Prominent lawyer in VW cases
When Henry “Hank” Wallace sought justice for his injured clients in a courtroom, the trial lawyer often lowered his smoky voice to a conspiratorial whisper, forcing jurors to listen closely. The tactic irritated opponents but it often worked.
Mr. Wallace built his reputation during the late 1970s, successfully challenging Volkswagen, the German automaker, in two major cases that ended in million-dollar verdicts.
Mr. Wallace, who formerly lived in Bethel Park and Upper St. Clair, died on Jan. 11 at Odd Fellows Nursing Home in Worcester, Mass. He was 80 and had dementia.
A charming, determined and energetic litigator, the Pittsburgh native’s snowy hair and matching beard framed a ruddy face and blue eyes. He smoked cigars daily, drove sports cars and wore well-tailored suits. Colleagues knew him for his thorough preparation.
“He wanted to know everything about the case so that he wasn’t surprised,” said Maureen Harvey, a lawyer who worked with him for more than 30 years.
In a 1977 job interview, he asked her to name the leading product liability case in Pennsylvania. She did — instantly. Noting that 100 lawyers would not have known that, he asked her when she could start.
In April 1976, Mr. Wallace and his partner, Russell J. Ober Jr., won a $1 million verdict for John W. Wilson, a 33-year-old Penn Hills man. A staff attorney for the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission, Mr. Wilson borrowed a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle and drove through Virginia on a rainslicked road. The car overturned on March 30, 1973, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
In 1976, his lawyers claimed the car’s steering mechanism and roof were defective. In his 1978 book, “The Million Dollar Lawyers,” author Joseph C. Goulden recounted Mr. Wallace’s struggle to obtain key documents from Volkswagen.
In 1979, after a 10-week trial in a New Jersey court, Mr. Wallace and Mr. Ober won a nearly $2 million verdict against Volkswagen. The lawyers also represented three Marines who were injured and a fourth who was killed when the axle on a 1972 Volkswagen Micro Bus broke, ejecting four men from the vehicle.
“He was fearless,” Mr. Ober said. “Hank was, fundamentally, a gambler . ... He was willing to take on difficult personal injury cases for plaintiffs and try them and had a lot of success doing it.”
During the New Jersey trial, Mr. Ober recalled, Mr. Wallace could not afford to pay their mounting hotel bill. Still, he spent money to test an expert’s theory on how that accident happened, buying a 1972 Volkswagen Micro Bus, modifying its roof supports and hiring a film crew to record footage of the vehicle rolling over.
“We know that what a jury sees is what they remember. He wanted to demonstrate to them so they could visualize what the defect was,” said Mark F. McKenna, a Pittsburgh attorney who worked on the New Jersey case.
Away from work, Mr. Wallace taught his seven children to scuba dive, coached baseball, vacationed in Stone Harbor, N.J., and enjoyed fishing in Florida.
In the 1980s, when his 10year-old daughter, Natalie, wanted to play baseball, he arranged for her to play on a boys’ team despite opposition from parents and teammates. Ms. Wallace pitched and later helped start a team at Winchester Thurston School in Shadyside.
“He came to every single game. Now that I’m a lawyer, I don’t know how he did it,” said Ms. Wallace, who lives in Blackridge. “He was unstoppable when he set his mind to something.”
Ernest Hemingway was Mr. Wallace’s favorite author and he collected books and stories about his literary hero.
“My dad emulated all things Hemingway, so much that my teen-aged friends called him Ernest,” said his daughter, Lynn Margadonna of Spencer, Mass.
He was an accommodating boss, said Ms. Harvey, who had five children during her legal career.
“Hank allowed women the flexibility in order to keep us working when we were having children at a time when that was not done generally,” she said. “He wanted that for his daughters. He didn’t want us to have to choose between our families and our careers. He was very much ahead of his time in doing that.”
For years, he kept an apartment on Mount Washington where he could write legal briefs without interruptions, enjoy the spectacular view from Grandview Avenue, make eggs Benedict or unwind at the Shiloh Inn’s piano bar.
Born Henry Heiser Wallace IV, he learned to play the piano as a boy. His mother, Genevieve, ran the Wallace Piano Co., which had a Downtown store and four other locations. He graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1958, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and a law degree from Cornell University in 1966.
After clerking at a local law firm, he opened his own office, Wallace and Lipton. When he closed his firm’s Grant Building office in 2008, its final name was Wallace, Barozzini, Harvey and Zimmaro.
Besides his two daughters, Mr. Wallace is survived by two former wives, Martha Lang Wescott of Wapiti, Wyo., and Donna Priore of Carrick; two other daughters: Jeanne Wallace of North Logan, Utah, and Lauren Flanagan of Vancouver, Canada; three sons: Henry Wallace V of Boston, Stephen of Aspen, Colo. and Donald of Blackridge.
The family will receive friends at 10 a.m. Wednesday in the parlor of Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 5121 Westminster Place. A service will follow at 11 a.m. Burial is in Homewood Cemetery. The family requests memorials to the Alzheimers’ Association of America.