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The firm avoids burnout by giving its lawyers generous vacation time to recover from the frenetic pace. It's not uncommon for partners to take several months off.

Beyond that, he is an aggressive lawyer described as a tough negotiator and capable of controlled volatility that intimidates the opposition. "He likes to not only get the meat off the bone, but to go in and get the marrow as well," said former associate Walker.


The leading rainmaker

Campbell, hired as Krupnick's first associate, quickly became the firm's leading rainmaker and carries the heaviest caseload. He gets a great deal of referral business from other South Florida lawyers who are seeking a litigator, and he expands his range of contacts as a member of the Florida Bar's governing board and president-elect of the Broward County Bar Association.

"Skip gets so many cases we almost annually have to redistribute cases among us," partner Kevin Malone says, "because everybody wants to hire Skip."

Campbell's style varies markedly from Krupnick's and its hallmark is congeniality with everyone, including courtroom opponents, and that plays well with jurors.

"Skip Campbell's approach to the world is as Everyman," says John Gillespie, a former associate who left to form his own firm and now is name partner at Bunnell, Woulfe, Keller & Gillespie in Fort Lauderdale. "He's the consummate common man. That's really his appeal."

One of his clients, Michael Mancusi, rented a car from Alamo Rent A Car in 1986 and was arrested on car theft charges two weeks after the vehicle had been returned following a complaint to police by Alamo. The state eventually dropped the charges, but Mancusi sued Alamo for malicious prosecution.

During the trial, Mancusi recalls, a defense witness testified for three hours that entries made on the Alamo computer can't be erased. But after studying computer printouts, Campbell saw a notation indicating that was not true. Under questioning, the witness quickly conceded the point.

"He nullified three hours of testimony in 30 seconds " Mancusi says. "He's like an athlete in the courtroom. He has a real natural sense for it."

Campbell's caseload is so heavy he has five secretaries to keep up with it. They hand him an index card each morning with back to back appointments listed for every half hour of the day.

"We call him the white tornado," says Linda Goepfert of her fair-haired boss. "He's in and out and goes every minute. His mind is like a steel trap. He has terrific recall. His caseload is 300 files, and he has 90 percent recall of those cases."

Litigation expert

While Campbell's strength is the ability to obtain significant damage awards, Malone excels in proving defendant liability. Often the two will work together on a file and utilize each other's strengths. Malone's reputation also rests on his intelligence.

"Kevin Malone is just one of the smartest people you'll ever meet," Gillespie says.

Malone is the firm's expert in complex litigation, so he was the obvious choice to take the lead on the Benlate® litigation. "He never let the pressure get to him," partner Lisa McNelis says.

"There was so much invested in that case, if something had happened, if something went wrong, the whole firm had invested their salaries in it," McNelis says. "Kevin never lost his positive attitude and never let anyone know the pressures he was under."

Malone pursued the cases with an intensity that partners and associates say is typical of the firm.

"On my third day of work, I flew to Pierson, Fla., and joined Malone with Benlate® clients," McKee remembers. "We didn't stop for lunch. At 11:30 at night, he said, ‘Pull over at this Stop & Go, you're buying me a can of spaghetti and making me dinner.' "That was the end of my work day."

While widely reputed to be an aggressive, demanding firm, Krupnick Campbell receives little but praise from competitors and opposing counsel.

"They are a group of excellent lawyers and they do a very fine job," said competitor Gary Cohen, a partner in the Fort Lauderdale office of Grossman & Roth. "I've never heard a bad word."

West Palm Beach attorney Eric Peterson, who has opposed the firm in a number of cases, says Krupnick Campbell's lawyers fight hard, but fair.

"I look forward to a good, clean, fair fight when we are up against those guys," Peterson says. "I emphasize good, clean and fair. There are some lawyers who can tell you something over the phone and you can bank on it, and that's the case with the Krupnick firm. They have an excellent reputation for honesty and integrity."

Three weeks ago, partner Joseph Slama sued one of Peterson's clients, Stecklow Engineering, to recover damages following electrical problems at Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale. Peterson said he showed Slama evidence that his client wasn't involved with installation of the electrical system at the mall. Slama immediately agreed to drop Stecklow from the case, Peterson says, thereby saving the company legal expenses and aggravation.

Generosity to staff

The firm is just as scrupulous in how it treats its lawyers and staff.

Former associate Walker recalls that his second child had just been born when he decided to leave to start his own firm. Krupnick, he said, helped make the transition possible.

"I took a sizable number of clients with me, he said. "Jon Krupnick was very helpful and  encouraging."

The firm cements loyalty with generosity. The staff receives bonuses for every settlement or verdict of $1 million or more. "Everything they do is top drawer," Goepfert says. "They don't skimp on the staff."

The firm earns loyalty through its small gestures as well.

"After 10 years, you become a sacred cow," Goepfert says. "It started out as a joke when Krupnick said there weren't any sacred cows. They had a party and gave us a scales of justice necklace with little cows hanging on the bags. We have a lot of sacred cows here."

Partner Campbell says the firm's partners haven't forgotten their roots. "One of the cementing forces that keeps this firm together is that no one has changed their morality, which is to try to treat people they way you ought to be treated yourself and not to think you are better than anyone else," says Campbell, who lived on food stamps for two years while in law school. "Whenever we hire anybody, we hire them on as a family member. We feel strongly that you have to give back to the office personnel. "

The firm avoids burnout by giving its lawyers generous vacation time to recover from the frenetic pace. It's not uncommon for partners to take several months off. Krupnick, for example, took a four month sabbatical in the South Pacific three years ago.

"It's a good balance," Malone says. "On the one hand, everyone works very hard here. On the other hand, there is more to life than work. Lawyers can take off whenever they want. I usually take off for two months a year. Because everyone naturally is a very hard worker, there is never a question of 'he's not pulling his load.' "

The firm never worked harder than during the 2 1/2  years it represented its grower clients in their effort to recover damages from DuPont. Partner Thomas Buser and associate McKee worked full-time with Malone on the Benlate® cases.

When the firm first started taking Benlate® cases, DuPont had recalled the fungicide and paid at least $510 million in damage claims to growers. Krupnick Campbell was competing with 40 law firms to get the cases. Then, in November of 1992, DuPont announced it was stopping all payments because its research had proved that Benlate® had not caused damage. With the easy money gone, other firms dropped out of the running, leaving potential plaintiffs without counsel.

"Normally, I wouldn't take 200 cases," Malone says. "But once I started taking the big cases, I couldn't leave the small cases adrift because nobody wanted them. If you're going to do the base research you might as well have a lot of cases."

The firm realized how difficult the Benlate® litigation would be in 1993 when Atlanta plaintiff's lawyer Neil Pope tried the first Benlate® case in Georgia and settled, fearing a loss, while the jury was deliberating. The jury foreman later told the Fulton County Daily Report that the jury was on the verge of exonerating Dupont when the settlement was announced.

That's when the partners at Krupnick Campbell began discussing how many cases they could lose before giving up the battle.

But luck was on the firm's side. When Broward Circuit Judge W. Herbert Moriarty  asked both sides to pick the case they were most likely to win, DuPont's attorneys and Malone both selected the same one. It was the first to go to trial.

Malone believed the case was as near as he was going to get to a sure thing. A DuPont employee had told his orchid grower client in Bradenton that his crop damage was caused by Benlate® and the company paid him $200,000 as an advance on a settlement. The company later decided not to go through with the settlement after it completed its own tests on Benlate®.

The second case for trial was picked out of a hat by a court reporter. "Typical of my good luck, she drew the name of my second favorite case," Malone says. "I'm the most extraordinarily lucky individual in the world - $200 million litigation and the right name comes out for me. That's the way my legal career has gone."

The firm didn't press its luck, turning instead to painstaking preparation for trial. Thousands of DuPont documents had been made available to plaintiffs' lawyers across the country. Most plaintiffs' firms hired other firms to examine the documents, but a handful, including Krupnick Campbell, did that work for themselves, an effort that associate McKee says consumed "thousands" of hours.

By so doing, the firm was able to unearth those most damaging to DuPont and Malone relied on the internal memos to convince jurors that the company knew it had a flawed product. A 1989 memo, for example, noted "horror stories" regarding quality control at one Benlate® plant. "It's not a matter of having a smoking gun. It's a matter of having a loaded gun," says McKee of the work to get ammunition to use against DuPont.

Jurors in the first trial were strongly persuaded by those memos, according to juror Evelyn Feldman. "We did rely more on the written word in the memos," she says. The effort paid off. Malone won a $3 million verdict in the first trial in 1993, and later that year a $668,000 verdict in the second trial.

Using those two victories as leverage with DuPont, Malone was able to negotiate sizable settlements for the remaining cases and says most of his clients got the compensation they desired. About ten weak cases settled for nominal amounts, he says. "Not only is he a good litigator, he's a good strategist," says Miami lawyer Louis Vendittelli, who also has represented growers in suits against DuPont. "He understood the motivations behind DuPont and the reasons they might settle with him and he used that to his advantage.

"DuPont at that time needed some good press and needed to show their investment bankers that it could handle all of these cases," he says. "By getting settlements at those levels, they were able to allay the investors' concerns."

Once the Benlate® cases were settled, the firm's lawyers had some adjustments to make.

"After Benlate® was over, we had to acclimate to the real world," Slama says. "It was nice to stay home a few weekends...

For us, that was almost like a vacation."



Story by JANICE HELLER * Photos by MELANIE BELL