Childhood of Hardship Forged a Legal Warrior

The broken bones, severed limbs and accidental deaths of the poor provided attorney Aileen Norvell Goldstein with the legal work to leave her own poverty behind.

But she says it was her background--as the daughter of poor, idealistic Russian immigrants, someone who endured childhood hardship and scorn--that made her a scrappy fighter on their behalf.

Goldstein on Wednesday enjoyed the glow of her most recent triumph, forcing attorneys for Los Angeles County to veer from their defense strategy in a gutsy game of litigation chicken.

The county attorneys acknowledged that her clients in a medical malpractice lawsuit were the parents of an infant who died of a birth defect overlooked in a county hospital, dropping the claim that the babies had been switched.

“Do you realize what a victory it was to get the county to admit to anything?” she asked. “Other attorneys told me I was crazy to sue the county--that I’d get buried by them. I can’t wait for them to hear about this.”

Brash, loquacious, excitable, Goldstein can be oblivious to those around her. But when it comes to her clients, she’s as sensitive to the travails they suffer as a seismograph to the earth’s tremors. Her repeated outbursts of indignation on their behalf feature the same memorized phrases and images of outrage.

The yearlong legal battle endured by her clients--Patty Chavez, 17, and her boyfriend, Reynaldo Ruiz, 21--was motivated by racism and discrimination against the poor, she said.

“This would not have happened to a middle-class kid from Tarzana. The only reason it was done was because they thought she would roll over and fade away.”

Referring to the county’s lawyers and their switched-babies defense strategy, she said: “The only other assumption you can come to is that they are incompetent and they don’t care. Some lower-echelon person came up with this defense and no one checked into it.”

Although she can be abrasive, Goldstein can also put strangers at ease with a rich streak of self-deprecating humor--about her bulk, her clothes and her age.

When a television crew showed up at her office last week demanding an interview, she swore, and then said, “They’re going to put me on television again without any makeup.”

When the cameras were about to begin taping, she said: “Don’t get my knees in the shot!”

Born in 1941 to Morris and Settie Norvell, who fled Minsk pogroms in 1912, Goldstein grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis, Tenn.

She says she was ridiculed and pitied--because her laborer father died when she was 4, and she was poor, Jewish and born with a deformed left hand--when she ventured beyond her community’s accepting confines.

At 16, she married Julian Goldstein, a sailor from Los Angeles stationed in Memphis. But it wasn’t until she was 30 years old, the mother of a son and a worker at menial jobs for more than a decade, that she decided to get an education. After taking a high school equivalency test, she was admitted to West Los Angeles College and then UCLA.

At 32, after earning straight A’s, she said, she had her second child.

“I shlepped that kid all over campus on my back,” she said. “I used to get complaints that I was bringing my kid to class, and I just went anyway. I was in my flower-child stage, with my Birkenstocks and robes and flowers in my hair.”

She graduated in 1976, took a year off, and enrolled in night classes at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. Goldstein said the first year of law school was murderous, as she worked part time during the day, attended classes at night and studied and took care of her children in between.

Admitted to the bar at 40, Goldstein quickly built a lucrative practice representing poor Latino clients in accident and personal-injury cases even though she does not speak Spanish.

She rented an office from another attorney in Beverly Hills, later opened her own office in Sherman Oaks to be closer to her home and recently moved into half a floor of a posh Toluca Lake office tower favored by the movie industry.

Before Goldstein became an attorney, she and her family had an apartment in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, where her son, Marc, now 26, remembers always having to be wary of going out at night.

Her daughter, Sharon, 18, recently graduated from Oakwood School in North Hollywood and is enrolling in Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Julian Goldstein also helped the family’s fortunes by getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and starting a computer consulting business that caters to lawyers.

“She’s doing what she loves to do,” Julian said Wednesday. “She loves to win. She really believes this widows-and-orphans thing. They are the ones that need winning for, because they have a hard time getting good representation.”

Known by her fellow attorneys as someone willing to take on steep odds and Goliath-like opponents, Goldstein says, “My background gives me heart for the fight.”

Stuart Kesner, a Los Angeles trial lawyer who has known Goldstein since she began practicing, called her “one of the hardest-working lawyers I know” and said, “she’s an absolute fighter . . . and she thinks of her clients and gives them every bit of her energy.”

She won a large award early in her career for a client who suffered devastating injuries when his car rear-ended a truck in 1980. The client appeared to be at fault until she managed to turn up a witness who saw the truck pull onto the freeway. With the help of another attorney, she persuaded a jury in Fresno to award her client $600,000, of which she received a one-third contingency fee.

Goldstein explained the victory by saying the jury took a liking to “a little, fat, Jewish woman,” referring to herself.

In 1989, she won a $2.1-million judgment for a woman who was left a paraplegic when her car was hit by a truck.

In that case, the firm that owned the truck had maintained that its insurance coverage was only $1 million, but eventually Goldstein discovered the amount was more than twice that. Goldstein has also won several other six- and seven-figure damage awards.

She gets particularly passionate when she talks about medical malpractice cases, such as the one in which she is now suing the county. State law limits the awards in such cases to $250,000 and attorneys’ fees to about $80,000. The expenses in fighting such a case can run $30,000 or more, she said, and makes many attorneys unwilling to handle them.

The defense the county’s attorneys offered in the Chavez case, she said, was “the most bizarre” she had ever seen, provoking her to seek public scrutiny of the case.

She also threatened to have the baby’s remains exhumed to carry out a DNA test to prove the county wrong.

That threat--which she insists she was willing to carry out even if it cost her $20,000 and despite the emotional pain it would inflict on her clients--moved the county to order its own test.

Results from that test, conducted Tuesday, caused the county to back down and seek a settlement.

Sitting in front of the wall of law books in her office Wednesday, Goldstein smiled broadly at the bank of television cameras.

She used every question as a platform from which to preach her views on treatment of the poor, minorities and the need for more government funding for health and education.

After the 90-minute news conference, she didn’t slow down even for a minute.

She ordered a member of her staff to hand out her business cards to lingering reporters and then shouted to Patty Chavez, who was down the hall, to get something to eat for Chavez’s fussing 10-month-old sister.

Sighing, she said: “I like this family, what can I say? They are the backbone of this country. My family was just like them. Immigrants.”

Times Staff Writer Amy Pyle contributed to this story.