Megan G. Demshki 

Megan G. Demshki is the managing partner of Aitken Aitken Cohn’s Riverside office, where she started as a law clerk in 2013. She now specializes in plaintiff-side personal injury, medical malpractice and wrongful death cases.

She serves as treasurer of the Riverside County Bar Association and she is a past president of the Pick Group of Young Professionals. She is also a past chair of the Janet Goeske Foundation, past president of Riverside County Barristers and past president of the Consumer Attorneys of the Inland Empire.

“I’m busy, and that’s how I like to be,” Demshki said, adding that from the start, she’s been involved in big cases. “I had the best mentors here.” As a 23-year-old clerk, she was assigned to the senior founding partner, Wilie A. Aitken, to work on the Toyota unintended acceleration cases. The matter settled for $1.3 billion. “It was a huge case filled with the nation’s best lawyers, and I learned a lot.”

This year and last, Demshki helped her colleagues shepherd a massive environmental class action to settlement in record time over the underwater oil pipeline leak off Huntington Beach. In February, multiple shipping companies agreed to pay $45 million to class members — a sum that came atop last fall’s $50 million settlement with Amplify Energy Corp., which owns the pipeline.

The $95 million total deal came just a year after two cargo ships drifted in a storm into a restricted area, dragging their anchors across and damaging the line. East Meets Wests Excursions v. Amplify Energy Corp. 8:21-cv-01725 (C.D. Cal., filed Oct. 18, 2021).

The settlement money will be divided among a fisher class, a property class and a waterfront tourism class.

“A speedy result in the class action world,” Demshki said. “We had a phenomenal plaintiff team putting pressure in the right ways on the insurance companies involved, and Judge [David O.] Carter was a big help with that.”

Demshki was co-lead counsel and helped secure a $38.5 million settlement for nine construction workers injured, three of them critically when part of a highway bridge collapsed in Corona in 2015. The accident happened as a 900-ton bridge deck was being lowered into place by hydraulic jacks. The plaintiff team found structural flaws in the bridge and design defects in the equipment used. Gillespie et al. v. Clark Construction Group et al., RIC1606486 (Riverside Co. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 17, 2017).

“My heart really lies in representing individuals and telling their stories,” Demshki said. She represented James “Chip” Chaffee, who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in the bridge collapse. “People come to us when their worst nightmare has happened.”

— John Roemer