Weary from battling incurable leukemia at age 57, Ernest Erspamer had no energy to fight the Veterans Administration for disability benefits in 1979. Doctors had linked his disease to radiation he was exposed to while working as a navy engineer in the Bikini Atoll, the site of early nuclear bomb tests. But he had a message for his son Gordon, a young lawyer. “He told me, ‘I’m not going to spend the last year of my life fighting the VA, but if you want to take it over, feel free,’” says Erspamer, now 58 and a senior counsel at Morrison & Foerster.
He did, and he took on more as well. In the years after his father’s death, Erspamer, a trial lawyer specializing in antitrust litigation and energy law cases, served as lead counsel on two massive pro bono lawsuits alleging that unresponsive handling of veterans benefits claims by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—the successor to the Veterans Administration—violates due process guarantees. These claims routinely take a decade to be decided, says Erspamer, and the right to counsel is limited. “They count on the fact that most veterans give up or die,” he says.
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