Jim Sturdevant has been tilting at windmills for his entire legal career—and he’s brought a good number of them down. His adversaries are unethical corporations, polluters and negligent institutions. He goes to battle on behalf of the poorest of the poor, the old, the weak and the powerless.

It wasn’t what he had in mind when he first entered law school at Boston College. He was just following his father’s advice that knowledge of the law would come in handy for whatever he ultimately decided to do with his life. But he had an epiphany the summer between his first and second years, when he took a job with a legal aid program in Baltimore. His clients were inmates of the local mental institution, the jail and the state penitentiary—locked away, essentially, for the crime of being poor. By the end of the summer, he knew these were the people he wanted to fight for.

Sturdevant had a sheltered childhood. He grew up in Salt Lake City in the late ’40s and ’50s. Mom stayed home with the four kids and Dad worked in his father-in-law’s bank. Sturdevant spent his teen years at a prep school in Rhode Island, then attended Trinity College in Connecticut before going for his law degree. His most radical venture was helping to close down the law school to protest the 1970 bombing of Cambodia.

He received his degree in 1973 and worked in legal aid in Connecticut for several years, mostly bringing class action suits on behalf of poor people. In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles to be near the woman who became his first wife, also an attorney. He started The Sturdevant Law Firm in L.A., then moved it north to San Francisco, where she joined another firm.Sturdevant has become increasingly politically active over the years, working on legislation, serving on the boards of a number of local and national lawyers associations, garnering armfuls of honors for his community service. Last year he was president of Consumer Attorneys of California and was named Trial Lawyer of the Year by that organization. His first marriage ended after 15 years and he remarried two years later, again to an attorney. They have three children now, ages 8, 6 and 3. He and his wife have both been cutting back on work lately to spend more time with the kids.

When I met him, he had just returned from a ski trip with the family in Sun Valley, a good deal worse for the wear. He’d slipped on some ice while there, bruising the ribs on his right side, then came down with a case of bronchitis and the flu. Rather than break our appointment, he came to my house a bit sedated from pain medication—which may account for some of his apparent reserve. Tall and slim with a thin mustache, he had a dignified air about him. He talked in detail about his work, displaying little emotion. But if the medication dampened his passion, it must not have affected his lawyer’s loquacity—he stayed and chatted for three hours.

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Give me an example of the kind of cases you handle.
A little over a year ago we got a verdict in a class action against Bank of America in San Francisco for well over $1 billion involving misrepresentations by the bank to people on Social Security who had established direct deposit accounts to receive their benefits. The bank had repeatedly misrepresented that it had a right to seize those moneys to pay any bounced check fees the bank claimed the customer owed them. There’s a California Supreme Court decision from 1974 against Wells Fargo Bank that says that a bank can’t simply take money from your account to settle up its debts.

Yes, that sounds like a very scary practice. Do any other banks do that?
All of them.

So when you sued B of A, does that affect other banks?
Well, it hasn’t affected B of A yet. Judgment is finally going to be entered today [March 4]. The judge awarded more than the jury and made findings on the non-jury issues as well, so the amount of the verdict will be in the range of $1.5 billion. I understand it’s the largest verdict in the history of San Francisco and it’s among the three or four largest verdicts in the history of California.

And that money will go to depositors all over the state?
Right. At any one point in time the bank has more than a million customers who have these accounts. Most of the damages that have been awarded come from NSF [not sufficient funds] fees—bounced check fees. Corporations follow P.T. Barnum’s advice, that it’s much easier to steal a dollar from a million people than it is to steal a million dollars from a single individual. B of A charged $32 per overdraft, up to a maximum of $160 a day. In California alone the bank collects currently somewhere between $40- and $50 million a year in these $32 fees.

Tell me more about the depositors.
The [lead] plaintiff we were dealing with was someone who was declared mentally disabled by the Social Security Administration in the early ’90s as a result of an assault. He was a photojournalist who was physically assaulted in Southeast Asia and had significant brain damage. His total income was from SSI, $670 a month. So a fee of $32 for an overdraft was 5 percent of his monthly income. What they did in January of 1998—and this happened on a number of other occasions as well—they had erroneously deposited $1100 to his account. And he thought it was some kind of retroactive adjustment from the Social Security Administration. Then three months later the bank discovered that it was somebody else’s money and reversed the deposit.

Without telling him?
They sent him a letter, which he got three or four days later. Meanwhile, he bounced his rent check for his Section 8 housing, his PG&E check and several others. And they charged him $32 for each one. He went to the legal services program that the bar of San Francisco has and they referred the case to me. At first they tried to handle it internally and the bank had apologized and said it was the bank’s fault, but then it happened again, two more times. After that, the bank retained an outside collection company to go after the plaintiff, Paul Miller.

When the bank apologized, were they apologizing for the practice in general, or for the particular instance?
I think they were apologizing for the instance, but later at trial we were able to determine that the legal department had told people dealing with his account that the bank had no right to seize Social Security moneys to pay for these debts.

So the bank’s officers knew that this is an illegal practice and yet they continued to do it?
And they continue to do it today.

Do you expect them to appeal?
Oh, yes. There will be a lot of resources brought to bear on this case. Not simply because it’s a significant amount of money, but because of the implications that the decision has for national banks. The jury awarded damages on behalf of each class member, which we anticipate will number at least 1.3 million people. Because the members of this class are either mentally or physically disabled or elderly, many of them with Alzheimer’s disease, they could be awarded up to $5,000 per person for having suffered substantial emotional or economic harm.

What do you foresee as the ultimate outcome?
I won’t be letting any secrets out of the box if I tell you that national banks are already working the halls of Congress and the federal regulatory agencies seeking a response to this lawsuit.

So you expect to see legislation that will make it legal for banks to take depositors’ money out of their Social Security funds?
Yes.

That must make you crazy! You spend years of your life working to stop the bank from breaking the rules, you win the case and then Congress sabotages you by changing the rules!
There’s a mind-set in the country that has nothing to do with the individual hardship that befalls certain classes of Americans, a mind-set that is hellbent on protecting the interests of the largest multinational corporations. This is the only case that’s gone to trial against a national bank in the country, and any number of cases have been filed about this issue.

How much of this $1.5 billion goes to your firm?
None right now. I’m hoping to be able to distribute as much of that, plus the post-judgment interest, as possible back to these individuals. But I know that a number of them have died, a number will have moved and we won’t be able to find them. But we’ll be able to separate that money from the bank, and that’s the most important thing. We will also apply for attorney’s fees and it will be up to the judge as to how she wants to do that.

Would the new class action law that President Bush just signed affect cases like this? Would this kind of case in the future be heard in federal court rather than state court?
It would, because Bank of America, after the merger with Nations Bank, is based in North Carolina. So even though all of the conduct took place in California, even though only Californians are affected, even though we’re only talking about California law, a Bank of America under the new law would have had the right to remove that case to federal court.

The Bush administration has been saying that one of the reasons this law is needed is that attorneys wind up getting the bulk of the awards and plaintiffs, if they get anything, it’s just coupons for products from the company they just sued.
Coupon settlements have happened way too frequently, in my opinion. I’m on the board of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, which sharply discourages coupon settlements because, for one thing, they require the individual to do business with the very entity that violated the law in the first place. Also, it’s not a check or a credit posted to their account, it’s just a coupon for additional products or services and few of those coupons get redeemed. I wouldn’t have had any problem if the sole point of the legislation was to limit coupon settlements, because I support that. But this reminds me of the kind of thing President Reagan used to do. He’d point to one example he’d heard about where someone used food stamps in some small town to buy a half pint of vodka to justify savaging the food stamps program, which provides undeniable benefits to millions of people. The solution the Bush administration came up with to protect against what they call “forum shopping”—where plaintiff’s attorneys go into counties where they think they’ll have favorable judges to file class actions—is to create a system of forum shopping for corporate defendants. This law will overwhelm the federal judiciary. This will delay the resolution of all these cases for many, many years. That’s why the Federal Judicial Center, of which the Chief Justice of the United States is the chairperson, opposed this legislation. But this bill was signed within I think 12 hours of the House acting on it, which is almost unheard of.

So the purpose of this bill is to make it more difficult to sue corporate defendants because the federal courts won’t have time to hear the cases?
The next best thing to having a judgment in your favor if you’re a corporate defendant is not having any resolution of the case. I think this is a major, draconian action in favor of corporate America.

Is there any truth to the way the Bush administration portrays “trial lawyers”? Are there lawyers out there lining their own pockets at the expense of their clients?
I don’t think there’s any question that you could find an individual lawyer who did something unethical. From my focus, which is completely different than the president’s, we need to look at the problem and see what we can do to solve it. What the president is interested in doing is to virtually eliminate the civil justice system. One way he’s doing that is to characterize and label all trial lawyers as people who file “junk lawsuits”—which must be a Texas term for frivolous lawsuits. There is no financial incentive that I can think of for a lawyer to file a frivolous lawsuit because, one, you can be sanctioned substantially by the judge for doing that; and, two, unless the defendant is very wealthy and just decides to pay you, your fee is strictly contingent on your success. There’s no payment along the line, no matter how long the case takes, there’s no payment up-front, it’s all going to be contingent. The civil justice system has given Americans safer products, safer services, we have safety switches and safety locks, we have seat belts, we have safety buttons on the trunks of our cars, on our refrigerators and our washing machines that all came about because of serious injuries or deaths that led to a lawsuit that led to these changes. There have been fewer lawsuits in the last 30 years—despite the increase in our population—because the safety devices are in place. So people don’t lose their lives, they don’t lose their limbs, infants don’t burn up in fires in their cribs.

Let’s talk about the Bush campaign to limit medical malpractice suits. I understand there already is a limit in California on medical injury compensation.
Since 1975, there’s been a limitation on attorney’s fees and noneconomic damages. There’s a cap of $250,000 on noneconomic damages, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the severity of the injury, even an injury that caused death. Outside of medical damages and the loss of wage-earning potential, the total amount the plaintiff can recover is $250,000—and that was an amount that was deemed appropriate in 1975. If you went by the cost of living adjustment, that would be equal to between $850,000 and $1 million in today’s dollars, but there’s never been an adjustment.

How has this affected people?
There was one case in which a woman’s perfectly healthy breasts were removed because the pathology report from another patient was thought to be hers. There are lots of reported instances in which doctors have taken off the wrong arm or the wrong leg because a chart got misread. With this law, there is no compensation for any pain and suffering in cases like that.

And is this California law going to serve as a model for the federal legislation?
Yes, but even Senator Feinstein isn’t willing to go along with the president on this, and she’s been a pivotal player in this administration’s efforts against lawyers. The question is whether there will be any deal that she’ll be able to work out.
I understand there’s an initiative coming up on the next ballot, sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, to limit attorney’s fees. Tell me about that.

It would limit the amount of fees that could be recovered in any tort case to 20 percent of the recovery to the plaintiff. If they set the fee level so low, it will drive lawyers out of business. It would eliminate the protections that have been available to Americans for hundreds of years. As a lawyer, you have to look at this from a long-term perspective—that you will lose a number of cases, you can’t win them all. So a lawyer has to decide, can my firm be profitable if the contingency fee is at 20 percent? And I can tell you, having been in business for almost 35 years, that the answer is no. If the contingency fee were reduced to 20 percent, the only attorneys that would be in business would be the people at the very top of the legal echelon who can command the most egregious cases, and all other lawyers will be priced out of the market. And that eliminates any resources for the plaintiffs for representation in the civil justice system. The pharmaceutical industry would like to discourage, deter, reduce or eliminate, if it could, any lawsuits that would challenge its ability to market drugs that the industry knows can cause serious injury or death. Just like the tobacco industry did for decades.

What drew you to this area of the law?
I’m not sure what I had in mind when I first entered law school, but I quickly became interested in representing poor people and severely disadvantaged people. I worked for a legal services program the summer after my first year in law school in Baltimore and the lawyers I was working for were exclusively representing individuals who had been arrested and were confined in the Baltimore City Jail and the Maryland Penitentiary and in a couple of state mental hospitals. So those were the people I started representing as a law student.

What was your first experience working with that population?
One of my first experiences was representing a middle-aged man who was confined to a mental institution. He had lived for many years with his mother, and at some point his neighbors reported him to the authorities because his roof was leaking and he wasn’t repairing it. They did some kind of psychiatric analysis and he was civilly committed. We challenged that commitment order and we were successful and he was released. He was able to care for himself and he certainly wasn’t a danger to anyone else.

So the only thing he had done wrong was he didn’t repair his roof?
That’s all that I was aware of.

What was the impression you came away with after that experience?
I was horrified. I became aware of the conditions in which this country housed many people who were either elderly or, in some person’s view, had some level of dysfunction. We used to basically warehouse thousands and thousands of people in mental institutions where, if you weren’t psychotic upon admission, it would be difficult not to become psychotic as a result. In the jail and in the penitentiary, you had men confined in very small cells, which still exist in California today. The food wasn’t edible, there were lice and vermin. In the early ’80s I became involved in prison litigation here that was started in 1973 by Public Advocates. It was a suit against the state involving San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad and Dual Vocational Institute in Tracy. And that confirmed all the things I’d seen in the Maryland penitentiary. There were hundreds of men double-celled for periods of more than a year in square boxes of less than 48 square feet with a fixed double bunk. There was a lack of running water, the plumbing was dilapidated, there were rats, mice, feces. And the noise levels were so high that it was like a pair of locomotives coming at each other at 60 miles an hour. The place is all cement and iron, and everyone inside turns up the volume on his own radio or TV so he can hear it over everybody else’s. The cacophony was unbelievable. Ultimately, it was ruled unconstitutional to confine people under these conditions. It would be all but impossible to rehabilitate someone confined like this for many years and then expect them to walk out the door and compete for a job in our economy and live next door to us as if nothing had happened.

Why was this population appealing to you?
Because most of the people who are in prisons or in jails or in mental institutions are absolutely powerless. They’re there because they didn’t have any money. If it weren’t for the legal services programs, their conditions of confinement would have gone unaddressed. And as a result of litigation, these conditions were exposed and positive changes were made at those institutions. At some point in that summer of 1970, I decided that I wanted to commit at least a portion of my professional life to representing people who were disadvantaged. And that’s what I’ve done.