-His name now sits among some of the most influential trial lawyers in American history.

Las Vegas attorney Robert Eglet is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and other supporters.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

One of the most accomplished trial lawyers in the country, he built his career in Las Vegas, taking on powerful corporations and winning.

A graduate of Western High School in Las Vegas, he earned his law degree from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law.

A force in the courtroom, he secured billions of dollars in verdicts and settlements and has represented plaintiffs in some of Southern Nevada's most high-profile cases, including One October survivors.

Any attorney award, you name it, he's likely won it.

Most recently, an induction into the Trial Lawyers Hall of Fame.

Robert Eglet, Founding Partner and Lead Trial Counsel at Eglet Law, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

-So that honor, you are joining names like Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall.

What do you think?

(Robert Eglet) Well, I'm very humbled by it.

I-- When I read the names of the previous inductees, I was, you know, Why did they put me on this list?

It's like, whoa.

And I was also very surprised, because the times I've seen these inductions, most of the times they're being awarded to people who are no longer living.

And the times I've seen them awarded to people who were living, they were quite old and retired, most of them.

And so when they called me in January, at first I thought it was a joke.

And I said, well, you know, I'm, I'm not retired.

I'm actually still working and have no intention of retiring anytime soon.

And I'm, you know, I'm only 65.

And they said, Yeah, we know, you're one of the youngest, but your credentials deserve it.

And I said, Well, okay.

And then they had it in Las Vegas at the Wynn, which was, you know, kind of cool, because it was my hometown, and my family and colleagues and friends and even a bunch of judges were there.

So it was kind of neat.

-You also told me, off camera, a story.

I'll summarize.

You saw one of those local attorneys at an event, and he kept calling you the GOAT, and what did you think?

-Well, he's a friend of mine, Farhan Naqvi.

He's a fine young man, fine lawyers, and he's a great guy.

And it was an opening of a new, The Summit, the new country club.

And he was in a group of people and pointing at me and saying, That's the GOAT, the GOAT.

And I was-- I thought he was upset with me or something.

I thought he was like making fun of me.

And so I walked over to my wife, I said, I think-- Is Farhan upset with me about something?

She goes, Why?

Well, he's calling me a farm animal.

(laughter) What's he calling you?

I said, He's calling me a goat.

She goes, You idiot.

Don't you know what that means?

And she explains it to me.

I'm like, Oh, okay.

-Which for our viewers who don't know, it stands for Greatest Of All Time.

-Yeah.

I learned that from my wife that night.

(laughter) -Your wife has also had a large influence on your career.

How so?

-Tremendous.

I mean, we are partners, and we've been partners in life.

We've been married for a very, very long time, and partners in law.

First of all, she, my wife, has one of the most brilliant legal minds I've ever known.

She's incredibly smart, and I think she's a legal genius and one of the best strategists, legal strategists I've ever seen, best legal writer I've ever seen.

So, you know, I did the smart thing and I married her.

And so she has been very influential in my career.

She's the one who pushed me earlier to start taking on these bigger cases and bigger cases and more complex cases and doing a lot more product liability and taking on these, you know, large corporations and, you know, and doing those things.

And she has always been there to help direct the litigation and run the team of lawyers we have on the case.

She's brilliant, and I would not be here without her.

I would never have had the kind of success that I have had without her.

We're truly a team.

And, yeah, couldn't have done it without her.

-So big shout-out to Tracy Eglet, then?

-Yeah.

-When you hear about people saying that your cases have reshaped industries and redefined justice for communities, what comes to mind?

Which case or cases?

-Well, I'll start with the first.

The first time I got the largest verdict in Nevada was in 1997, and it was a 13-year-old kid, a young man in Pahrump who it was his birthday.

And he had one of these dirt bikes, off-road dirt bikes.

If you ever have ridden dirt bikes, you know that there's a lot of sparks that come out of dirt bikes.

And the gas tanks, because it bounces around, it has a tube off the top of the gas tank.

So the gas tank is splashing around the-- You're going to have some sort of combustion that some drops of gas can leak out.

And his uncle had bought him some, some off-road, what were advertised as off-road safety clothes.

And he was out on his birthday, 13 years old, so proud.

And the same company made pajamas for children that looked just like the off-road safety, like racing clothes for the-- The pajamas under federal law were fire retardant.

The clothes that he was wearing, the safety off-road clothes, was not.

In fact, it propagated the fire.

Sparked-- Gas came out, sparked.

He went up like a Roman candle with these clothes.

He had over 90% third-degree full thickness burns over his body.

To this day, he's still the youngest man in the country to survive, youngest male to survive those kind of burns.

And he did.

I tried that case, got a verdict just under $50 million dollars on that case.

And the company and all-- In Europe, the off-road motorcycle clothes were fire retardant.

That changed in America after that; they became fire retardant.

That was the first time.

Then we had the hepatitis C outbreak in Nevada in 2008 tied to Dr.

Desai's clinic, and a lot of people just went after the doctors.

I went after the pharmaceutical industry, who was marketing and supplying the propofol to these companies.

They were putting large vials of propofol when they only needed small vials.

And so it caused the-- because they're not going to throw away the propofol, because even it may say single dose on the vial, they purchase it by the milliliter.

So when they're sending them large 50-milliliter vials instead of 10- or 20-milliliter vials, which is all you need for an endoscopy, they're going to double dose out of it.

So that case, the first case I tried, there was like over 100 people that got hepatitis.

And I had more than half of them, represented more than half.

I was lead counsel in the case here.

I tried the first case.

We got a $505 million verdict for one claimant, Henry Chanin.

Right after the first verdict, the CDC went in.

First of all, they got all these large vials of propofol out of endoscopy centers all over the country, because they were everywhere.

And they also changed injection practices.

I demonstrated, came up with an injection practice that was safer.

So they changed the injection practices around the country.

The CDC went in and trained everybody, and they changed the injection practices.

And we-- and they-- We changed the, how these, these propofol was packaged and what size vials they could, they could ship to endoscopy centers.

So we saved a lot of lives in that case.

The One October case, I was lead counsel in that case.

We secured the settlement with the MGM for $800 million.

-Big opponent, especially if you're here locally.

-Yeah.

But they-- At the time, Jim Murren was the CEO of MGM.

He knew right away.

Jim is a smart man.

He knew right away that this is a case.

They're a local company in Las Vegas, the largest employer in the state.

He knew that, you know, he needed to do the right thing for the community.

I took over and became lead counsel in that case.

There was a lot of other firms involved, but they kind of put it in my lap to handle the case.

And so we were able to work with the MGM, their general counsel, and Jim Murren.

I had a relationship with Jim and his wife, Heather.

I had a relationship with their general counsel.

They trusted me.

They knew me.

They knew I was local.

They knew I wasn't going to try to bankrupt MGM.

That would not be good for our state, would not be good for anybody, wouldn't be good for the, for even for the people.

But we got a great settlement.

And all the victims were compensated fairly, and virtually every one of them were happy about it.

At the same time, MGM stepped up and showed what corporate responsibility really means in a community.

And you know, essentially the mediation we went through, the settlement with the, with deposing, it is me and MGM against the insurance companies, getting them to cough up their insurance one at a time.

There's 27 layers of insurance equaling $750 million.

And then I told MGM, You need to kick in 50 million.

It's going to help you with the public here, help you with the publicity.

And they-- And I think people now look at MGM as the example of good corporate responsibility, being a good corporate citizen.

-To date, your largest verdict is more than $3 billion.

When you step back, though, and you think about all of this money, is that justice for these victims?

-Well, you know, it's the only way we have to compensate.

We don't, we don't have any magic wands.

AI is not developed enough to make people back how they were before their injuries.

This is the only thing we have.

And as Winston Churchill once said, the American justice system is the worst justice system in the world, except for every other justice system in the world.

It's slow.

It's monotonous.

It's expensive.

But it's the only thing we have is to try to compensate victims with money.

Does money make them whole in the sense of making them back to where they were?

Of course it doesn't.

But it pays for their medical care, their future medical care, their loss of earning capacity, their loss of household services, their pain and suffering, both past and future, and the loss of enjoyment of their lives.

We do the best we can.

And when facts are presented to a jury honestly, incredibly, and you're not trying to overreach with them, and you can really show them because why this is an empathetic situation and an empathetic person that's been harmed, if you really get to know your client and understand, and you can relate that to the jury in a story, you know... I know one of the potential questions you sent me is what, you know, What makes a good lawyer?

And I say, you know, really the question is, What differentiates a good lawyer, good trial lawyer, from a great trial lawyer?

A good, a good trial lawyer presents facts.

A great trial lawyer presents a coherent story about their clients that is easily understood and presents the facts and the evidence in that story.

People learn through stories, not through data.

They just don't.

For thousands of years, before we had written language, everything was passed along through stories.

And so really what great trial lawyers are is great storytellers.

-Robert Eglet, we have run out of time.

Congratulations on the induction, and thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.