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“We’re a husband-and-wife trial team and it’s great!”
“It’s a big di erence from living in my car when I rst started law school,” Rowley says. “But we have planes so we can reach and help more people, not for luxury.”
Rowley who is licensed in multiple states and federal courts, will be helping people in jury trials upcoming months in West Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, New Mexico, Washington state, Colorado and Alaska. TL4J has o ces throughout the country, and Rowley has applications for licensure pending in Colorado, Washington and New Mexico. He has seven more trials set in California for CZR this year.
When Grounded
e Rowleys travel a lot, but when they are at home, they put the work aside and focus on family. If they are not in a courtroom in front of a jury, one can nd them spending time with their children.
e day Attorney at Law Magazine interviewed Rowley, he was dressed comfortably at his expansive Spanish-style house in Ojai, Cali- fornia, which is complete with a mature orchard of citrus and avocado trees and a soccer eld that doubles as a helicopter landing pad. He had been for a long walk with his kids, had exercised and had watched “Into the Spider-Verse” with his 4-year-old, Odan, and talked prin- cesses with his 2-year-old, Greta.
“When we’re not full-time trial lawyers, we’re full-time parents,” he says.
Adding more to Rowley’s plate is his passion to remove the non- economic damages cap in the state of California known as the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act. Passed in 1975, MICRA, he says, was the work of insurance companies and lobbyists who convinced California politicians with “false and fraudulent information” that a $250,000 cap would stop a healthcare crisis resulting from personal- injury lawsuits.
Rowley explains that if a healthcare provider commits egregious act of negligence and injures, maims, scars or kills a patient, the maximum amount of money that that patient or that patient’s family is entitled to for the human losses under the law is $250,000. is is an insu cient amount, he says, for loss of a life, pain, su ering, loss of enjoyment of life and other non-economic damage that a person or one’s family would be entitled to in the state of California.
He cites the 2012 case of So a Blunt, a child who was negligently injured by health care providers in a botched delivery that caused her severe spastic quadriplegia and cerebral palsy. e jury had decided that the non-economic damages for life were worth $11.525 million, not knowing that the verdict would be reduced.
“ is little girl will never be able to walk, to talk, to use the bath- room or to live outside of a wheelchair, and because of this law in Cali- fornia, they’re capped out at $250,000,” he says. “With attorney fees, they’re going to get less than $125,000—for her being trapped inside a body that doesn’t work.”
Rowley compares this case to another he tried in Sioux City, Iowa, in 2018. Carrie DeJongh, a 40-year-old farmer’s wife, Sunday school teacher and mother of four, experienced an agonizing death over an allergic reaction to contrast dye during a routine examination proce- dure. e cure for the reaction, Epinephrine, was an arm’s length away.
“When we came onto the case, the insurance company o ered a million dollars,” he says. “We didn’t take what the insurance company o ered and took it to trial. e jury deliberated for about two hours,
ATTORNEY AT LAW MAGAZINE · LOS ANGELES · VOL. 5 NO. 3 14