January 19, 2018
The Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll attorney is usually out-resourced and out-manned, but that hasn’t stopped him from using the law to win high-stakes, multi-million dollar cases brought against some of the world’s largest companies.
When Ted Leopold started his career after college as a high school teacher at Coral Gables High in Miami, he didn’t foresee that he would become one of the country’s most prominent plaintiffs attorneys, winning millions of dollars from huge corporations.
But while working as a teacher in the 1980s, Leopold, who is now a South Florida-based partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, realized he wanted to do important work that would make a difference in people’s lives. And he recognized that the law could be a vehicle to do just that. So with financial support from his wife, he went off to law school.
“It was an opportunity to do work that would be challenging. I wanted to do work that would be important. I wanted to have an opportunity to make a difference and help people,” Leopold said. “What I’ve come to appreciate even more is the difference litigation can have on changing conduct, actions, corporate misconduct, things of that sort. I’m still a strong believer in that.”
That belief has paid off. This month, Leopold was appointed interim co-lead class counsel in a class action water contamination lawsuit against global chemical producer DuPont and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Chemours Co. FC LLC. He also leads the Pulse Nightclub shooting plaintiff team in a case filed on behalf of more than 90 survivors and victims’ families of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
Among his sizeable list of big wins is one of the first and most important cases relating to managed care, Chipps v. Humana, which is still referred to in the industry today, nearly 20 years later. In 2010, he obtained a $131 million jury verdict against Ford Motor Co.—the ninth-largest verdict against an automobile company in U.S. history. More recently he successfully represented a client against Japanese company and air bag maker, Takata.