CEO, Senior Mass Tort Executive and Senior Data Scientist
James has over 18 years of mass tort experience. He entered the industry as a lead originator for mass tort law firms, and then he migrated to founding a law firm that originated cases and co-counseled these cases with other law firms. He then co-founded a mass tort law firm which processed its own cases.
Although he is not an attorney, James has a strong background in law. For several years he worked as a part-time paralegal for his father, a prominent attorney in Los Angeles. He received a better education from his great uncle, Donald R. Wright, who was Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1970 to 1977. For exceptionally important cases that were being argued in Los Angeles — e.g, People v. Anderson, 6 Cal. 3d 628 — Wright’s secretary would send James the briefs and James would attend the hearing. Afterwards, Wright would review the transcript with James, engaging in Socratic dialog similar to what one sees in the movie The Paper Chase. He would ask questions such as, “Why did the lawyer argue this point and not that point?”
James has a strong background in statistics and data mining. As a graduate student at Harvard University, he took or audited several graduate level classes in statistics. James received a better education by working as a Research Assistant in statistics for Professor Gary R. Orren, a brilliant statistician and methodologist.
James has over 53 years of information technology experience. In 1970, at age 15, he started programming computers, 11 years before the IBM PC was introduced. James was a Software Engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation, the leading minicomputer manufacturer before the IBM PC put these companies out of business. He was a Research Associate in computers and information systems at the Harvard Business School, followed by 12 years of high-level IT consulting for major technology companies (Digital, Lotus Development, and Codex) and major commercial banks (Bank of Boston and Shawmut Bank).
For two years James attended Pitzer College, the Claremont Colleges, studying economics, political philosophy, and demography. From 1977 to 1979, he was enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. At Harvard, in addition to studying statistics, James concentrated in international security and defense policy.