If there is one thing that living in a market economy teaches us, it’s that there is no such thing as a complete disaster. I always marvel when someone says– with surprise– that “like a phoenix from the ashes”, they managed to come out of a bad situation and did OK.
Because the phoenix is the ashes.
There are plenty of people who understand this. Lee Kreindler, for instance. He managed to make a living, start an industry, shape international law, and help thousands of people get recompense for their unwelcomed horror.
The phoenix is the ashes.
Lee Kreindler, 78, Air-Crash Lawyer, Dies
By ADAM LIPTAK
Lee S. Kreindler, who is considered the founder of air disaster law, and whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, represented plaintiffs in almost every major aircraft disaster in the last half-century, died yesterday at New York University Hospital in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage, his family announced.
In 1989, The National Law Journal asked lawyers in the aviation field whom they would hire if a family member died in a plane crash. About 20 lawyers and firms were mentioned in all, but the newspaper noted that Mr. Kreindler, “the grandfather of the field,” was at the top of nearly everyone’s list.
“You name them,” Mr. Kreindler said of the big air disaster cases of the last 50 years, “we were in them.”
He played leading roles in the lawsuits after the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and scores of others.
Aviation law is a complex specialty that involves traditional wrongful death and personal injury doctrines, international treaties and difficult jurisdictional questions. The factual issues are almost always equally complex. Discovering the causes of disasters requires knowledge of aeronautical engineering, aircraft and airline operations, weather and, sometimes, airport security.
Mr. Kreindler was adept at boiling a mass of both legal and factual issues down to their essences.
Domestically, he contended with stringent limitations on airline liability and on where damage suits could be filed. His arguments helped persuade courts to ease these limits.
But it was in international law that Mr. Kreindler faced what he called “horrendous” challenges, and he waged a 50-year battle against treaty limitations on recovery in cases arising from international travel.
Under the 1929 Warsaw Convention, obtaining any recovery above a small amount required proof of willful misconduct on the part of the carrier. It also limited the places in which plaintiffs could sue.
“For years,” he wrote in The New York Law Journal in 1999, “willful misconduct was almost impossible to prove, but in the 1980’s and 1990’s, juries, mindful of the awful consequences of their failure to find it, began returning verdicts for the plaintiffs.”
The enormous technical sophistication Mr. Kreindler and his firm developed played a role as well. That sophistication may explain why a relatively small number of law firms undertook air disaster work.
His father, Harry E. Kreindler, was the other Kreindler in the firm’s name. Today, the younger Mr. Kreindler’s son, James P., is also a partner there.
He is also survived by his wife, Ruth, a daughter, Laurie Laster, and seven grandchildren, as well as a sister, Rosamond Koffman.
Lee Kreindler’s father gave him advice on his first air disaster case, arising from the 1952 crash of a National Airlines DC-6 in Elizabeth, N.J., according to the Harvard Law School’s alumni magazine.
Observing his obsessive work on the case, his father said, “No case will ever reward the kind of effort you’re putting into this one.”
Among other things, he went to work in a maintenance shop to educate himself on the plane’s design. He came up with a theory of the failure of one of the four propellers that eventually persuaded a jury to award his client $300,000, then the highest award in an air crash suit.
The younger Mr. Kreindler went on to write a three-volume treatise, “Aviation Accident Law” (Matthew Bender 1971), and frequent articles explaining developments in the area. He was active in trial lawyers’ organizations and served as the chairman of several committees devoted to aviation law.
He graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School and served in the Army in World War II.
Fifty years after the Elizabeth disaster and two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Kreindler took stock of airline and airport security in a New York Law Journal column following precautions instituted in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing, primarily involving barring unaccompanied baggage.
“One must conclude,” he wrote, “that terrorist incidents will be fewer and will be far less likely to succeed than before Lockerbie.”
He was an early advocate of the theory that T.W.A. Flight 800, which exploded and crashed into the ocean off Long Island in 1996, was brought down by mechanical failure. Mr. Kreindler represented the families of more than 50 of those who died in the crash.
He explained the differences between the two disasters to his law school’s alumni magazine.
“The Lockerbie bomb brought Pan Am 103 down because it exploded at 32,000 feet in high winds,” he sad. “It punched a small hole in the fuselage, and that permitted the winds to tear the structure apart. T.W.A. 800 exploded at 13,700 feet in calm weather. It would have taken a huge bomb to bring that plane down, and the larger the bomb, the more difficult it is to smuggle onto a plane.”
In 1996, not long after Congress enacted antiterrorism legislation allowing suits against nations that sponsor terrorism, he sued the government of Libya for its involvement in the Lockerbie crash. Libya recently offered to settle the case and other claims for $2.7 billion. The proposed settlement has been delayed by wrangling over how much responsibility Libya will acknowledge.
Mr. Kreindler and his firm also represented the families of many victims of the 9/11 attacks. He was a critic of the compensation fund created by Congress and of Kenneth R. Feinberg, the fund’s special master.
In an article in The New York Law Journal in January 2002, he cautioned Mr. Feinberg, based on his experiences, about “the rage that disaster victims feel when they think they are not being treated fairly.”
Mr. Kreindler flew a great deal, and it bothered him not at all.
“I’m a very relaxed passenger,” he said. “It’s extremely safe. An accident only happens when there is an extraordinary
coincidence of a number of things going wrong.”
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