Scott Frost

Scott Frost traces it to a grammar school play built around a real case, with the audience serving as the jury. He cannot recall which side he argued, but his side won, and he never forgot the feeling of persuading a room and making a difference in people’s lives. No one in his family had graduated from college, so he charted his own route, joining the U.S. Army through a program that let him earn a law degree and serve six years on active duty as a judge advocate.

Scott says his focus is making sure clients are taken care of throughout the case, not just at trial, because clients often get lost in the shuffle. He recalls a religious client who had built houses and missions for others, including in Tonga, yet never owned a home; the verdict Scott won let him buy one so his wife would be secure after his death. Because his clients have terminal workplace cancers, Scott says listening to them, and taking time with his own family, keeps him effective in court.

As an Army defense lawyer, Scott represented a young soldier who drove the car in a drive-by shooting. Convinced the client expected a fistfight, not gunfire, Scott argued that officers sworn to follow the rules must acquit if they have any doubt, and the panel found him not guilty. A year later the client called to say he had been present for his first child’s birth; everyone else in that car was in prison. He also recalls a South Carolina mesothelioma trial where he helped a widower shed survivor’s guilt.

Scott’s closing thought is about losses, which he says hurt more than victories feed the ego. Even Clarence Darrow lost the Scopes trial, he notes. A lawyer who can look a client in the face and say he did his best with his training and the facts should hurt, then move on; one who cannot should get more training and watch other trial lawyers. Taking a hard case to verdict and losing still improves the system. “Get back up, strap on your boots and get out there,” he says.

Scott’s results include a $40.75 million mesothelioma verdict in Cook County, Illinois, in 2023; a $32 million secondhand asbestos exposure verdict in South Carolina in 2021; a $9.9 million mesothelioma verdict in Baltimore in 2010; and asbestos verdicts of $9.7 million in Los Angeles in 2008, $8.66 million in California in 2013 and $7 million in a California product liability case in 2016. Settlements include $7.45 million in 2021 and $2.5 million in 2022, both in California, plus a 2018 talc mesothelioma settlement in Bartow, Florida.

Scott served six years as an Army judge advocate, first as a prosecutor in a deployable unit, where he earned the nickname “Judge Dredd,” then as a defense lawyer at Fort Hood, Texas, which he requested for its caseload. His final year was assigned to a U.S. Attorney’s Office trying a double federal capital murder case. While serving in Bosnia, he applied to Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College and became one of the first active-duty JAGs accepted. He now teaches at Keenan Trial Institute and Trial Lawyers University.

Frost Law Firm is in San Pedro, California, where Scott is a partner; the firm’s website is frostlawfirm.com. He is admitted to practice in California, Texas and other jurisdictions and earned his law degree at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. For roughly 30 years since leaving the Army he has represented people harmed by corporate negligence and defective products, mainly asbestos and benzene, in toxic tort, product liability and wrongful death cases.