This year, we tried cases in courtrooms across the country for our clients. We are regularly asked to handle jury and bench trials for our clients and even other law firms.

One of our trials was closely watched nationwide – including by drug company executives, lawyers, boards of directors, municipalities, and the public.

It involved the opioid crisis.

Opioid addiction has touched every corner of America, unlike almost any other crisis.

Drug companies poured a deluge of opioids into nearly every community in the United States over more than two decades.

The human wreckage that resulted is morally shocking. It deserved a forceful response.

Together with our co-counsel, we represented the City and County of San Francisco through David Chiu, San Francisco City Attorney, in a lawsuit brought on behalf of the People of California against the opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies that fueled the epidemic.

The trial was considered a bellwether for more than three thousand pending cases across the country.

Partner Aelish Baig presented critical opening and closing arguments at the trial, in addition to putting witnesses on the stand. The judge ruled in our client’s favor, finding the evidence presented “devastating” for the sole remaining defendant, Walgreens. Other defendants settled before, or in the midst of, trial.

U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer’s 112-page order sets forth in great detail the conscience-rocking tale of how the drug companies fostered widespread opioid addiction in San Francisco – and the tragic human cost in lives upended and cut short. The ruling was released in August 2022.

A few months after the court’s ruling, in November, the country’s three largest pharmacy chains — Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart — agreed to settlements providing a combined $13.8 billion to impacted communities nationwide and commitments to improving dispensing practices.

These came on the heels of the $26 billion nationwide settlement with major distributors and manufacturer Johnson & Johnson providing funds for intervention, treatment, and recovery and reforming drug dispensing practices, which was finalized in February 2022, as well as nearly $6 billion in settlements with opioid manufacturers Teva and Allergan.

Paul Geller was one of the key architects of each of these historic settlements bringing relief to crisis-impacted communities. He put it best when he told The Washington Post that he hopes the judge’s opinion in the San Francisco case “is distributed as required reading in Big Pharma boardrooms throughout the country.”