Bostwick & Peterson partner James Bostwick was interviewed by James Langford for Lawdragon Hall of Fame Lawyer Limelight. The in-depth article covered many highlights and cases from his extended personal injury law career and discussed his fictional legal thriller novel that was released in 2019 and will soon become a movie.
The article opened with the story of how Jim, a young, relatively unknown lawyer in the early years of his practice, took on a legal malpractice case against the well-known “King of Torts”, as nicknamed by Life magazine in 1954, San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli.
“Taking on Belli was folly, Bostwick’s friends told him. Suing him in San Francisco was tantamount to madness.”
After a nine-week trial, he won $6.4 million, the largest legal malpractice jury verdict in San Francisco at that time.
The interview touched on many topics from how he was originally pre-med in college to his early days working for well-known personal injury lawyer Bruce Walkup to highlighting his record-breaking settlement wins and individual cases that have stayed close to his heart for many decades.
Amid his success as one of the top personal injury lawyers in the nation, Jim decided to also pen his own fictional legal thriller about a character named Matt Taylor that is loosely based on himself. He discussed how he has always been a great fan of legal thrillers but found many of them to be “pretty inauthentic”. Challenged by his wife to write his own legal thrillers, he started the novel when his now 27-year-old daughter was a baby.
In 2019, his book Acts of Omission was published by Post Hill Press and the first edition sold out. The book was also successful as an audible version and now is being adapted into a movie by well-known screenwriter Michael Schiffer and Hollywood producer Jeff Apple. Although Bostwick is thrilled to be helping with the screenplay, his main priority – as it always has been – is making sure that his clients are given the best legal representation so they can be taken care of both financially and emotionally.
Read James Bostwick’s entire interview here.
