Nick Rowley

Nicholas C. Rowley is the founder of Trial Lawyers for Justice, a national plaintiff firm with offices in Los Angeles and other cities across the country. He represents people and families harmed by medical malpractice, vehicle crashes, corporate misconduct and other serious injuries, and the firm reports more than $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements across his career.

Born in Storm Lake, Iowa, Rowley grew up in Nogales, Arizona, and small-town Iowa and was supporting himself as a child. He joined the U.S. Air Force at 17 and spent six years as a medic in the Air Force and the Army. Military education benefits helped him finish a bachelor’s degree in social psychology by 19 and begin law school at 20. He is admitted in nine states, including California, Iowa and Washington, and has appeared pro hac vice in many others.

His reported results include a $412 million medical malpractice verdict, a $131 million verdict for a car crash victim, a $74.5 million birth injury verdict and a $50 million verdict against Starbucks for a young man who was badly burned. In Washington, he helped win several verdicts against Monsanto for students, parents and teachers exposed to PCBs at a public school. One of his 2025 verdicts was named by Courtroom View Network among the year’s 10 most impressive plaintiff verdicts.

Rowley co-founded Trial by Human, a nonprofit trial-skills program for plaintiff lawyers, and founded Justice Watch, which monitors the judiciary. He helped drive the ballot initiative that led California to raise the MICRA cap on medical malpractice damages, work cited when Capitol Weekly named him to its Top 100. He has written the books Running With the Bulls, Trial by Human and Damages Evolving, hosts the podcast Brutal Honesty, and is teaching an advanced trial skills session at TLU Live Huntington Beach 2027.