Assistant U.S. Attorney Ali Moghaddas, a lead federal prosecutor who obtained a guilty verdict against Tom Girardi, has joined Edelson PC.

Moghaddas helped lead the Los Angeles prosecution of Girardi, 85, who was convicted on Aug. 27 of four counts of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles alleged that Girardi, of Los Angeles-based Girardi Keese, stole at least $15 million from four clients.

Moghaddas joined on Tuesday and will help grow Edelson’s Los Angeles office.

“We’re growing the trial team because we’re in an era that is seeing the return of the trial—particularly in class actions,” Edelson founder Jay Edelson said in a statement. “It's long been a running joke in the class action bar that the most experienced class trial attorneys generally had one trial and it settled right after opening statements.”

Edelson, however, has won class action trials, including $200 million in verdicts against PacifiCorp over a series of 2020 wildfires in Oregon and a $925 million jury award in a U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act case against ViSalus Inc. Edelson also has 14 trials scheduled for 2025, including the first against a gun manufacturer, Smith & Wesson, over a mass shooting, and 10 additional damages trials in the PacifiCorp wildfire case.

“The increase in trials is driven by a focus—both by courts and, increasingly, members of the plaintiffs' bar—in actually valuable settlements,” Edelson said. “All of that means that this is a particularly exciting time for us to be adding Ali to our trial team.”

In addition to the Girardi case, which he handled with Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Paetty, Moghaddas was the lead prosecutor in a dozen criminal trials during his five years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California.

“Edelson's shown that it will never hesitate to try a difficult case, and the firm’s record there is exceptional,” Moghaddas said in a statement. “Just in the coming year, Edelson has trials set across the country at the leading edge of class and mass actions. There was no question in my mind that I wanted to be part of that.”
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'We Were Just Incredibly Impressed'

Edelson, based in Chicago, was instrumental in breaking open the Girardi scandal. Founding partner Jay Edelson was co-counsel to Girardi Keese on the lawsuits against Boeing over the Lion Air crash in 2018 when he alerted a federal judge in Chicago about a missing $2 million in client settlements. The 2020 motion by Edelson prompted U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin of the Northern District of Illinois to impose a $2 million contempt order against Girardi and his firm, Girardi Keese, and refer him to federal authorities.