Plucked from the sky: Podhurst Orseck earned a reputation—and millions of dollars—representing the victims of airline disasters. But its plucky founder Aaron S. Podhurst says the firm has just begun to define its niche

South Florida CEO, August, 2005 by Jaime Hernandez

Anxiety creeps over attorney Steven C. Marks whenever he steps aboard an airliner. Marks represented the families of victims of the 1997 Silk Air jet crash in Indonesia, and images of the charred wreckage, left in the wake of the crash, often mingle with worries for his own two young daughters.

What spurs the feelings, says the Podhurst Orseck PA partner, is a visit he made two years ago to discuss a lawsuit against an airplane parts maker with the family of one of the victims. That evening, in the Singaporean family's dining room, a surviving daughter of one of the victims momentarily brought the conversation to a halt. "When's daddy coming home?" the young girl asked between sobs.

"It's very rare that I don't think of that event," Marks says from his office at the firm's headquarters in Miami. "There are certain cases that will haunt me."

His sentiments are only a small measure of the institutional memory at Podhurst Orseck--a firm with a global reputation for successfully litigating cases against airlines and other companies involved in airline disasters. Since opening its doors in 1967, it has handled more than 70 such cases and applied that expertise to broaden the firm's reach into product liability and other resource-intensive casework.

The Silk Air case, for example, was a long, drawn-out legal saga that cost the firm and its co-counsel $4 million in out-of-pocket expenses. Last year, Marks convinced a California jury to give his clients approximately $20 million in damages. He won an additional $23 million for two other families who lost relatives in that crash.

Podhurst Orseck's roots in wrongful death and personal injury law are deep, stretching back to the firm's founders Aaron S. Podhurst and Robert Orseck--childhood friends who became hotshot tort attorneys working for the Miami-based personal injury firm of Nichols, Gaither, Beckham, Colson, Spence & Hicks. When that firm broke apart in 1967. Podhurst and Orseck hung their own shingle outside. Indeed, the dissolution of Nichols, Gaither spawned several leading South Florida law firms, including Colson Hicks Eidson in Coral Gables.

The law partners continued to take on personal injury cases during the late 1960s and the 1970s, developing a reputation as formidable litigators among other lawyers and judges. The turning point for the firm came in 1972, when Eastern Airlines Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades, killing 101 of the 172 passengers aboard.

The 1972 Eastern crash was the first in a string of airline disasters whose victims' families the firm has represented. In a very real way, that crash put the firm on the map in a global sense.

Since then, Podhurst Orseck has helped fight for financial awards numbering in the millions of dollars, including more than $250 million for the families of passengers who died in the May 1996 ValuJet crash in the Everglades and $187.5 million for the families of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed when their civilian airplanes were shot down by Cuban fighter jets over international waters in 1996. In 1999, the firm won the appeal of a $37 million case against Juno Beach-based FPL Group on behalf of the family of a 12-year-old Pinecrest girl who died in a car crash because FPL workers had disconnected a traffic light.

Despite the preponderance of wrongful death and personal injury casework. Aaron Podhurst, the firm's president, chafes at the label "ambulance chaser."

"The public is concerned over whether lawyers are doing the right thing," Podhurst says. "It's important for us to be honest and hardworking. Believe it or not, the other lawyers and judges not involved in a matter will pass along our name."

And industry experts agree with him.

"This type of firm is a very high quality litigation practice," says Andrew J. McClurg, a law professor at Florida International University who specializes in tort law and product liability cases. "It's incredibly expensive to try a case against a major corporation. These people give a voice and a day in court to people who would not otherwise have that day in court."

London-based legal research firm Chambers and Partners ranks Podhurst Orseck as one of the three top tier general litigation firms in the state, the other two being Miami-based firms Greenberg Traurig LLP and Kenny Nachwalter PA. Chambers also ranks Podhurst and longtime law partners Robert C. Josefsberg and Victor M. Diaz as three of the top general commercial litigators in Florida. Joel D. Eaton, a former Navy fighter pilot who heads up the firm's appellate division, is considered by Chambers to be one of the best in the region at his practice.

Podhurst says the concentration of top talent at his firm makes it "very competitive with the large firms" in terms of revenue, but he would not disclose how much it actually rakes in.

Unlike many other law firms, Podhurst Orseck largely draws its revenue from contingency fees, meaning all of the money needed for a case is spent up front and profitability rests on winning. Podhurst says such a system drives attorneys to work much harder, and 38 years of operating that way--and repeated victories in the courtroom--have paved the way to larger, more lucrative jury awards and settlements.