It was a performance, one Baton
Rouge Advocate columnist wrote, that
forced Briggs to “concede a stupendous
ignorance of his purported area of
expertise.” Legal experts said it elevated
Palermo’s profile at a time when Louisiana
is trying to reconcile saving its fragile
coastline with courting businesses whose
practices are hastening its demise.
“Rock has a reputation as an
outstanding trial lawyer who is always
prepared and straightforward to work
with,” says Connie Koury, executive director
of the Louisiana Association for Justice.
“It’s always gratifying to watch someone
who believes in the causes they pursue and
the cases they represent.”
PALERMO GREW UP THE OLDEST OF
four children in Sulphur, a western
suburb of Lake Charles. He developed
his toughness while playing on his high
school football team’s offensive line for
coach Shannon Suarez, who modeled
himself after the legendary Bear Bryant.
“[Suarez] believed in building character
foremost,” Palermo recalls. “There’s probably
nothing I faced later in life that seemed to be
as difficult as playing for Shannon Suarez. If
you could endure playing for him, then you
could endure anything.”
However, the baseball diamond was where
Palermo developed his legal temperament.
As a youngster, he umpired games and
found the job to be “a great laboratory for
rules and issues and adjudicating things,” he
says. By the time he went to college, he knew
he’d become a lawyer.
Palermo earned a bachelor’s degree in
finance from Louisiana State University in
1987 before entering its law school. As a law
student, he worked for the university’s sea
grant legal program, editing a publication
that tracked federal and state laws dealing
with the environment. Working there helped
him understand how important the law was
to protect his state’s fragile coast. Outside
of class, he earned money teaching scuba
lessons, which is how he met his wife,
Kim. It also reinforced the notion that the
environment was in dire need of protection.
When Palermo finished law school in
1992, he learned to fly airplanes, and later
helicopters, before getting a plaintiff’s attorney
job with Raleigh Newman in Lake Charles,
where he cut his teeth handling catastrophic
injury and products liability cases.
One of his first cases was a tragedy
involving a lemon meringue pie.
“[My client] was using lemon extract,
which contains a large amount of alcohol,”
Palermo says. “She was making the pie
filling on the stove, the filling caught fire
and the flame got onto her child’s pajamas.”
The child, who had disabilities, was badly
burned and died a year later.” Although the
company that made the extract made new
packaging that warned it was flammable, it
did not take the extra step of removing the
old bottles without that warning from store
shelves,” he says. “My client had purchased
one of the old bottles.”
Palermo eventually secured a favorable
settlement for his client.
“All of my life, I thought that attorneys
ripped off most people,” says Jerry
Jones, a Baton Rouge man who Palermo
successfully represented in a medical
malpractice case. “What I realized after
working with Rock is that I wouldn’t have
gotten $25 if it hadn’t been for him.
He’s someone who makes an effort to
understand what you’ve gone through, and
who can communicate it and who has the
resources to find individuals who can back
up what he says. I have enormous respect
for him as an attorney and a human being.”
For his part, Palermo feels the weight
of responsibility for those he represents.
“The client oftentimes comes to you with
nothing,” he says. “Their only means of
balancing the playing field is your skills and
resources. We’re not paid by the hour most
of the time. We have to take the case based
on our belief that we will be successful.”
After nine years with Newman, Palermo
joined colleagues Jay and Jamie Bice to
found their own firm, eventually adding
partners J. Michael Veron and Alonzo
Wilson, and focusing on environmental
litigation since 2005.
While many of the firm’s cases
involve large landowners dealing with
contamination, they also have “ones where
there’s a small landowner with a three-acre
property that has been contaminated by an
oil company,” Palermo says. In a smaller
case, “it’s not difficult for an oil company to
admit to what they did and get it cleaned
up. It’s easier for them to do that than it is
to litigate it for years.”
Michael P. Cash of Liskow & Lewis in
Houston has been Palermo’s courtroom
opponent in many cases. “The highest
compliment you can pay to your opposing
counsel is that you trust him,” Cash says.
“And I trust Rock. Maybe it’s an unfortunate
commentary that it’s so rare to trust your
opposing attorney, but it’s real. Rock is smart,
he’s tough, but he’s always professional. I
enjoy working with him—except for the part
[where] it makes your job harder.”
Cash recalls once going back and forth
with Palermo on a hotly contested matter
in a hearing. At some point, Cash made an
offhand comment about his daughter being
a student at LSU. Palermo, who is active in
fundraising at the school, approached Cash
after the hearing and said that if his daughter
ever needed help, to please let him know.
“That’s Rock Palermo in a nutshell right
there,” Cash says. “He can go to war with
you in the courtroom and then turn around
and offer to help your kid at school. He’s
just a class act.”
IN HIS SPARE TIME, PALERMO GOES ON
scuba trips with his wife and three teenage
children. He serves on the Lake Charles
Airport Authority and is a board member
of the Louisiana National Guard Youth
Challenge Program, which helps at-risk
youth learn discipline and earn a general
equivalency diploma.
He also puts his flying skills to good use
with his local sheriff’s aviation unit and with
the Civil Air Patrol. In the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, Palermo gained a bit of renown
when he sent the Coast Guard latitude and
longitude coordinates so it could save a
family who was stranded on the roof of their
home. When Hurricane Rita barreled toward
Lake Charles, Palermo was drafted into the
operations team for that part of the state,
evacuating areas as needed, assessing the
damage and providing a plan to get people
back to their homes safely.
Then there’s his ongoing legal battle on
behalf of Louisiana’s coast.
“We’ve all been under the belief that
you have to choose between a clean
environment and a great economy,”
Palermo says. “There shouldn’t be a
choice. In fact, a robust economy and
clean environment should be truly aligned.
In South Louisiana, we have an interest
in protecting the oil and gas industry’s
infrastructure from storms, and the industry
has an interest in having a population that
can live here and work in their facilities.
One of the things that coastal litigation
has shown to the public is that this is a real
problem and it needs to be addressed.
I think oil and gas companies should be
held accountable if they fail to restore the
wetlands. If you break it, you fix it.”