Rahul Ravipudi

Los Angeles

Personal Injury

Rahul Ravipudi has built a personal injury practice that includes seeking justice for residents who are victims of California's worst natural disasters.

As one of the leading attorneys on the Thomas and Woolsey fires along with the Montecito mudslide, he helped position for settlements 99% of the victims, totaling more than 3,900 households.

The 2017 and 2018 catastrophes killed 28 people. Settlement amounts have not been released, but defendant Southern California Edison agreed to pay $550 million to the California Public Utilities Commission and billions to insurance companies.

"There were hundreds of depositions taken from the corporate executives all the way down to linesman," Ravipudi said. "And I was a member of the small team involved in taking depositions and marshaling all of the evidence -- including millions of pages of documents to hone in on where the failures happened, why they happened, how they happened, and what should have been done to ensure things like that don't happen."

So when the recent Maui fire happened, Ravipudi was distressed to see utilities and public agencies not learning from what happened in California. Some of those victims have already called Ravipudi and he will be involved in that disaster as well.

"It's just heartbreaking that other utility companies are not learning the lessons from these catastrophes and actually doing something about it," he said. "At the core, hopefully, when you look at what we've done and continue to do, I take incredible pride in having the privilege I have to help people and achieve justice on behalf of my clients against corporate negligence and others."

Closer to home, Ravipudi has won two other big personal injury cases for victims who had tragic outcomes.

In one case, he obtained more than $7 million in a settlement for the family of Craig Sherwood, who was killed at SpeedVegas when he lost control of a Lamborghini and it slammed into a track wall. Lax safety standards were to blame.

In another matter, client Jack Greener was awarded $46.4 million by a jury for injuries suffered by a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instructor that left him a quadriplegic. The instructor severed Greener's spinal cord during an exercise.

--Tori Richards