One piece of wisdom San Francisco litigator Richard Heimann usually offers less-experienced trial attorneys is that “you’re going to have some bad days in a trial.” Yet, for the Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein partner, San Francisco’s bellwether bench trial against opioid distributors was an exception.

“This was one of those rare cases where basically everything that we did, in terms of both the direct testimony that we put on and the cross-examination, went just as well as we could have hoped,” said Heimann, the chair of Lieff Cabraser’s securities and financial fraud practice. Heimann’s work in the bench trial over the opioid crisis is one of the matters earning the attorney a finalist spot for the California Legal Awards’ Attorney of the Year.