Ricardo Echeverria

Trials

Ricardo Echeverria, a trial attorney who handles insurance bad faith and catastrophic personal injury cases, has won nearly $200 million in jury verdicts in the course of his career. He has been recognized numerous times for his work and service to the legal community, including a term as president of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA), the nation’s largest local association of plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Last year, he settled a challenging wrongful death lawsuit against the county of Riverside. Jeremy Swanson v. County of Riverside, RIC 1611766 (Riverside Sup. Ct., filed Sept. 13, 2016).

Former minor league baseball player Brandon Martin had been placed in an involuntary 72-hour mental health hold, known as a 5150 hold, after posing a danger to others based on acts of violence toward his family. The lawsuit accused Riverside County of releasing Martin after two days without any treatment. He immediately returned to the family home, where he used a baseball bat to murder his father, his uncle and a contractor installing a new alarm system.

“The law gives governmental agencies a great deal of immunity in cases like this. So long as they have a licensed psychiatrist evaluate him and then release him, they have immunity for the 5150 hold early release, no matter what happened. The County was arguing they had immunity,” said Echeverria, who represented the six grown children of two of the slain men. “When we got the file, there were a lot of things that were very suspicious.”

The medical report showed a number of inconsistencies in terms of when and where the county psychiatrist claimed to have evaluated Martin and the medical center was unable to provide the metadata for the report, Echeverria said. He argued that the county did not properly follow the law in terms of a 5150 hold, which ultimately allowed the murders to occur.

“Our position was: We don’t think this evaluation ever actually occurred,” Echeverria said.

The county argued that even if it were liable, damages would be capped under California’s Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), which at the time placed a $250,000 limit on medical malpractice lawsuits. However, the County couldn’t claim negligence if a psychiatrist never evaluated Martin. The MICRA argument wasn’t going to stick, Echeverria said.

The case settled very favorably for Echeverria’s clients on the eve of trial.

“It was one of those very unique cases. There were the immunity issues we had to navigate, then on top of that, the MICRA issues — two big hurdles to overcome,” he said. “It came down to just doing our homework, looking at the file carefully, connecting the dots and demonstrating how things didn’t add up to support that he was actually evaluated by a psychiatrist.”

Despite a trial record distinguished by impressive victories, Echeverria is not just in it to win it.

“At the end of the day, if I do my job right, I make someone’s life better — someone who’s been through something terrible.

—Jennifer Chung Klam