Deanne L. Miller 

Deanne L. Miller has spent most of her career defending large corporations in environmental and toxic tort cases in California and nationwide.

Late last year, however, she and her team scored a $133 million unanimous jury verdict representing a large corporation as a plaintiff. It’s “a sizable verdict that we’re quite proud of,” Miller said.

The client is Shell Oil, which has spent more than a decade cleaning up and remediating land in Carson, on which it used to have three very large reservoirs full of crude oil. The defendant is a subsidiary of Dole Food Co. that purchased the property as-is from Shell in the 1960s and then built a housing development atop it.

In November, the jury said the builder should finally pay half the cleanup costs. And earlier this month, a judge ruled that Dole itself should also be a debtor on that $133 million judgment along with its subsidiary. Shell Oil Co. v. Barclay Hollander Corp., BC544786 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed May 6, 2014).

The defendant has appealed the verdict, but “we’re pursuing the judgment anyway,” Miller said. Shell Oil Co. v. Barclay Hollander Corp., B327035 (Cal. App. 2nd Dist., filed March 6, 2023).

On the defense side of her practice, Miller is a leader of the team representing SoCalGas and Sempra Energy in litigation over the 2015-16 natural gas leak at the Aliso Canyon storage facility. The large collection of cases has been called one of the biggest and most complex mass tort litigations in the history of the L.A. Superior Court. The team handled close to 400 individual and government complaints involving more than 48,000 individual plaintiffs, multiple class actions and other cases. After a trio of settlements, most of the litigation is resolved, she said.

Miller also leads a team defending Merck against claims that its HPV vaccine Gardasil caused an assortment of injurious side effects. Much of that litigation has been consolidated in an MDL in North Carolina. In Re: Gardasil Products Liability Litigation, 3:22-md-03036 (W.D. N.C., filed Aug. 4, 2022).

She also is representing Merck in seven Gardasil cases filed in the Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura Superior Courts. Those have not yet been combined into a Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding, she said.

But over her career, Miller has often argued for or against bringing groups of cases into JCCPs. She has a couple of such matters keeping her busy currently, she said.

In addition, she has a number of single-plaintiff cases pending. And she is still keeping an eye on the Shell oil field remediation.

Miller began handling legal issues from the contamination in 2010 when it was first being investigated. Now, the last phase of the cleanup is just finishing, and the neighborhood looks fantastic, she said.

— Don DeBenedictis