A Legal Career Goes
to the Dogs
L.A. solo represents the human victims
of canine attacks
By Mike McKee
[The Recorder,
Monday, December 27, 1999]
Opening the front door to her quiet
Oakland home, Selma Taylor worriedly tells a visitor to come inside quickly.
"The dogs are loose," the 40-ish
grandmother says nervously while fiddling with a cell phone.
The "dogs" are two Rottweilers owned
by Taylor's next-door neighbor, the same dogs that Taylor says have attacked
her twice in the last 15 months. She claims to have been bitten at her
doorstep in August 1998 and to have been knocked down at the edge of her
yard last May, escaping serious injury only by jumping into a passing pickup
truck.
"It's a game of chance for me to
get from my front door to my car every day," she says.
As it turns out this day, Taylor,
executive director of a nonprofit agency in Oakland, apparently has seen
the wrong dogs: The neighbor's canines are secure in their yard. But it
doesn't matter. Taylor's terrified by the big animals and wants them taken
away or destroyed.
Enter Kenneth Phillips, a 48-year-old
Los Angeles solo practitioner who filed suit on Taylor's behalf in August.
Phillips long ago saw his career going to the dogs -- dog law, that is
-- and just might be the dog-bite king of the legal world.
He represents people all over California
who have been attacked by dogs and is the proud founder of dogbitelaw.com,
a year-old Web site -- packed with the doggonedest facts and figures --
that has become a global hit.
And while dog-bite law sounds like
a legal practice that might have fared better in Medieval Europe, Phillips
is a thoroughly modern man. He's a techster who can hold his own on a synthesizer,
lets a computer program of his own design run his office, and meets his
dog-bitten clients in an ultra-modern high-rise in L.A.'s Century City.
He might not be handling Silicon
Valley-style litigation, but Phillips manages to be happy and make a living
at an arcane practice partly because there's no end of clients.
"There are 50 million dogs in this
country," says Phillips, who estimates that more than 60 of his 100-plus
active cases are dog-related. "And they are causing a hell of a lot of
damage."
The Centers for Disease Control estimates
that dogs bite more than 4.7 million people a year in the U.S., with more
than 800,000 attacks serious enough to warrant medical care and more than
half involving children. The CDC also reports that 304 Americans died from
dog attacks between 1979 and 1996. And insurers estimate doling out more
than $100 million annually to dog-bite victims.
"I get, on the average, five inquiries
a day pertaining to dog-bite litigation," Phillips says. "And that can
be anything from a legislator asking me a question about what the law is
or should be, all the way to a dog-bite victim, all the way to somebody
whose pet has been killed by another dog."
A random sample of e-mail sent to
Phillips' Web site reveals inquiries from the mother of a dog-bite victim
in Alabama, an insurer from an unidentified locale seeking information
about dog-owner liability, lawyers with separate dog-bite cases in Vermont
and South Africa, a high school student in Germany researching a science
fair project, college students studying dog law in England, and a North
Carolina animal-control officer who gushingly calls Phillips' Web site
"undoubtedly the best . . . regarding this very sensitive issue."
"It's an amazing cross-section of
people," Phillips says.
Most aren't looking for representation,
just advice, which Phillips dispenses for free. But Phillips has gotten
a few clients, including Selma Taylor, from the site.
A friend of Taylor's found Phillips
online, and Taylor chose him as her lawyer after making contact by telephone.
"What impressed me was his understanding
of California law. That's what I needed," she states. "And he's responsive.
He takes time to explain the issues. I feel like I'm being taken care of."
NO DOG-EAT-DOG WORLD
Phillips is a big man. Standing six-feet,
six-inches tall and weighing 255 pounds, he could be an imposing figure,
if not for his jovial nature and the laid-back style he acquired growing
up in L.A.
Though he meets clients in a stuffy
conference room in Century City, Phillips actually works out of the mellow,
hacienda-style home in Rancho Park that he shares with his wife, Cecile
Munoz, an executive recruiter in the financial realm. A water fountain
babbles outside his work window, and his backyard -- where he plots legal
strategy -- is home to six pet rabbits, a few wild squirrels, a pool of
koi fish, and trees bearing lemons, apricots, peaches and plums.
"I use nature to inspire me in my
battles with the real world," he says. "It makes you more effective, and
you won't die when you're 45."
Ironically, Phillips owns no dogs.
He's a self-proclaimed "cat person," who has one feline inside his house,
three strays outside and a joke "Beware of Dog" sign on his front porch.
But he says he loves dogs. He owned three pooches -- one a mutt named Tracy
--
when he was younger.
A 1976 graduate of the UCLA School
of Law who went solo in 1993, Phillips never intended to be a personal
injury lawyer, let alone a dog-law expert. He practiced litigation and
entertainment law at a handful of firms, but retained an interest in PI
after getting $200,000 in his first case for a cousin hurt by a printing
press.
It wasn't long before a dog-bite
victim showed up at his doorstep and a niche practice was born. He still
does entertainment law and serves as a judge pro tempore for the small-claims
division of L.A. Municipal Court, but his first love is dog law.
Of course, he's gotten a few gibes
from fellow lawyers over the years, but he doesn't really care.
"They'll usually say, 'Dog-bite law?
Why dog-bite law?' and I'll say, 'Strict liability, dude.' That is a very
meaningful criteria," he says, "because it means we have a better shot
at getting a fair recovery for someone."
In other words, unless there's some
extenuating circumstance, "the owner pays all damages" in California, he
says, if his or her dog bites someone.
One initial Phillips skeptic was
San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Stuart Hanlon, who tracked Phillips
down after a female friend was bitten by a dog in L.A.
"Before I met him, I thought it was
a joke -- someone specializing in dog-bite cases," the Tamburello, Hanlon
& Waggener partner says. "It was like something from Saturday Night
Live. But he certainly appeared competent to me. He asked the right questions,
or I wouldn't have referred her [to him]."
That friend, Candace Killman, had
been attacked by an akita while visiting a nephew who worked in a beauty
salon. "It was out of the blue," she says. "[The dog] just up and bit both
of my eyes and ripped my left eyelid -- a three-quarter-inch tear. It was
pretty gruesome."
Killman, an interior designer in
Larkspur, sued after the dog's owner refused to pay her medical bills,
and she was quite happy with the $20,000 Phillips got in a settlement.
Of course, that's one of Phillips'
smaller recoveries. In his cases with more serious injuries, insurers have
ponied up bigger bucks, which he highlights in colorfully named stories
on his Web site. There's the "pit bull attack" that settled for $200,000,
the "Christmas party case" that resolved for $290,000 and the "going-away
party case" that ended for $300,000.
The Christmas case involved a particularly
violent incident. A client, who Phillips prefers not to name, was attacked
by a German shepherd while visiting a Bay Area friend on Christmas Night
1992.
"The dog ripped off the woman's nose
and ate it," Phillips says. The woman, who lives in New York, has
had several surgeries, but remains scarred.
The case was especially egregious,
Phillips adds, because the dog owner had denied any previous aggressive
tendencies by his pet. Phillips discovered, however, that only three months
before the attack, the same animal had badly bitten the nose and cheek
of a veterinary technician in Hayward.
"Until then, [my client] considered
herself the victim of an unavoidable accident," Phillips says. "Now she
has had to face the truth -- namely that the defendant needlessly exposed
her to attack, by failing to lock up the dog or warn the guests."
FABIO'S FIDOS
The serious nature of dog attacks
is underlined by all the attention given them by veterinarians, insurers
and legislators.
State Farm Insurance Co. provides
an online consumer safety guide about dogs, including a dog-bite quiz for
children.
Students at Auburn University's College
of Veterinary Medicine produced a dog-bite prevention book -- Fido! Friend
or Foe? -- that has sold more than 4 million copies.
Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation
in August that lets prosecutors charge dog owners with a misdemeanor or
a felony if their animal attacks someone, depending on the severity of
the injury and whether the owner knew the dog had a propensity for violence.
Called "Cody's Law," the legislation was named after 11-year-old Cody Fox
who was mauled by a pack of dogs in Tehama County in September 1998.
And even as recently as Nov. 24,
the Fresno-based Fifth District Court of Appeal ruled in People v. Henderson,
99 C.D.O.S. 9291, that pit-bull terriers can be considered deadly weapons.
Pit bulls are among the 10 breeds
of dog that CDC officials have identified as the most dangerous. Others
include rottweilers, German shepherds, akitas and even chow chows.
But one thing Phillips says he's
learned is not to pre-judge any particular breed of dog, but rather to
evaluate the owners of individual animals.
"Any dog -- literally any dog --
can be a bad dog if the owner is a bad owner or the breeder is a bad breeder,"
he says. "I've heard of killer Labradors. On the other hand, any dog associated
with a bad breed can be a good dog if the owner is a good owner or the
breeder is a good breeder."
It also depends on the individual
circumstances. In his most celebrated case, Phillips went after male model
Fabio Lanzoni for negligence on behalf of a Canadian actress whose teeth
were knocked out when Fabio's Great Danes leaped into her face as she leaned
downward. Phillips argued that jurors should have been allowed to decide
whether Fabio should have known his dogs were in an excitable state because
he had riled them up while playing with them earlier.
"The point I was trying to make in
that litigation was that Fabio should be responsible for making his dogs
crazy," Phillips says.
The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
ruled against Phillips in May 1997, but not before he earned the respect
of his legal opponent, Richard Charnley.
"I enjoyed him immensely. He's got
a good sense of humor, he's a gentleman and he's a good litigator," says
Charnley, now of counsel at Santa Monica's Nelsen, Thompson, Pegue &
Thornton. "If someone called up and said their kid had just been mauled
by a vicious animal, I'd refer them to Ken."
Phillips likes hearing that, because
he really likes his work and feels he provides a legitimate service to
his clients. But he frets about providing comparatively superficial aid
to maimed individuals.
"I can't give them their nose back.
I can't take their scars away," he says. "I can only get them money."
He should take some comfort, though,
in clients like Selma Taylor, who says money is secondary to her.
"My issue is having the dogs removed.
I don't want to live in fear," she explains. "And I felt like [Phillips]
had some compassion. There was some concern about my well-being. And I
needed that."
(c) NLP IP Company,
Monday, December 27, 1999 |
