Colleagues to buy Angelos law practice
Circuit judge approves sale of firm to 3 attorneys
The law firm of Peter Angelos, whose share of the big-dollar awards and settlements he won for asbestos victims funded his purchase of the Baltimore Orioles, will be sold to three members of the practice.
The sale was approved Wednesday by Baltimore County Circuit Judge Keith R. Truffer, who had presided over a legal battle among Angelos’ family members. Now 94, Angelos has been incapacitated by illness since 2018.
The financial terms of the sale were not disclosed in court documents filed Wednesday.
The sale comes in the wake of the Angelos family agreeing to sell its most lucrative possession, the Orioles, to David Rubenstein, a Baltimore native and private equity billionaire.
The ownership of the law firm will transfer Friday to attorneys Jay D. Miller, James S. Zavakos and William G. Minkin, according to court documents.
They are seeking approval from the Supreme Court of Maryland to continue to use the name of “The Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos” for at least three years.
“It has been our privilege to have worked with and to have been mentored by Mr. Angelos for many years, and we intend to carry on his legacy and his commitment to fight for the rights of clients, a commitment that he instilled in us as we worked side by side with him over the course of our careers,” the incoming owners wrote in a “Dear Client” letter. The firm will send the message, signed “Jay/Will/Jim,” to the more than 20,000 people it represents.
The firm had been in conservatorship as a result of the legal wrangling within the family. Angelos’ younger son, Louis Angelos, who had been managing the firm, sued his brother John, the Orioles CEO, and their mother, Georgia, in June 2022. Louis Angelos claimed that his brother was trying — with the acquiescence of their mother — to take control of their father’s assets.
That suit and a countersuit by Georgia Angelos were settled privately in February 2023 under still-secret terms.
None of Peter Angelos’ family members or their representatives returned requests for comment for this article.
Since they settled their suits, the family has been selling off pieces of Peter Angelos’ vast self-made fortune, from his real estate holdings, to the team — whose sale is pending the expected approval of Major League Baseball — and now the law firm.
Angelos opened his practice in 1961 after graduating from the University of Baltimore law school, which he attended at night. Unlike how other firms are structured, he was always its sole owner and the other attorneys his employees, even as the practice grew.
The firm became a powerhouse largely on the basis of suing companies that had exposed workers to asbestos, including those who toiled at Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point. Angelos’ impact on asbestos litigation is hard to overstate, with cases sending multiple companies into bankruptcy and turning Baltimore Circuit Court into the country’s busiest venue for such suits. At times numbering in the tens of thousands, asbestos cases so clogged the docket that Angelos successfully lobbied to get four new judges appointed to the city bench.
Baltimore-based attorney William H. “Billy” Murphy, who has been close to Angelos for decades, said the “brand” his friend created is “alive and well” and will continue.
“He helped people in the millions, through mass actions and class actions,” Murphy said. “He had the absolute loyalty of the white working class, the black working class, the unions.
“He left a legacy. He did it for posterity,” Murphy said.
Angelos’ legal career made him the millions of dollars that allowed him to
lead a group of investors in 1993 to buy the Orioles for a then-record price of $173 million.
The firm was chosen by the state of Maryland in 1996 to handle its litigation against tobacco companies, seeking to recoup its costs for treating those sickened by related illnesses. Maryland’s share of the tobacco settlement was estimated at over $4 billion and, after a fight over how much Angelos should receive, he agreed to take $150 million.
But more recently, the firm shrank as asbestos cases began to dry up. Although its lawyers continued to litigate those and other personal injury matters. Angelos’ health began deteriorating, and his family feuded over his assets.
According to the family members’ lawsuits, Angelos’ wife, whom he designated his attorney in fact to act on his behalf, wanted to sell or dissolve the firm. She was opposed by Louis Angelos, who had been managing the firm in his father’s absence. In January 2023, the judge placed the firm under a conservator — William J. Murphy of Zuckerman Spaeder and no relation to Billy Murphy — to help determine its fate.
Despite “extensive efforts” to identify potential buyers, the conservator concluded “the only feasible acquiror” would be would be attorneys already affiliated with the firm, wrote William J. Murphy and his law partner, Gregg L. Bernstein, in a motion filed in the case.
Court documents offer a bare-bones look at months of meetings, with Angelos family members, their representatives, and attorneys and other staff at the firm to asses the practices’ finances and liabilities. The process took longer than expected because of a host of moving parts, such as the lease the firm has on its offices at One Charles Center. The aluminum and glass landmark downtown tower was designed by modernist giant Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and is owned by Angelos.
The building is among the assets the family has been trying to sell; it has been on the market since August 2022.
After months of meetings, the parties entered into a “binding term sheet” to transfer the law firm to the three attorneys, Miller, Zavakos and Minkin. With the Maryland Bar Counsel, Thomas M. DeGonia, which handles conservatorships of law firms, satisfied that the agreement fulfilled state requirements, the deal went to Judge Truffer for his approval.
Miller, a past president of the Baltimore County Bar Association, joined the Angelos firm in October 2013, according to his LinkedIn page. He represented nearly 250 patients who sued a one-time star cardiologist at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. The plaintiffs accused Dr. Mark G. Midei of unnecessarily implanting stents in them, resulting in medical complications. Miller settled the cases for an undisclosed amount of money in May 2013. The following year, the previous owner of the Towson hospital, Catholic Health Initiatives, agreed to pay up to $37 million to resolve the cases.
Several years ago, Miller filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, claiming more than $3 million in liabilities, including about $1.5 million in personal loans from his boss, Peter Angelos. According to an article at the time in The Daily Record of Baltimore, a horse breeding and racing business that Miller had started failed. Court documents show the case was closed in June 2020, several months after an appointed trustee found Miller had no property beyond what was exempted by law to pay off the debts.
Miller, Zavakos and Minkin, saying a few more details need to be finalized before the firm’s ownership of transfers to them, declined to say anything beyond a statement: “This is about preserving the legacy of the firm and the legacy of Mr. Angelos, and that our clients continue to receive excellent representation.”