Including all of the criminal writ petitions which I filed during the some 16 years that I practiced criminal defense law in San Francisco, since starting practice in Philadelphia in 1962, I probably have handled or worked on more than 75 appellate matters.  In California, at least seven opinions in cases I have handled have been cited in various Witkin treatises on points of substantive and evidentiary law and one case was listed in an article as being one of the most important cases in employment law over the past ten years.  The cases are the following:

• Yanowitz v. L’Oreal USA, Inc. (2005) 36 Cal. 4th 1028, 116 P.3d 1123, 32 Cal.Rptr.3d 436, involved retaliation under the Fair Employment and Housing Act against my wife for refusing to fire a good-performing female employee who her general manager thought was physically unattractive.  The opinion of Chief Justice Ronald M. George established several significant principles of employment law. The case has been cited in 342 published and unpublished decisions and has been the subject of discussion and commentary in numerous texts, periodicals, and programs and seminars.
• Molien v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (1980) 27 Cal.3d 916, 616 P.2d 813, 167 Cal.Rptr. 831, 16 A.L.R. 4th 518, which involved emotional distress damages when there was no physical injury or impact, was considered by the Continuing Education of the Bar in its annual survey of cases to be the leading tort case in California decided in 1980.  It was featured in an article in the periodical of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, written by a Professor of Torts, and has been included in summary form in one casebook on torts, Dobbs and Hayden, Torts and Compensation:  Personal Accountability and Social Responsibility for Injury (4th ed. 2001 West), pages 507-508 and 521.
• People v. Schoenfeld (1980) 111 Cal.App.3d 671, 168 Cal.Rptr. 762, was the appeal in the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping case. Three young men from prominent families hijacked a school bus and transported the 26 children on the bus and the bus driver to a buried moving van, from which the victims later escaped.  The crime and its aftermath was the Story of the Year both for the AP and the UP.
  As part of a plea bargain, the three men entered guilty pleas to kidnapping for ransom, and the case was tried before a judge, without a jury, on the issue whether the victims had suffered severe “bodily harm” as the term is defined in the kidnapping section of the California Penal Code.  Although the trial judge ruled that the victims had suffered bodily harm, the judge ruled that the prosecution had not established the more serious harm that had been alleged. The  Court of Appeal  decided that the bodily harm that the trial judge had ruled that the  victims had suffered was insufficient to satisfy the statutory requirement for the sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole and reduced the sentence to life imprisonment.
• People v. Brown (1971) 13 Cal.App.3d 876, 91 Cal.Rptr. 904, grew out of the emotionally-tinged murder of a San Francisco bus driver by three young African-Americans during a robbery in Hunters Point in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  The Honorable Joseph Karesh asked me to represent the alleged “triggerman” because I had tried cases before Judge Karesh, and he told me that he knew that I would present a vigorous defense.  Judge Karesh also told me that he wanted to assure the African-American community that there would be no racial recriminations against the defendants in the San Francisco criminal justice system.  
  The evidence against the defendant was fairly overwhelming: including a confession, the testimony of a co-defendant, and the testimony of a relative about an admission.  However, I believed that the so-called “fitness” hearings in the juvenile courts after which the decision was made whether to try juveniles as adults violated the prohibition against double jeopardy.  I unsuccessfully raised the issue in the appeal.  However, lawyers in the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, including a law school classmate, became aware of the point and sought my briefs.  Thereafter, in Breed v. Jones (1975) 421 U.S. 519, a case brought in the federal system, involving a crime far less inflammatory, the United States Supreme Court accepted the very position that I had argued in Brown.
• In People v. Gambos (1970) 5 Cal.App.3d 187, 84 Cal.Rptr. 908, the conviction was reversed because of the admission of prejudicial evidence.  However, because my client was an addict who sold narcotics to support his habit, I also had sought to overrule the then-existing rule of law that trial judges lacked the power to strike prior convictions charged in narcotics cases.  The Court of Appeal did not address the issue in its opinion, but at a later time, that principle of law was adopted in another case.  I did not pursue the issue after the remand because of an extremely favorable plea bargain.
• Multiplex Insurance Agency, Inc. v. California Life Insurance Company (1987) 189 Cal.App.3d 925, 235 Cal.Rptr. 12.  
• Mavroudis v. Superior Court (1980) 102 Cal.App.3d 594, 162 Cal.Rptr. 107.
• People v. Matlock (1970) 11 Cal.App.3d 453, 89 Cal.Rptr. 862.
• Moreover, in Decker v. Antovich (In re Antovich Constr., Inc.), 2006 Bankr.LEXIS3698 (Bankr. N.D.Cal. Dec.28, 2006) the Bankruptcy Judge applied the single enterprise variation of the alter ego doctrine to determine that the debtor was the alter ego of another corporation.