Howard A. Kapp
	Law Offices of Howard A. Kapp Los Angeles, California   Tel: (213) 927-8000 e-mail: hkapp@kapplaw.com website: www.kapplaw.com
		Business disputes Substantial personal injury & death cases Civil Appeals		Medical malpractice Legal malpractice Insurance coverage & “bad faith”

Howard A. Kapp was born and raised in Los Angeles. After graduating with honors from El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, he attended UCLA where he graduated early with a bachelor's degree in Political Science in December of 1974. He then attended Loyola Law School, located near Downtown Los Angeles, again graduating early in December of 1978. He was on Deans' List for 3 years at Loyola Law School. He passed the State Bar exam on his first attempt and was admitted (licensed) as an attorney by the California Supreme Court on May 31, 1979. He has subsequently been admitted to practice to a number of other courts, including the United States Supreme Court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

During his last two years at law school and up until he was licensed as an attorney, Mr. Kapp worked full time as a law clerk for several "insurance defense" firms, gaining valuable experience in legal practice. These firms specialized in personal injury defense, insurance coverage and bad faith defense, products liability, aviation liability and related matters. He continued working for the same law firm after he took and passed the State Bar exam. He continued to work "on the defense side" until November 1981.

In November 1981, Mr. Kapp decided to change to "other side" and represent accident and insurance victims (plaintiffs). He began as a litigation associate with the law firm then known as Moray & Moray in Los Angeles. In his first jury trial, he obtained the third largest verdict in the Norwalk courthouse in 1982, shocking observers with a $225,000 jury verdict for a woman claiming headaches as the result of a defect in her apartment. This was the third largest verdict in Norwalk that year.

He was appointed to the Los Angeles Superior Court Personal Injury Arbitration Panel in 1984 and to the Los Angeles Municipal Court's Temporary Judge Program in 1985. In the mid-1980s, he obtained what was reported to be the first $1,000,000 settlement of a "trip and fall" accident in L.A. County history. He also has conducted innumerable arbitrations (both as a litigator and as the arbitrator), depositions, court hearings and a number of jury trials. He personally expanded that firm's historic scope of practice by accepting much larger and more complex cases, including insurance bad faith cases. By the mid-1980s, Mr. Kapp had become a partner in the Moray & Moray law firm, which shortly changed its name to Moray, Kapp & Vallette.

In the fall of 1987, Mr. Kapp left to form his own firm in Beverly Hills, California, named the Law Offices of Howard A. Kapp. In July of 2000, the firm moved to its current location in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles. The firm now practices in all areas of plaintiff's (victim's) tort litigation, focusing on medical malpractice, legal malpractice, auto, insurance, appeals, business litigation and related matters.

Mr. Kapp believes that his clients' claims should not be discounted because the adverse insurance company doesn't take the lawyer seriously or believe that the lawyer has the “right stuff" to try a case to a jury, which is a rare attribute in today's breed of accident lawyers. In that capacity, he has acquired a reputation as a tough and unrelenting adversary; in recent years, he has personally conducted up to 4 to 5 "high risk" jury trials per year. He has a large number of "6 figure" (more than $100,000) settlements and jury verdicts to his credit, with a number of such settlements considerably more than that. (Privacy concerns preclude the naming here of the involved parties on those cases.)

Mr. Kapp is a trained mediator (settlement officer) and has supervised the settlement of hundreds of cases for other lawyers and the courts.

He has published, and continues to publish, technical articles for legal journals on areas of interest to consumer lawyers; at latest count, he has published a dozen articles, mostly for the Consumers Attorneys Association of California (COAC), the leading organization of consumer attorney (civil trial lawyers) in California. He taught torts (personal injury law) at the University of West Los Angeles Law School in 1988-1989.

Mr. Kapp is a member of the State Bar of California, the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the Consumer Attorneys of California (formally California Trial Lawyers Association) and the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (formally Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association).

Mr. Kapp is married and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Bella, a long time elementary school teacher, and their two children, Michael, a graduate of UC Berkeley who holds a master's degree from the University of Chicago and is currently attending law school, and Rachel, a 2009 honors graduate of UC Berkeley.

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