LEFT: Holm with her grandfather, Dion R., who was City Attorney of San Francisco.
ABOVE: With her kids. “Everybody’s out of the house now and things have settled
down,” she says.
Holm, 63, one of the most prominent
medical malpractice defense attorneys
in Southern California, is often at the
helm of landmark litigation—including a
2006 scandal in which the University of
California faced almost 100 claims against
its liver transplant program at UC Irvine
Medical Center.
“That was a very complex, high-profile
matter, with myriad types of negligent and
intentional tort theories being brought, and
she was the lead counsel,” says McMahon.
“She did an incredible job sorting through,
evaluating and staging the cases. She
obtained great resolutions.”
HOLM WAS BORN IN SAN FRANCISCO
but her family soon moved north to
Sunnyvale. Surrounded by apple orchards
and open spaces, she grew up with two
younger brothers, and parents who
believed in both self-expression and hard
work. “My mom was a strong woman,” says
Holm. “She was a 5-foot- 10 redhead, and
she would always want me to do the best.”
Holm’s mother translated that passion
into her career as a theater director, and
that theater—the King Dodo Playhouse—
was at the center of the Holm family’s
world. Holm’s mother acted and directed,
and her father, who worked in the
mortgage business, was often cast as the
star. Peggy and her brothers regularly
performed in productions. They also served
as stagehands and ticket collectors, and
helped with props.
“The theater was a huge part of our life,”
she says. It also made her comfortable
speaking in front of people. “Now when I
get in front of a group of jurors, I feel fine.”
In addition, it taught her to seek out her
passion, and as she neared high school
graduation, Holm found that passion—in
medicine. Her pediatrician encouraged
her pursuit, and in 1969 she became pre-
med at the University of California, San
Diego. There she was thrown into biology,
chemistry and physics classes.
“I took a lot of heavy-duty stuff with
people who were going to be Nobel
laureates,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘Gosh,
I love the idea of being a pediatrician, but all
I’m seeing is a bunch of numbers. And do
we ever see anything larger than a cell?’”
Then in her junior year, she says, “I realized
I was going to have to take PChem—physical
chemistry—and run a fruit fly lab.”
Exit medicine, enter law.
As a woman at Santa Clara University
School of Law in the early 1970s, Holm
was a rarity, but that didn’t faze her. By
her second year, she secured a position
with the district attorney’s office as its first
certified law clerk. “My mentor there loved
to go to court,” she says. “He was a DA and
he let me go and argue pretrial matters in
hearings in the criminal court in my second
and third year of law school.” Bonus: The
attorney she worked for in private practice
hated to go to court, and brought her along
to argue cases as his certified law student. “I
got a lot of experience,” she says.
In her third year, Holm ran for student body
president. Among her campaign promises:
strong financial management, outstanding
leadership, and beer kegs at the library every
Friday night. The victory made her the first
female student body president in the law
school’s history. It was such a milestone that
the news made the local paper. “I remember
they wanted to take a picture in the rose
garden. So my hair is down, I have my beads
on, I look like this hippie chick,” she says. “But
it was a big deal.”
After graduation, Holm took a job in the
office of Herbert Hafif, a business litigation
and plaintiff’s personal injury attorney in
Claremont. “It was just brilliant the way he
would handle cases,” Holm remembers.
“He was always saying that if you can’t
tell somebody what your case is about in a
sentence or two, then you don’t know what
your case is about; you haven’t gotten to
the essence of your case.”
Holm and other female attorneys may
have been breaking new ground, but old
attitudes died hard. “I would show up for a
deposition and I would be mistaken for the
court reporter,” Holm says. “‘Um, no, I’m
the lawyer.’ There were even times in my
early years where if you won a legal battle
in the courtroom you might be described
as ‘a pushy broad.’ You had to make up
your mind as to whether you were going to
be offended by those comments or keep
moving and do your best.”
As Holm took on more plaintiff’s medical
malpractice cases, she routinely found
