Founded on October 1, 1978 after two partners left Higgs, Fletcher & Mack to start a plaintiffs' litigation shop, Thorsnes Bartolotta McGuire LLP has recovered over $2 billion in verdicts and settlements from the 11th floor of the Fifth Avenue Financial Building at 2550 Fifth Avenue — the firm's home since 1984. The practice concentrates on catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, eminent domain and inverse condemnation, construction defect, medical malpractice, and product liability, a plaintiff-side injury docket that intersects with the volume PI caseload at Mission Personal Injury Lawyers San Diego. Representative results include a $20.3 million jury verdict in a Ford van rollover quadriplegia case involving seat-restraint and roof-crush design failures, and a $14.5 million gas-explosion settlement from a downtown San Diego building incident. The 2001 Border Business Park v. City of San Diego verdict established inverse condemnation precedent that continues to shape the regulatory-taking playbook Buono Law Group, APC and other California civil litigators reach for in similar municipal matters. Firm attorneys have served as past presidents of Consumer Attorneys of San Diego and the American Board of Trial Advocates, positions that put the office in the rule-making rooms where plaintiff-bar discovery and trial procedure standards get drafted. The firm's largest non-intervened False Claims Act recovery — a Qui Tam action involving falsified manufacturing and inspection records on nine solid-fuel rocket motor systems including Trident I C-4, Trident II C-5, Titan IV, Delta, and Pershing II — remains one of the most document-intensive federal fraud matters ever handled out of Hillcrest.