Jim Leventhal started getting lessons about relationships at an early age.
By the time he was 10 years old, Leventhal was recruited by his parents, Harold and Freda, to work at the family-owned young men’s clothing store, The Squire Shop.
“I started when my father violated the child labor laws,” Leventhal laughs, “just making boxes for gifts for Chanukah and Christmas.”
“When I was old enough and tall enough to sell, my dad put me on the floor and I became a salesman. I was probably 12 when I started selling clothes.”
So as a young man selling suits to people his age — some of them readying for a Bar Mitzvah, Leventhal learned something that holds true today.
“In order to connect with somebody, you actually genuinely need to be interested in people,” Leventhal says. “That falls right through to what I do today. When somebody came into The Squire Shop, I would want to know who they are and what they’re about, and also have some fun.
“It’s all just really liking people and establishing a bond and a trust.”
That has served Leventhal well in his lengthy career as one of the nation’s premier medical malpractice attorneys.
“Part and parcel of being a trial lawyer is picking a jury, and it’s also getting people to trust you enough to hire you,” Leventhal says. “In order to do that, you actually have to look people in the eye and you have to be candid with them. You have to explain and take time with them. I’ve always done that.”
Leventhal, 75, started his legal career as a public defender, followed by a job with the Colorado Trial Lawyers Assn. He then found his way into the personal injury legal lane.
I thought the medicine was fascinating,” says Leventhal. “I saw that there was no one my age that was really doing medical malpractice work, and so I started to focus on it.
“When I initially opened my office, the only person calling me was my mother wanting to know if anybody called.
“This guy called me and said that he’d been referred to me by some people he played golf with, and he asked if I had any openings for an appointment. I said, ‘Yes, I have openings from now on (laughs).’ He said his wife went into the hospital for a hysterectomy, and came out without her right leg.
“He asked, ‘Are you interested in the case?’ I said, ‘I am, of course.’ We went through the details of the case and he said, ‘I’m considering two other lawyers.’ They were two of the top trial lawyers in the state of Colorado.
“He looked at me and asked, ‘Why should I hire you?’ I said, ‘You shouldn’t. If I were you, I wouldn’t hire me.’ He asked, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘These other guys are experienced. You’ll feel much more comfortable with them. They’re great lawyers.’
“I said, ‘What I can offer you is that this case will mean more to me than it means to them.’
“Three weeks later, he called me and said, ‘I’m gonna hire you.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you were the one who was honest with me.’
“I built that practice from that, to now, which is 50 people, 14 lawyers and a national practice that we don’t advertise except in the Intermountain Jewish News.”
A visit with Leventhal in his Glendale office was the day after his 50th anniversary since his legal career began. There have been more than a few highlights.
In 1993 Leventhal was hired by a woman in her 80s after a hip replacement.
“When you do a hip replacement,” Leventhal says, “you have to bore out the hip socket and replace the top of the femur with metal. Sometimes you have empty spaces and you have to fill that in. Some doctors use donor bone from cadavers.
“After her surgery, she read a lot about AIDS and knew that she’d had some transfusions. So she got tested and she tested positive for AIDS. When the CDC did an investigation, they determined it was not from a transfusion, it was from a donor bone from man who’d been murdered in Virginia.
“So I got a call on the case. The potential defendants included a tissue bank in Virginia.
As a result of that case, the testing before accepting a donor became equal to that which the blood banks were doing.
“That was a case no one would touch.”
Another landmark case Leventhal is proud of was for a 15 year-old who had had heart surgery at Children’s Hospital, who came out of the procedure with a significant brain injury.
“It was the most complicated malpractice case I had done up to that point,” says Leventhal. “Three separate cardiovascular surgeons told me there was no case. I didn’t believe them. I don’t know any lawyer that would’ve done what I did.
“So I went to a fourth one. He told me the case I had was right, but for the wrong reason. I filed the case and then hired a new expert from Boston Children’s Hospital. When I got done with the case, Children’s hired my expert to redo their program and make it safe for those kids. While my case was going on, they stopped allowing elective heart surgeries at Children’s until my case was over.”
Cases of that sort define Leventhal’s drive.
“I tell people this all the time, if you decide to practice law and make money, you may do OK. If you decide to practice law to help people, you have the opportunity to be successful behind your wildest dreams. And at the end of the day, you’ll be able to sleep right.
“If you look at the cases I’ve done, the cases that have helped people locally, sometimes just a family or so, or the national cases that have made an impact on medicine throughout the US — they’ve always been cases that no one else would take on. That’s something I’m really proud of.”
Leventhal is also proud of his rather extensive medical knowledge base.
“I did a brain surgery case a couple of years ago and I spent eight weeks immersed in the medicine of it — not just the brain surgery. It was fourth ventricle surgery, which is really difficult. Also, the anesthesia component, the neuromonitoring component, the hospital component, were all important.
“When I got done with the case we had a great settlement and made a huge difference in this guy’s life. But I had to learn everything from scratch even though I had done a fourth ventricle tumor removal case before. It was certainly an important thing to get that much knowledge about something like that, which is fun.”
All, from a man who might have become a clothier. Even after becoming a licensed attorney, Harold Leventhal would call his son, requesting he put in a few shifts at the store over the weekend.
“I’d say, ‘Dad, I’ve got a trial coming up I have to get ready for.’
“He’d say, ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me, Jim. You need to work Saturday. We have a busy day.’
“So I’d go to the store to work.”
How long did Leventhal acquiesce to his father?
“Until I was 40, when the store closed in 1998,” he says.
The habits from his youth — and indeed, until he reached his fifth decade — have never dimmed.
Longtime tricks of the haberdashery trade don’t go away, either. It takes Leventhal a mere moment to size up a new acquaintance.
“You’re a 42 long, right?” Leventhal declares, while not really asking.
His measurement was spot on, much like knowledge of anesthesia and neuromonitoring that one doesn’t readily find in a law school book.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
