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They’ve pleased the court.
A Long Island law firm that changed the world using out-of-the-box thinking on everything from smoking to cars to beer at baseball games is celebrating centenarian status this year.
“Everything that you have grown up with and have taken for granted is because of what’s happened in this firm over the last 100 years,” New York State Supreme Court Justice Christopher McGrath told The Post of firm Sullivan-Papain, which has recovered north of $2 billion in settlements in the past decade alone.
The judge cut his teeth with the Garden City-based practice as a 23-year-old under the tutelage of its late 5’2″ skinny founder, Harry Lipsig, who was a giant in the legal world 50-something years ago.
“He was just different. He’s a genius — and yet, we’ll call him a little quirky at the same time,” McGrath said.
“One time, my job was to meet him at his apartment at seven in the morning. The train got me in late at 7:05, and he said, ‘Good afternoon.’ “
Lipsig’s high standards weren’t without reason.
He used a mix of sheer brilliance and common sense to change how the world operated; perhaps most notably, starting with how stadiums sold beer 80 years ago, after a man at a New York Giants baseball game got belted in the head with a glass bottle at the old Polo Grounds.
“The Polo Grounds was saying it wasn’t their fault. … ‘We can’t put a police officer in every other seat. We can’t have everybody stop anybody from throwing something down,’ ” recalled senior partner Bob Sullivan.
During the three-day trial, Lipsig, who passed away in 1989 at age 89, brought a mysterious handheld paper bag into court with him each day and left it sealed on the table.
“When he got to summation, he pulled out a paper cup and he said, ‘This is how you stop it.’ … That’s how that came to be in stadiums all across the country,” Sullivan said.
On a case-by-case basis
The novel way of thinking that Lipsig was known for — he once won a shark-bite case by proving the victim’s hotel wasn’t dumping its garbage far enough at sea and drew in the predators — has been passed down generation to generation.
New York state recruited Sullivan-Papain in its lawsuit against smoking companies in the late 1990s, which yielded an end to cigarette ads and $25 billion in recovery locally.
“The genius was that we didn’t represent the smokers, we represented the nonsmokers,” Sullivan said.
“Your taxes, what you pay for Medicare, Medicaid, for all these people who got sick and were dying of cancer, went through the roof. That was the key point.”
Ironically, most of the firm’s team on the case was hooked on nicotine.
“Every hour, we would take a 10-minute break so the lawyers could go out and smoke,” said partner Nicholas Papain, a lawyer who led to changes in how cars are built.
He was involved in several cases of people who got into accidents by unintentionally hitting the gas rather than the brake when first getting into their cars. Ultimately, the high-volume litigation led to automakers keeping gearshifts locked unless a driver’s foot was on the brake.
The firm has also branched out into medical malpractice and represented the FDNY for four decades, with partner Eleni Coffinas saying cancer patients often find emotional strength in court victories.
Sullivan-Papain has done an estimated $40 million in pro bono work for the families of first responders on 9/11, too.
“I think it speaks to that firm culture, philosophy, that is a big reason why it has been around for 100 years,” said managing partner TJ McManus, who added that it is common for new workers to hear of Lipsig’s legend during their first week on the job.
“I think he set certain parameters and a legacy that is followed all the way through to today.”
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