Super Lawyers - Louisiana 2015

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.