-cv-05905 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 21, 2020).

The victims assert that the Portland, Oregon-based institution knew that Professional Financial Investors and its principals were using new investor money to pay existing investors and to line their own accounts. Despite Umpqua’s alleged knowledge of the scheme, the bank provided banking services to PFI for nearly a decade.

In December, Zeman defeated a motion for summary judgment and won class certification.

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco wrote that the bank’s suspicious activity monitoring system issued more than 146 alerts and assigned PFI a risk score three times above the threshold for high risk.

“Umpqua’s analysts investigated all the alerts and ultimately dismissed each one without taking preventative action,” Seeborg wrote in his class certification order.

“The judge gave us a great order, but he has not yet given us a trial date,” Zeman said. She hopes that will happen at a status conference set for the end of June.

“The bank knew what was going on and we intend to prove it,” she said.

Zeman has another alleged bank Ponzi scheme case on her firm’s docket, based on claims that Wells Fargo knew a Las Vegas attorney was misusing his attorney trust account at the bank to carry out a massive, five-year $500 million fraud on investors who were told they were funding advances to plaintiffs awaiting payment on personal injury settlements. In re J&J Investment Litigation, 2:22-cv-00529 (D. Nev., consolidation order filed June 3, 2022).

– John Roemer