Page 105 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

Cliff was inducted as a Fellow of the College in 2003. He is a Fellow of and has served as President of the International Academy of Tri- al Lawyers. He was recognized by the Ameri- can Association of Justice as a member of the Top 100 Trial Lawyers. He is a charter mem- ber of the AAJ’s President’s Club and serves on its Leaders Forum. The AAJ appointed him as one of forty lawyers to serve on the Peo- ple-to-People Ambassador Professional Dele- gation to China, a highlight of his career.
A sustaining member of the Montana Trial Lawyers Association, Cliff was named their Trial Lawyer of the Year in 1996, and then again in 2022, a quarter century span that Cliff declares “I am damn proud of.” He was awarded MTLA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Committed to advancing the art of advocacy and preserving our indepen- dent judiciary, he has presented continuing legal education seminars on innumerable tri- al related topics, and taught for two decades at the University of Montana School of Law, (now the Alexander Blewett III Law School). He has served terms on both the Carroll Col- lege Board of Trustees and the University of Montana Foundation, as well as a trustee of the Montana Historical Society. He served eight years as Co-Chair of the Board of Visi- tors of the National Judicial College, and just began his second three-year term on its Board of Trustees.
Cliff represented a group of fifteen proudly retired Montana Power Company employees, all WWII veterans who, after a lifetime of work, had their pen- sion benefits terminated by Montana Power’s successor entity, Northwestern Energy, when it killed the retirement plan in bankruptcy. With a laugh Cliff recalls “I found myself pro hac vice in bankruptcy court in Delaware, arguing that the issue needed to be remanded to state court.” He ultimately prevailed and “I got those old boys their pensions back, with present value and interest adjustments, plus a million dollars apiece in compensatory damages for their troubles.” Cliff found that experience served to restore his clients’ faith in our country’s justice system, a faith shaken by the treatment they had received after a lifetime of work.
A true Montana ranch kid, Cliff has a strong sense of obligation to the “clean and healthful environment” guaranteed to all Montanans by its 1972 Con- stitution, and has become involved in a number of cases brought to redress damage to it. In a case that brings to mind A Civil Action (the best-seller about Jan Schlichtmann’s epic case to redress water contamination), Cliff cru- saded against groundwater contamination in Livingston, Montana. When the county was notified by the Department of Environmental Quality that it was responsible for toxic chemicals being leaked into the groundwater at the county landfill, and from there migrating to the Yellowstone River and downstream, it found that it was uninsured and did not have the funds to hire a lawyer to identify and pursue those actually responsible. Cliff agreed to a contingency fee arrangement and after a “who dunnit” Easter egg hunt, aid- ed by the appropriate excavation equipment, his team located, identified and exhumed barrels of toxic chemicals that the railroad had been illegally dump- ing in the landfill for years. The resulting $14.7 plus million-dollar verdict Cliff obtained against the railroad in 1999 was the largest in the history of the state at that time. Subsequent cases, such as those involving cyanide poison- ing leaking from mine leach pits and destroying water sources for Montana ranches in the North Moccasin Mountains, and an Exxon oil spill resulting in groundwater contamination and migration into the Yellowstone River, etc., have provided satisfying results for the damaged agricultural landowners, as well as all of the little towns and communities downstream.
SUMMER 2024 JOURNAL 104
Cliff’s focus on environmental and employee rights litigation in Montana resembles the story line of a John Grisham novel.