Hiram Anthony Raldiris, Esq.
HIRAM ANTHONY RALDIRIS, ESQ.
Partner & Senior Trial Counsel
Hiram is an accomplished Trial Attorney with over thirty-five years of experience who has secured over five hundred million dollars of jury verdicts and settlements for his clients in New York and California. He is also the founder and President of the non-profit corporation, Pan Latinos, which will seek to partner with poor communities to address issues of hunger – hunger for food and hunger for knowledge. Hiram credits the love, support and guidance of his parents, Hiram and Elena, for his love of reading, writing and education. He credits his uncle Mickey for the lessons that he taught him, which Hiram knows makes him a more aggressive, compassionate, and empathetic advocate for his clients in and out of Court. As a founder of these organizations and a leader in his field, he is eager to serve New York’s most vulnerable inhabitants by providing legal representation through his law firm of Raldiris & Gonzalez, and by his charitable efforts through his non-profit corporation, Pan Latinos. He is happily married to his wife, Christine, and is the proud father of four, and grandfather of three.
Background And Upbringing
Hiram Anthony Raldiris is a co-founding Partner and the Senior Trial Attorney for Raldiris & Gonzalez. He is a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, who grew up in the Soundview section of the South Bronx in the 1960’s and 70’s and witnessed at an early age how his family used social activism and political engagement in defense of the rights of the marginalized. His father, Hiram Agosto Raldiris, was a respected leader in the Bronx business community actively involved in Bronx politics.
Hiram’s father was one of the First Puerto Ricans ever appointed as a Commissioner of a New York City agency when Mayor, John Lindsey, appointed him a commissioner for Addiction Services Agency or “ASA” – The agency charged with handling the heroin epidemic ravaging poor communities in New York City at the time. Hiram Agosto even went on to serve as the daily rotating senior Administration official or “Night Owl” assigned to monitor any emergencies which may arise while the mayor slept.
shown above Upon his father’s passing in 2005, Hiram inherited and proudly displays the certificate bestowed upon his father in 1970 for serving as Mayor John Lindsey’s “Night Owl.”
Hiram Agosto was also involved in the effort to elect Herman Badillo as the first Puerto Rican member of Congress in 1970. Hiram vividly recalls contributing to his father’s efforts by handing out shopping bags that read “Badillo for Congress” at the bottom of the long staircase for the Number 6 train at the Soundview/Morrison subway station in the Bronx.
Hiram’s tio, Mickey Melendez, was a founding member of the New York Chapter of the Young Lords Party. The Young Lords, a group of young, brash, predominantly Puerto Rican youths, provided a template for action answering Abizu Campos’ cries for the use of “weapons of knowledge” to uplift poor communities of color and address social problems by mobilizing community-based activism. Mickey led many social activist activities around the City of New York with the Young Lords and he is whom Hiram credits most with igniting his burning sense of Latino pride and his understanding of the importance of social justice. Mickey Melendez later went on to document his efforts with the Young Lords and his commitment to social justice in his memoirs, “We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights.” Mr. Raldiris is proud to have come full circle with the Young Lords from child supporter and observer to legal advocate by recently representing eight of the most prominent Young Lords pro bono in contract negotiations for the upcoming feature film “Takeover”. The film documents the Young Lords’ ambitious and historic takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to make demands for health justice and a Patient Bill of Rights – a concept considered radical, militant and dangerously revolutionary in 1970 but which now can be found displayed in every hospital in the country.
Watching his Tio’s actions while growing up inspired Hiram to also be an active participant in social activism. In 1987, for example, Hiram participated in a protest march on the steps of City Hall in the City of Middletown to condemn the killing of an unarmed young black man by off-duty City of Middletown policemen at a local movie theater decades before the formation of Black Lives Matter.
Education And Legal Experience
Even before beginning his professional career as an attorney, Hiram was making waves as a writer in New York City. He was a first-grade student at the same elementary school, Blessed Sacrament on Beach Avenue in the South Bronx, the same year that eighth grade student and current United States Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was the Valedictorian. As a 2nd grade student there he won a New York City-wide Creative Writing Poetry Competition sponsored by Fordham University. His poem “Castle in the Sky”, expressing the fear and hope of a child growing up in the turbulent 1960’s was published in the March 28, 1971 Sunday Magazine section of the New York Times.
In the 1970s, Mr. Raldiris’ family was able to move from the Bronx to a home in Middletown, New York. At the time, he was one of the few people of color in the city of Middletown which now boasts a Latino population of greater than 50% and is a more diverse community than when he first arrived in the 1970s. His grandmother, insisted that he receive a Catholic High School education which she helped pay for. In 1980, Hiram graduated from John S. Burke Catholic High School in Goshen and was awarded a New York Regents Scholarship.
Mr. Raldiris refused to wear a tie for this photograph of the school’s Regents Scholarship winners despite the strong protestations of school administrators. Mr. Raldiris advised school administrators that he was being honored for being smart and that he was smart enough to know he didn’t have to wear a tie if he didn’t want to. Thus continued his career as an advocate for change.
In 1982 he graduated from Orange County Community College in Middletown and received an Academic Achievement Award. He then attended the State University of New York at New Paltz while he worked part-time as a professional drummer. He was a drummer and singer/songwriter for the punk rock band “The Eternals” and is proud to count himself among the lucky few who have performed on stage at legendary musical performance venues like the “Dirt Club” in Bloomfield, New Jersey and CBGBs in New York City.
In 1984, he graduated Magna Cum Laude from the State SUNY New Paltz and in 1986, he graduated 4th in his class from the accelerated, two-year SCALE program at California’s Southwestern University School of Law, earning the John J. Schumacher Minority Leadership Scholarship in the process.
Mr. Raldiris (pictured with his parents) received his Juris Doctorate degree on stage at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, California in 1986. True to his New York City and punk roots, he accepted his diploma while wearing his Converse Chucks. Several faculty members and other students disapproved of his attire and felt that it cheapened their educational accomplishment. He didn’t care.
In 1987, knowing that New York would always be his home, he studied, sat for, and passed both the New York and California State Bar Examinations. Hiram then worked in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. There, he authored General Office Memorandum 87-82 which was instrumental to filing deputies since the memo set forth the guidelines for determining when to file Second Degree murder charges in drunk driving homicide cases. Hiram authored an influential article outlining trial strategies for holding drunk drivers guilty of Second-Degree Murder, which was published in the News Journal of the California District Attorneys Association’s 1988 winter edition. These same strategies first developed by Hiram and proposed in the article, were later adopted by District Attorneys across the State of California and are now commonplace in these types of cases.
In California, Mr. Raldiris was the litigation partner of the Los Angeles law firm of Sobol & Raldiris. There, he garnered extensive media coverage in various publications including the Los Angeles Times, Ventura Star Free Press and Camarillo Daily News for prosecuting cases involving personal injury, police brutality, wrongful termination, homeless rights, and under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Hiram is also regarded in California as a pioneer in Insurance Bad Faith law because he prosecuted precedent setting cases during his time in California. In the 1990s, insurance companies increasingly began using the so called “Minor Impact” defense to dispute personal injury claims in motor vehicle accidents based on the amount of the property damage to the vehicle they were in at the time of the accident. They went to great lengths to hire and pay “biomechanical engineers” to come to court and say it was “scientifically impossible” for a client to have sustained “any injury at all” in a given crash based on the amount of property damage to the vehicle. The client was then savaged in Court as a fraud. Unfortunately, the most affected and most aggressively prosecuted cases by insurance companies tended to be Los Angeles’ people of color who lived in the city’s poorest neighborhoods like Watts, Compton, Long Beach and East Los Angeles and most depended on their insurance to cover them in their time of need. Mr. Raldiris, seeing this inequality and injustice, felt a call to arms and took on the insurance industry by filing bad faith insurance cases against all the major automobile carriers. By challenging the legality of their use of the defense against their own policyholders, Hiram established himself as a leader in Insurance Bad Faith law, so much so that a bad faith case he prosecuted for a minister from the City of Long Beach against Allstate Insurance Company received national recognition and was featured in the National Law Journal.
In his distinguished career, he filed and won many other bad faith cases against insurance companies alleging discrimination in claims handling policies and procedures based on an unjustified heightened scrutiny of claims based on Latina citizenship circumstances. Hiram was also successful in fighting for the scope of practice rights of Chiropractic Doctors in bad faith cases seeking injunctive relief to stop Unfair Business Practices that would deny payment to Chiropractic Doctors for legitimate adjunct physical therapy services performed within their scope of practice under California law.
Hiram was a member of the faculty at the annual California State convention of the Consumer Attorneys Association of California (formerly the California Trial Lawyers Association) in San Francisco in 1997. He was honored by having an insurance bad faith case that he had successfully prosecuted selected for a mock trial presentation at the convention. The case was the first of its kind to establish the bad faith liability of an insurance carrier for use of the “Minor Impact” defense against policyholders. His speaking presentation at the convention was videotaped for future use by other attorneys for Continuing Legal Education credits. His legal work in this area was pivotal in curbing Insurers’ use of the defense against uninsured motorist policyholders in California and his influence in the field continues to be felt to this day.
Return To New York
Hiram returned to New York in 1998 and has since been representing personal injury victims in jury trials from Long Island through the Hudson Valley for over twenty years. He has become one of a handful of attorneys in New York State to have secured a seven-figure jury verdict in a one-day Summary Jury Trial. (Moret v. Casimir (Kings Supreme Index Number 19546/12). He also holds the distinction of having the largest jury verdict ever upheld by an Appellate Court in the State of New York for a routine soft tissue neck or back spinal disc injury – $600,000. (Martinez v. MABSTOA, 23 A.D. 3d 302 (1st Dept. 2005) He has developed an expertise in bringing Spinal and Traumatic Brain injury cases to seven figure jury verdicts and settlements. His efforts in securing a $4,700,000 settlement in the Traumatic Brain Injury Labor Law case of Lorenzo v. 343 LLC (Bronx Index Number 24436/05) resulted in one the highest settlements in Bronx County in 2016. In 2017, two of his jury verdicts arising from motor vehicle accidents were recognized by TopVerdict.com as being among the Top 50 in the State of New York. Hiram has successfully handled injury cases in the areas of labor, motor vehicle and premises liability that are recognized by Verdict Search in their Verdicts and Settlements Hall of Fame and holds the honor of being a life member of the elite “Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum” – one of the most prestigious groups of trial lawyers in the United States.
In his personal life, Hiram has continued to nurture his lifelong love of music, poetry, and writing. His punk band, “The Eternals”, were one of the first bands in the Hudson Valley to release a record of original music after the punk/new wave explosion of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. His band has been recognized as First Wave Classic Alternative music recording artists by Marky Ramone, the legendary drummer of the originators of the punk genre, The Ramones, who still plays their record recorded in 1982 on his National Sirius satellite radio station. He remains a lifetime musician, producer, songwriter and recording artist collaborating regularly with other musicians across the country.
Hiram has also performed Spoken Word poetry. As an early financial supporter of the ground-breaking Poets Collective known as the “Readnex Poetry Squad,” his media production company helped to fund early college tours to promote the group. The same group then went on to innovate a workshop for at-risk youth called “Hip Hop and Poetry Saved My Life” that was picked up by the New York State Education Department and taught throughout New York, the country and abroad. Hiram is proud to have been one of the spoken word artists who appeared along with members of the group on a compilation album for Debefore Records performing his poem “Can you relate?”
All in all, Hiram is an accomplished Trial Attorney with over thirty-five years of experience who has secured over five hundred million dollars of jury verdicts and settlements for his clients in New York and California. He is also the President-Elect of the founder and President of the non-profit corporation, Pan Latinos, which will seek to partner with poor communities to address issues of hunger – hunger for food and hunger for knowledge. Hiram credits the love, support and guidance of his parents, Hiram and Elena, for his love of reading, writing and education. He credits his uncle Mickey for the lessons that he taught him, which Hiram knows makes him a more aggressive, compassionate, and empathetic advocate for his clients in and out of Court. As a founder of these organizations and a leader in his field, he is eager to serve New York’s most vulnerable inhabitants by providing legal representation through his law firm of Raldiris & Gonzalez, and by his charitable efforts through his non-profit corporation, Pan Latinos. He is happily married to his wife, Christine, and is the proud father of four, and grandfather of three.
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