What is a Trial Lawyer?

California trial lawyers, also known as plaintiffs' lawyers and consumer attorneys, represent plaintiffs in civil cases, usually on a contingency-fee basis. Contingency fee means that the trial lawyer's compensation is a percentage of the amount recovered for the plaintiff either from a settlement or by a verdict in a jury trial. The fee is “contingent upon" a recovery of money for the injured person.  If there is no recovery for the injured person, then no legal fee is owed to the attorney. Plaintiffs' trial lawyers represent people injured or killed in auto accidents, bicycle and pedestrian accidents, and dog attacks; by dangerous products (products liability), on dangerous sidewalks and roadways, by slip and fall accidents in stores, and by accidents on public transit such as buses and trains.  Trial lawyers also represent workers injured on the job and employees who are discriminated against, harassed or wrongly fired by their employers.  Trial lawyers will also sue an insurance company on behalf of a policy holder when the insurer fails to make good on its insurance policy. For patients injured by doctors and hospitals, it is the trial attorney who sues for medical malpractice. Consumers ripped off by large corporations such as banks and utility companies often turn to trial attorneys to file class-action lawsuits against these large corporations because a single individual cannot otherwise seek justice against them. California trial attorneys fight everyday to preserve the rights of the ordinary citizen in the civil courts of California.

The Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA) is the nation's largest local association of plaintiffs' attorneys, with over 3,000 attorney and law-office-staff members.  The roots of the association were in the Lawyers Roundtable, a group of plaintiff civil attorneys who began meeting informally in 1949. The association began in 1950 and was for many years called the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association (LATLA).

Consumer Attorneys protect people from unsafe products, unsafe medicine, unfair business practices and unscrupulous and negligent corporate conduct.  Members of CAALA subscribe to the highest standards of quality legal representation and ethical conduct. As attorneys who solely represent the interests of consumers, CAALA is a powerful advocate for victim's rights and equal access to justice.

CAALA is a 501 (c) 6 Mutual Benefit Trade Association. The Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles is not a referral organization and does not provide legal advice.

Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles
888 West 6th St., 6th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Phone 213.487.1212

Advocate is the largest magazine in the United States for plaintiffs' trial attorneys. Advocate is owned by the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA) and published for the benefit of plaintiffs' trial attorneys in Southern California.  Published since 1963, it is a peer-reviewed legal publication, written and edited by leading plaintiffs' attorneys. 10,000+ copies are mailed monthly to plaintiffs' attorneys throughout all of Southern California, from Los Angeles and Orange counties to San Diego, Imperial, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Kern counties.. In addition to members of CAALA, others receiving the magazine include all members of the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association and many attorneys who belong to the trial bar associations in San Diego and the Inland Empire (Riverside and San Bernardino counties).  Importantly, Advocate is mailed not only to trial bar association members, but to all lawyers whose practices are primarily the representation of plaintiffs in the civil courts of Southern California.  

Plaintiff is a monthly magazine for plaintiffs' trial attorneys in Northern and Central California, with 5,000+ copies mailed to the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast, Fresno and the Central Valley, San Jose, Monterey, Sacramento and all of Northern California.  Plaintiff is published by Neubauer & Associates, Inc.

JuryVerdictAlert.com is a searchable, Web-based database of California jury verdicts* in the civil state and federal courts of California. Verdicts include personal-injury law, employment law, legal and medical malpractice, consumer protection, civil rights and insurance law. The facts in the verdict reports are provided by the attorneys who tried the cases. The announcement of the verdicts is sent by email to over 10,000 California trial attorneys.

The searchable database is available only to subscribers to JuryVerdictAlert.com. Single and multiple-day subscriptions are available. Subscribers can use this database to look up current verdict ranges for specific types of injuries and actions, to research plaintiff and defense attorneys as well as expert witnesses, judges and litigants.

Attorneys are advised that while the information in the verdict reports is believed to be correct, they should verify it with the attorneys of record or in the actual court files before relying on it.

*And certain arbitration awards

The parent company, Neubauer & Associates, Inc., is owned by Richard and Deborah Neubauer. The Neubauer family is familiar to many Southern California trial lawyers as the publishers of Confidential Report for Attorneys, a leading verdict and settlement reporter for 35 years. From that newsletter they created Verdicts on Disk®, the nation's first PC-based database of verdicts and settlements. The database was sold in 1999 and subsequently merged into Verdict Search, an ALM Company.  Neubauer & Associates, with offices in Oceanside and San Francisco, has published Advocate magazine for the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles since 2002, and Plaintiff magazine since 2007.