Heatherman, Paul B.

An emerging leader within the plaintiffs’ bar, Lieff Cabraser’s Lexi Hazam represents clients in complex class action and mass torts cases, as well as qui tam actions.  

Lexi represented hemophiliacs worldwide, or their survivors and estates, who contracted HIV and/or Hepatitis C from contaminated blood factor products in America. A confidential settlement was reached in 2009. Lexi played a key role in litigating the case and in negotiating and administering a settlement of the claims of 1,600 clients in 15 countries, utilizing her multilingual skills in working with co-counsel on several continents. The blood factor litigation constitutes one of the only, if not the only, case in which major U.S. pharmaceutical companies entered a settlement with plaintiffs worldwide.

Today, Ms. Hazam represents hip replacement patients in the DePuy hip implant litigation, representing nearly 200 clients. Lexi has spoken at two conferences for plaintiffs’ counsel on the DePuy litigation.  She also represents women who were implanted with defective polypropylene surgical mesh.

Lexi’s class action practice includes representing nursing home patients of Evergreen and Kindred facilities who received deficient care due to understaffing.  A settlement in the Evergreen case requires adequate staffing for several years, without any release of claims by the class. Combined with related cases against other leading nursing home facilities, the litigation is helping to create a new standard for the staffing of nursing homes in California. 

Lexi’s qui tam cases include the $21.7 million settlement of litigation against Avaya, Lucent Technologies, and AT&T for charging governmental agencies for the lease of communications systems they no longer possessed and/or were no longer maintained by defendants.  She is currently working on whistleblower cases against the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and State Street Corporation for fraudulent foreign exchange services on behalf of California public pension funds. 

Lexi’s leadership outside the courtroom is evidenced by her service on the Court Funding and Litigation Challenge Group Task Force of the Bar Association of San Francisco and the Diversity Committee of the San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association.