Attorney Spotlight: Gary Dordick, Los Angeles Trial Lawyer
The first job Gary A. Dordick held in the law was in a file room. He had graduated from Beverly Hills High School and gone straight into a four-year night program at the University of West Los Angeles School of Law, never attending college at all, and he paid his way by working days at a law office where he had started as a clerk. California admitted him on June 17, 1987, and he opened his own firm immediately, with no employees and no partners.
Thirty-nine years later that firm keeps offices in Beverly Hills, downtown Los Angeles and Riverside, and employs eighteen lawyers, three of whom are his own children. Dordick himself holds the highest jury verdict on record in several California courthouses, and the firm reports he has tried more than 150 cases to juries. He has never practiced anywhere but Beverly Hills, the city he grew up in, and in 2020 he bought the building at its southern edge so that his firm would be the first thing a driver sees coming into town. He has also spent the last several Mays in Cabo San Lucas running a trial school for other people’s associates, the entire proceeds of which go to the Boston cancer institute that treated him.
I’ve been a trial lawyer now in the community for over 37 years, and I feel like those of us that have been around a little bit longer and achieved a certain level of success owe it to the legal community to give back and help the younger lawyers be better at what we do.
— Gary A. Dordick, to the Beverly Press
The practice is civil litigation, weighted heavily toward catastrophic injury and death, and he has described the operating principle plainly enough: “We emphasize litigation and going to trial. We take a small number of cases and fight very hard.” What that has produced is a body of very large verdicts, several of which did not stay the size the jury made them.
Night School, and a Building He Grew Up Near
Horace Mann Elementary came first, then Beverly Hills High School, and the family has stayed inside the same few square miles ever since; all five of his children went to school in the city. The law school that admitted him without a bachelor’s degree gave him its highest honor, the Bernard Jefferson Award, in 2003. He incorporated Dordick Law Corporation in 1996 and bought the Beverly Drive property it occupied that same year.
The Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles named him Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2001 and has nominated him for it eleven times, which the association calls unprecedented; Consumer Attorneys of California gave him its Trial Attorney of the Year award in 2009; CAALA inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2023. He served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates in 2025, a term that has since ended.
A Friday in Ventura County
Francisco Briones was twenty-one and driving to a five o’clock morning shift at a warehouse when Christopher Zink ran the red light at Rice Avenue and Channel Islands Boulevard in Oxnard in March 2013. Briones had left Oxnard College to support his mother and four siblings. The collision left him quadriplegic. By the time the case reached trial, Zink was serving seven years for felony drunk driving causing injury.
The jury deliberated for one day and came back on Friday, January 22, 2016, with $125,168,202, which the Daily Journal ranked as the top plaintiffs’ verdict by dollar in California that year. Zink’s lawyer then moved to strike the entire non-economic award under Proposition 213, on the ground that Briones had been driving his parents’ uninsured car; Judge John Nguyen denied the motion, because Briones had posted a deposit with the DMV that satisfied California’s financial responsibility law. A judge cut the award to $85 million after trial, and Dordick defended most of the verdict from there.
Roughly half the original number had been punitive damages, and Dordick told the Ventura County Star that Zink was in no position to pay his share of it, which made that half largely symbolic. Briones had left school in the first place to support his mother and siblings, and since the crash, Dordick said, his mother and younger brother have shared the work of caring for him. Asked what his client actually had in hand the day after the biggest personal injury verdict in the state, he did not dress it up.
Right now, they’ve got a piece of paper and no money. Justice doesn’t always come fast.
— Gary A. Dordick, to the Ventura County Star
What Happens After the Verdict
On June 17, 2024, a Los Angeles jury awarded a woman suing the technology entrepreneur Alkiviades David $900 million in a sexual assault case, $100 million of it compensatory and $800 million punitive, after Dordick asked for a billion. “Punitive damages are intended to punish and deter,” he told the Beverly Press at the time. That September the court found the award shocked the conscience and conditioned its refusal of a new damages trial on the plaintiff accepting $90 million instead, ten million compensatory and eighty million punitive. Whether she took the reduced figure or elected to retry has not been reported.
In September 2025 another Los Angeles jury returned $115 million against the former stepfather of a Gucci heiress in a sexual abuse case, $85 million compensatory and $30 million punitive. Dordick tried that one alongside his daughter Taylor, and the defendant told the court he was broke.
One of the big Arizona numbers moved in the other direction after the jury was done with it. In November 2023 a Maricopa County jury returned $31,550,825, unanimously, to Krystle Griepentrog and her son Greyson, who was deprived of oxygen during delivery and has cerebral palsy; the jury assigned Banner Health fifty-seven percent of the fault and the delivering physician forty-three. Because the award beat a $7 million pretrial offer, another $2 million was added, bringing the total past $33 million. Dordick represented the family with a colleague from his own firm and with Phoenix trial counsel who gave the opening statement and handled much of the expert testimony, and the Beverly Press reported it as the largest medical malpractice award in Arizona history.
He handles the appeals in his own cases as well, and they have not all gone his way. Since 2022 the California Court of Appeal has published four opinions in his cases: a reversal that revived a carpenter’s claim after a fall from allegedly defective scaffolding, and three that went against his clients, one of them involving an amusement park ride and another a woman who sat down on a forty-three-inch parking structure wall after a long evening at a restaurant and fell backward out of the building. The firm’s results page runs past a hundred entries, among them $42.7 million for a man who leapt from a burning U-Haul onto the I-10 and $30.9 million for people who lost homes and family in a Southern California wildfire.
Cabo, Every May
Dordick was treated for lymphoma at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and in 2020 he started an annual trial school in Cabo San Lucas whose entire proceeds go there. The money is directed to Dana-Farber’s Bing Center for Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia, a rare lymphoma, and the institute’s own fundraising arm lists the conference among its events. Across five years the college has sent it more than $1.24 million. The 2024 session alone raised $225,000, and he said at the time he thought $300,000 was reachable.
I received tremendous assistance from the doctors and scientists at Dana Farber Cancer Research Center in Boston and I wanted to find a way to help them with their research, because whether people like to think about it or not, it takes money to do medical research and it’s essential that they get the money they need to find cures for cancer.
— Gary A. Dordick, to the Beverly Press
At the college itself the curriculum and the social calendar get roughly equal billing. Sessions run in three tracks with titles like “My First Jury Trial” and “Expert Advice on Cross Examination,” a share of the programming is built for women litigators, including an all-star panel and a trial lawyers’ luncheon, and there are courses on handling sexual assault cases. Around that sit a golf tournament on the opening Thursday, yoga, a beach fiesta, tequila tastings, a rented-out nightclub in downtown Cabo that changes every year, and a closing-night party with live music. Scholarships are available to law students who want to come.
Roughly four hundred lawyers, judges, legal professionals and students turned up in 2025, and for 2026 the college moved to a bigger hotel, the Hilton Los Cabos, which Dordick’s people bought out entirely. One of the things he likes about it, he has said, is that plaintiff’s lawyers end up drinking with defense lawyers they will be trying cases against within the year.
The First Building You See
In 2020 the firm paid about $11.1 million for a ten-thousand-square-foot building at 470 South Beverly Drive, across the street from the offices it already owned, and hired the Beverly Hills architect Hamid Gabbay to rebuild it in glass. Dordick wanted the frontage, a hundred and forty feet of it, and he wanted the address for a specific reason: the property sits at the southern edge of the city, so it is the first thing a driver sees coming into Beverly Hills. The firm moved in this year. It also keeps offices on Wilshire Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles and in Riverside.
He talks about the real estate the way people talk about a hometown, which in his case it is. “It’s the first building people see when they enter Beverly Hills, and we want to make it a beautiful entrance to Beverly Hills,” he told the Beverly Press when the sale closed. On why he keeps buying property in the same few blocks, he offered the reason of someone who went to elementary school within walking distance of it: “We live in the neighborhood, all five of our kids attended school here. We are part of the community.”
His wife Nava has been beside him at the trial colleges, and three of the five children are lawyers in the firm now, one of them beside him on a nine-figure verdict last year. Four decades on from the night-school graduate with no college degree who opened a practice with no staff, the building at the entrance to town carries his name in gold, and every May he takes several hundred lawyers to Mexico and sends the proceeds to the institute in Boston that treated him.
