Robert Wilkinson, Dogan & Wilkinson, PLLC, Pascagoula, MS

A Lawyer Who Defends Business, Dislikes Class Actions, and Doesn’t Settle

By Sara Pentz

Robert Wilkinson is an unusual lawyer because as he openly states, “I am adamantly opposed to class actions.” About his Mississippi-based law firm, Dogan & Wilkinson, PLLC, he affirms this basic premise, “Our job is to protect businesses and corporations that are being unfairly accused in various lawsuits. I am most proud of what we have accomplished for one of our clients that is involved in the asbestos litigation.”

Founded in l995, Dogan & Wilkinson, PLLC, primarily focuses on mass tort litigation and municipal liability issues. In the mass tort department, the firm represents three defendants nationally in asbestos litigation. They are currently actively involved in litigation in 26 states handling in excess of 100,000 cases.

The law firm has participated in more asbestos trials than any other defense firm in this country. Because of the quality of the products that his client sold and the tremendous abilities of the other attorneys and staff in his office, he has not ever lost an asbestos trial.

Practically, and philosophically, Wilkinson believes that the majority of the clients that the firm represents know they did nothing wrong––and they will not settle out of court until their name has been cleared and the truth is told. He fights to clear his clients of false accusations. He fights for the integrity of his clients. For Robert Wilkinson, there is nothing more gratifying than to tell a client, after investigating the case, that they are not liable and then proving that through the course of the litigation.

Wilkinson reflects a strong sense of pride and confidence in his work protecting business against frivolous legal action by unethical lawyers and citizens who have no valid claim. He has successfully defended and gone to trial on behalf of clients in the States of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas (approximately 40 times), California, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York.

It is also clear that Wilkinson is opposed to the use of force, which the government has made possible by legitimizing class action lawsuits. He is quite clear on this subject because he has seen how this issue has corrupted the legal profession.

Class members often receive little or no benefit from class actions. Examples cited for this include large fees for the attorneys, while leaving class members with coupons or other awards of little or no value; unjustified awards are made to certain plaintiffs at the expense of other class members; and confusing notices are published that prevent class members from being able to fully understand and effectively exercise their rights.

Wilkinson is most proud of his law firm not only for the work that firm lawyers do, but because of the clients they represent. In addition he is exceptionally pleased by the way that firm members rebounded from having the office totally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Dogan & Wilkinson currently has twelve attorneys in Pascagoula with additional offices in Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana and Houston, Texas. All the litigation is handled and run through the Pascagoula, Mississippi office with a staff of approximately fifty employees.

The history of this law firm dates back to 1994 when Wilkinson decided to withdraw as a partner in another law firm in Pascagoula and start his own. At that time that there was only Wilkinson and three employees (one secretary, one bookkeeper and one paralegal). In 1995, Larry Smith joined as a partner and since that time the firm has grown to its current position with a national reputation.

Considering Pascagoula is a very small town (approximate population 30,000), it is unusual, to say the least, for a firm in this small town to be operating nationally.

Writer Sara Pentz interviewed Wilkinson recently.

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SP: Why did you choose to be in the legal profession? What was it about law that intrigued you?

RW: I do not know exactly why I decided to join the legal profession but can tell you that I never had any thoughts of doing anything other than being a lawyer. My mother tells me that since age eight I had told her that I was going to be a lawyer but I, of course, do not have any memory of that.

SP: However, you built a rather successful law practice, right?

RW: My firm started in 1994 with a secretary, two paralegals and me. Since that time, we have grown to our current size, which includes fourteen lawyers and a staff of over fifty. We are the largest law firm in Jackson County and probably the third largest on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We have done this in just over ten years.

Since our initial involvement in the asbestos litigation, which we are still heavily involved in today, we have been retained to represent clients in other type of mass litigation and toxic tort litigation. Recently, a multi district litigation case was set up in Texas for all silica cases filed in the United States. Five attorneys were selected to act as liaison counsel on behalf of hundreds of defendants that had been brought into the litigation. We were very pleased that our firm was one of five firms selected to act as liaison counsel for all defendants in all silica cases in this country.

SP: Take us back to your first memory of the legal profession?

RW: When I was approximately ten years old, my father was in the real estate business and the purchaser of a home filed a suit against him. The allegations were that there were certain things wrong with the home that he failed to disclose. I sat through a week long trial with him and believe that was the defining moment when I knew I wanted to defend businesses. It also was unjust that he had to incur those costs in defending a merit less lawsuit. As it turned out, even if the home had been defective there was no way that he could have determined this because of the type of alleged damage. Further, his experts easily proved that in reality there was nothing wrong with the house.

SP: Why did you choose to defend businesses? What motivated you to do so?

RW: The reason that I am involved defending business is something that I cannot put to an exact reason other than that is what I am supposed to do. The semester before I graduated from law school I was offered and accepted a job at a plaintiff’s firm. Instead of being excited about this I knew something was wrong. Within one week I contacted them and advised them that was not the direction I wanted to go. As luck would have it, I received an offer from a defense firm on the Coast several days later and have been involved in defense work ever since.

SP: What were you thinking when you decided law was for you? What attracted you to this profession? What is it that you most love about being a lawyer?

RW: You will hear a lot of attorneys say that they joined the profession to help "the little man" and, I guess that is some of that in me, but our job is to protect businesses and corporations that are being unfairly accused in various lawsuits.

I am most proud of what we have accomplished for one of our clients that are involved in the asbestos litigation. Prior to our retention this particular small family owned corporation had over 100,000 cases pending against them and settlements in the cases had already depleted 50% of the coverage.

Since our involvement with this client we have not paid any monies whatsoever in settlement and have had the number of cases pending against the client reduced by approximately 50%. Again, in the first four years of the litigation the company had paid almost 50% of its insurance coverage in settlements. In the last eleven years, the company has paid nothing.

SP: How did you get to the point where you are handling in excess of 100,000 cases in 26 states?

RW: In 1991 I was involved in a trial in Jackson County, Mississippi, involving thousands of plaintiffs alleging asbestos exposure from Ingalls Shipyard. This was the start of plaintiffs filing suit against over one hundred defendants. Discovery dragged on and the case went to trial approximately two years after it was filed. At the time of trial, only fourteen defendants remained as the rest had settled. The risk of an adverse verdict by some many plaintiffs was overwhelming and, in my opinion, unfair. At that time, this was one of the largest asbestos trials to ever go to court in this country with the case effecting approximately 6,000 individuals.

I represented a manufacturer and two distributors of that manufacturer’s product at trial. After a four and a half month trial (held at our local fairgrounds because of the number of participants), the jury deliberated for ten days. At that time, there were only nine defendants left. Four defendants received a defense verdict including the three that I represented. That was my first experience in mass tort cases.

In 1995 I was asked to go to Charleston, West Virginia, for an asbestos trial representing the same client. At that time, that trial was the largest asbestos trial in the history of this country with the verdict affecting approximately 9,000 plaintiffs. As with the Mississippi case, there were numerous defendants in the trial. I was very lucky at that trial. I represented one of five defendants in the litigation that sold similar products. At the conclusion of trial, three of those defendants had chosen to settle. Two, including my client, went all the way to the verdict on the case. The jury returned a verdict in favor of my client, finding that our products were not defective, while finding the other similar manufacturer’s product defective. That was truly a significant event in my legal career and started my work nationally.

Several months after the conclusion of the West Virginia trial I was contacted by one of the manufacturers that had settled the case. This company is a family owned business and was involved in approximately 100,000 cases. They had become painfully aware that, at the rate they were going, they would run out of all insurance proceeds long before the last case was over. This was a family owned business that had been in existence for over fifty years. Through the efforts of their insurance carrier, we became involved in representing this company. Since that day, we have resolved approximately 50,000 cases on behalf of this client. We have only settled five cases of the ones that we have disposed of. The total amount of settlements of these cases is less than thirty percent of what was paid in settlements during the first two years this company was involved in the litigation. We have been representing this company for over ten years.

SP: Why are you so interested in defending class actions?

RW: I am adamantly opposed to class actions. Most of the cases that we have been involved in were not officially called class actions but they were virtually the same thing. I refer to this litigation tactic as the McDonald’s of the legal industry. What the plaintiff’s attorneys would do is sign up thousands of clients (most of whom were not sick) and sue large numbers of defendants. These attorneys would get a little bit of money from a lot of defendants and, at the end they would be extremely wealthy. If they had one thousand clients that received $10,000.00 none of the clients feel that they have received a lot of money but yet the attorneys are receiving $4,000.00 from each one of these clients and those attorneys have done quite well.

The system was designed to force defendants into settlement because of the number of plaintiffs. This system forced many companies to settle cases that they neither had liability in nor were the plaintiff’s sick. I am pleased to say that, for the most part, the laws have changed in the states that we are involved in and this does not occur anymore. Both Mississippi and Texas have made tremendous strides in basically banning this practice.

SP: What specifically sets your law firm apart from others?

RW: I believe there is one characteristic of this law firm that sets us apart from the majority of the other defense firms in this state and in the country. In litigation, it is too common of a practice for the defendant to settle at the courthouse steps. The majority of the clients that this firm represents have the philosophy that they did not do anything wrong and they will not settle. There have been too many instances of companies spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in defense only to have their attorneys tell them that they should settle, as the case gets ready for trial. We do not do that. In fact, we do not get involved in the settlement process as trial dates approach. Our willingness, if not desire, to go into the courtroom and actually take a case to jury verdict set us apart from many of the other firms.

SP: You speak with pride about your philosophy of not ‘settling’ out of court. Why is this so important to you?

RW: I believe that we earned this reputation and the ability to go to trial through our many years of representing municipalities in South Mississippi. Many of these cases involved allegations against a police officer. Since the cases are making allegations about the integrity of a police officer, the thought of settlement has never arisen. When we get one of these cases in, we know it is going to trial and we act that way from day one. We have been to numerous trials representing cities and police departments on the Coast and they agree with our approach that settlement is not an issue.

SP: What is it about defending business that makes you so passionate about it?

RW: There is no other occupation that I would rather be involved in than being a lawyer defending businesses and municipalities. In many situations the client is extremely stressed out over the filing of the lawsuit and fearful about the consequences. There are so many stories and rumors out there about how plaintiffs with bogus cases receive millions of dollars. There is nothing more gratifying than to tell a client, after investigating the case, that they are not liable and then proving that through the course of the litigation.

SP: Why do lawyers, in general, have such a bad reputation?

RW: I regret that the legal community is not held in high esteem with the general public. It is my opinion that the worse thing that ever occurred in the legal profession was the Supreme Court’s opinion allowing lawyers to advertise. Most of the advertisements that I see on television or hear on the radio embarrass me. If someone is injured and needs a lawyer then they will find the right person without being solicited by an avalanche of advertisements.

SP: But don’t all businesses have the ‘right’ to advertise their professional services or business products?

RW: It seems to me that the advertisements have the effect of causing more lawsuits to be filed than merits dictate. Unfortunately, there is little that the bar association can do to curb the advertisement as our courts have said that the attorneys have a right to do so. I just simply wish they would watch their ads at some point and realize how sleazy most of them are. One of the duties of a lawyer is to educate the public. I do not believe that the public needs any further education about their rights if they are injured because of the negligence of someone else.

SP: I know that your business was tragically a victim of Hurricane Katrina. What happened?

RE: I am most proud of what this firm has accomplished since its beginning and how we survived Hurricane Katrina.

I arrived at our office on the afternoon of August 29, 2005, to find the office destroyed. We had approximately six feet of water go through the entire office and rip out walls, knock down doors and destroy every piece of furniture. We lost approximately four million pieces of paper on that day. Although we had backed up all of the information onto disks and put them in safe places, we still were basically shut down from doing business.

As I have heard one person say, in four hours on August 29, 2005, our business went from being like the Jetsons to the Flintstones. We lost every phone, computer, brief case, book, piece of furniture and everything that I had accumulated in over twenty years of practicing law. It was obvious that it would be some period of time before we could be practicing law in that building. We also had the issue of fifty plus employees who had to continue to receive a paycheck. To compound the problem, most of the individuals in our office either had severe damage to their homes or had them totally destroyed. With very limited insurance coverage for our damage we were in quite a spot.

What transpired over the next thirty days was really remarkable. The staff and attorneys in this office were phenomenal. Within one week, a group of five lawyers and five paralegals left Pascagoula, some with absolutely no clothes, and traveled to our Houston, Texas office. We have two attorneys in Houston working out of a relatively small office.

These attorneys and paralegals worked out of Houston for the next forty-five days ensuring that our client’s interests were protected and our practice continued on. Another group of five attorneys and fifteen paralegals left Pascagoula and went to Jackson, Mississippi, to work out of our office in Jackson. Again, they allowed us to continue to practice law, protect our clients’ interests and make sure that our clients knew that we were back in business.

The efforts of these individuals at this office were absolutely amazing. Those that were unable to travel out of town remained in Pascagoula and worked out of two paralegals homes that were not damaged.

To top it all off, most everyone came back on the weekends and assisted with one of the nastiest jobs that I have ever done, that is, cleaning out the debris from our old office. We, of course, had contractors assisting us but we were so concerned with regard to the costs that everyone pitched in. Again, I cannot say enough about the individuals in this office that allowed us to continue to function.

There has been a great deal said in Mississippi with regard to insurance companies following Katrina. To say the least, there have been many negative reports about the insurance industry. I must make a comment with regard to my clients following Hurricane Katrina.

All of my clients attempted, in very ingenious ways, to contact us after the storm to make sure that we were okay and to do what they could to assist. I had several clients who looked at some of the cancelled checks that they had paid us in the past to find out information on our bank so they could wire transfer money to us even though we did not ask for it. Other clients offered their offices for us to relocate to while we tried to recover from the hurricane. In short, they offered to do whatever was necessary to help us through this disaster. They were phenomenal. I will never be able to fully thank St. Paul Travelers Insurance Company, Tyco, Crane Co., and others for what they did for us after the storm. Again, we did not ask, but they simply came to the rescue.

SP: On a completely different subject, I know that you are passionate about cars––as a hobby; and that you were just beginning a car wash business when you were devastated by Katrina. What happened?

RW: Getting into the carwash was somewhat natural for me. I have always loved automobiles and it is a running joke that I am going to wash the paint off the ones I own.

Expansion plans were certainly on the horizon for us and preliminary sites had been approved prior to Hurricane Katrina. However, like the rest of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina put a delay on our expansion plans. Since two of my three partners had their homes destroyed during the hurricane we really could not focus on building additional carwashes until they had a place to live.

SP: So you are an entrepreneur, a creator of business, as well as a defender of business?

RW: I got together with three other individuals who were involved in other businesses and we started the first carwash in Pascagoula. That carwash has been successful since its start and continues to be the most active carwash in this town.

(Since Katrina) We have now decided to open a second carwash and have just broken ground for a new carwash in Moss Point, Mississippi. We are also looking for property to open a third carwash once the one in Moss Point is constructed. I would like to say that a self-serve carwash can run without any assistance but that is simply not the case. However, thanks to the tireless efforts of my partners, we have been able to make the first carwash a success and planned on building as many as the market will bear. So far, no one has sued us!

SP: With your reputation for defending business against frivolous lawsuits, I’m sure that would be a risky affair for anyone who knows you and your reputation. Thank you for taking the time to tell Mississippi Capitalist your story.

California-based journalist Sara Pentz has written for national and regional magazines and been the Editor of several publications. She has been a TV news reporter/anchor, radio show host and currently writes optimized copy, articles and press releases for website clients.

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