Arne J Nelson

On graduating from UC Berkeley in 1978, I began a PhD program that same year in History at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.  After a few months of study and in the midst of a very cold Winter, I returned to California where I began working in law firms. 

My first law related job was at the downtown Los Angeles firm of Overton, Lyman & Prince.  In the type of coincidence that only real life can bring, because I had worked the previous two Summers in a Wyoming uranium mine, this firm hired me to write "fact books" in the federal multi-district class action uranium litigation that was then pending in Chicago.  My work entailed flying to various big cities around the U.S. where I was assigned to literally read through and summarize file cabinets full of documents pertaining to uranium sales contracts at the offices of public utilities that had contracted with Westinghouse to build nuclear power plants. 

After a couple of years and as the uranium lawsuit began to resolve, I began working on the insurance defense side of "DES" cases, all of which involved the same extraordinarily sad fact pattern, where the female offspring of mothers who had taken this synthetic estrogen medication that had been prescribed to them in the 1950's and 1960's by their physicians to treat the side effects of pregnancy, these girls developed typically terminal cancer of the cervix.  The DES cases were my first exposure to personal injury litigation, and I found that I loved working in this nexus between medicine and law.   I also discovered that I wanted to work for the injured persons and not to advance the interests of insurance companies and large corporations.

After law school, I opened my own personal injury practice in 1991,  I've now handled nearly 1,500 personal injury cases from inception through insurance claims, litigation (when necessary) and trial.  I continue to do this work, because I beleive in the rights of individuals who have been injured by the fault of others, whether in the refined context of a complex products liability setting, from premises liability, or traffic collisions.  Regardless how a person has been injured, we are all entitled to fair compensation for injuries caused by another person's or entity's negligence.  Unfortunately, the process of obtaining compensation, typically from insurance companies, is fraught with bias, prejudice and greed.  And like our current political polarizations, the insurance defense professionals on one side and the plaintiff's bar on the other, each see the other all too often as a bitter adversary.   But such is the current state of our society as we wrestle with legal concepts devolved from medieval England.   My job is to advocate for each of my clients, applying all the hard won benefits of my experience, to obtain for her or him a fair measure of compensation.