When the Stakes Are Highest, Results Matter.

Danko Meredith, Trial Lawyers

For more than three decades, Danko Meredith lawyers have helped people catastrophically injured — and families who have lost loved ones — due to the negligence of others. We are plaintiffs’ trial lawyers: we never represent corporations, insurance companies, or defendants. We take cases on contingency, meaning there are no fees or costs unless we win.

What Danko Meredith is known for:

We are nationally recognized aviation trial lawyers. Mike Danko is an active jet and helicopter pilot with nearly 5,000 flight hours. We have litigated aviation accident cases throughout the United States and abroad for more than 30 years — from major airline disasters to general aviation and helicopter crashes. Learn about our aviation practice.

We are California wildfire litigation pioneers. Since 2015, we have represented thousands of survivors of utility-caused wildfires and disasters — including the Butte Fire, North Bay fires, Camp Fire, Dixie Fire, and the Eaton Fire — and have been part of litigation efforts that recovered billions of dollars for survivors. We are one of a small number of firms willing to take a utility company all the way to a jury verdict. Learn about our wildfire practice.

We are trusted trial lawyers for catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases close to home. Our attorneys are in Bay Area and California courtrooms handling the cases that define the firm’s everyday work.

Being an aviation trial lawyer requires more than legal knowledge — it requires understanding how aircraft actually fail, how investigations are conducted, and how to defeat the narratives that manufacturers and insurers construct in their defense. Two examples of what that looks like in practice:

A passenger catastrophically injured when an engine came apart in flight. When a Beech Bonanza’s Continental IO-550 engine failed in cruise flight and forced an emergency landing, the NTSB investigation cleared the engine manufacturer and blamed the mechanic who had last worked on the aircraft. Danko Meredith took a different view. We investigated the engine’s design and maintenance history and built a case against Teledyne Continental Motors — the manufacturer the NTSB had exonerated. The jury agreed with our analysis as presented by our experts, not the NTSB’s, and returned a verdict of $15 million for our client, who had suffered a severe brain injury in the crash landing. The verdict earned a Trial Lawyer of the Year nomination from the Consumer Attorneys of California. (Burdett v. Teledyne Continental Motors)

A pilot killed when a helicopter flew into power lines. When a Piasecki helicopter struck high-tension wires near Adelanto, California and crashed, killing all three aboard, the defense had a ready argument: forensic evidence, they claimed, showed that our client’s husband — not the other pilot — was at the controls at the time of the accident. The other pilot’s estate also argued that the city of Los Angeles should have installed warning markers on the lines. We proved that the other pilot, a flight instructor with more than 12,000 hours of experience, had trained his own students never to fly between electrical towers — yet on the day of the accident, he did exactly that. The jury found that he, not our client’s husband, was the pilot in command when the helicopter struck the wires. Our client received a $10 million verdict. (Goble v. Estate of Pike)

Learn about our aviation practice.

Danko Meredith’s attorneys are in courtrooms handling the cases that define this firm’s everyday work — serious injuries and wrongful deaths caused by dangerous products, dangerous roads, corporate negligence, and other parties unwilling to take responsibility. Though they often receive less public attention than a major wildfire or air disaster, we dedicate to these cases the same investigative resources, the same access to leading expert witnesses, and the same willingness to take a case to trial.

A few examples:

A bicyclist killed in a marked crosswalk. When 62-year-old Chris Chandler was struck and killed while walking his bicycle across a state highway, police investigated the death as a possible suicide and blamed Chandler for riding into traffic. We found witnesses who confirmed Chandler was walking his bike, not riding it, and uncovered the state’s own internal records showing the crosswalk had a known visibility hazard the state had declined to fix. A jury agreed, finding Chandler free of any fault and awarding his family $9.5 million — more than ninety times the state’s pre-trial settlement offer. The court of appeal affirmed the verdict, crediting the testimony of our expert in road safety. Not long after, the state installed pedestrian hybrid beacons — known as HAWK signals — at crosswalks along the same stretch of El Camino Real, giving pedestrians a controlled, attention-getting crossing the existing crosswalk had lacked. (Chandler v. State of California)

A toddler’s death from a dangerous product. When two-year-old Jeffrey choked on a candy containing a plant-based gel additive, his father could not dislodge it from his throat. We retained Dr. Henry Heimlich, who testified that not even his famous maneuver would have worked. Laboratory testing and internal company documents revealed the manufacturer knew the candy posed a choking hazard to young children and marketed it to them anyway. A judge awarded Jeffrey’s parents $50 million, calling it exactly the type of case punitive damages were designed for — and the FDA subsequently banned the import of the candy’s key ingredient. (Jing v. Sheng Hsiang Jen, et al.)

A pedestrian burned in a utility explosion. An underground electrical vault exploded beneath a Bay Area sidewalk, throwing a manhole cover and severely burning a woman on her lunch break. Rather than waiting years for a government investigation, our team independently identified former utility employees who helped establish the cause of the explosion within months. The utility settled for $20 million two days after seeing our trial presentation.

A real estate fraud scheme. When a prominent Silicon Valley developer reneged on funding a $750,000 land deal — after secretly planning to buy the property himself — we proved at trial that his limited liability company didn’t shield him from personal liability for the fraud. The result: a $10 million judgment. (Denevi v. Swenson, et al.)

A death caused by a defective, aged tire. When a tire’s tread separated and caused a fatal rollover, the manufacturer claimed the driver had simply left the tire under-inflated. We proved the tire was actually 14 years old and that the manufacturer had known for years that tires become dangerous after six years regardless of mileage — but kept selling aged inventory rather than absorb the loss. The resulting settlement, reached days before trial, prompted an industry-wide shift in how tire manufacturers warn consumers about tire age. (Crane v. Firestone, et al.)

Danko Meredith is often called upon to handle catastrophic injury cases outside California. And when we take on those cases, we’ve obtained significant results — including a $2.2 million judgment for a cyclist who suffered a traumatic brain injury after striking a defectively placed road hazard in Hawaii, and a $5 million settlement for a university researcher injured in a laboratory explosion.

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