Sean Claggett

Sean Claggett is a plaintiff trial lawyer in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the founder and lead trial lawyer at Claggett & Sykes Trial Lawyers. He represents plaintiffs in personal injury, wrongful death, premises liability, medical malpractice and sexual abuse cases, and is nationally known for a data-driven approach to jury trials.

Born in Twin Falls, Idaho, and raised in Boise before his family moved to Las Vegas in 1986, Claggett did not set out to become a trial lawyer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2000 and worked in banking at Wells Fargo before deciding to pursue law. He graduated cum laude from the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law in 2003, where he served as a staff editor of the Nevada Law Journal and competed on the National Moot Court team.

After gaining experience at a criminal defense firm, Claggett founded Claggett & Sykes in 2005 with a single client and one employee. In his early years he took nearly any matter that came through the door, building a practice around construction clients. When the housing market collapsed and that work disappeared, he shifted to personal injury, spending years studying trial advocacy before trying injury cases in earnest.

Central to that shift was an intensive commitment to focus groups. Claggett began running dozens a year and worked with his brother to build software that tracked juror responses across cases, convinced the patterns pointed to something predictable. That instinct led him to data-driven jury analysis and a collaboration with law professor and former trial lawyer John Campbell, with whom he and Alicia Campbell co-authored JuryBall, among the first works on using data to predict jury behavior. By 2012 he had committed his firm exclusively to personal injury work.

Claggett built a national reputation for record-setting results in catastrophic injury, wrongful death and abuse cases. In 2023 he served as lead counsel against Acadia Healthcare over the placement of a child with a known predator in foster care, obtaining a $485 million jury verdict believed to be the largest single-plaintiff sexual abuse verdict in the country. His results also include a $145.26 million Denver insurance bad-faith verdict and a $38.75 million verdict for the family of an 11-year-old girl killed by a garbage truck in a Las Vegas crosswalk.

Named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Nevada Justice Association in 2017, Claggett holds an AV Preeminent rating and has taught as an adjunct professor at the Boyd School of Law since 2013. He and trial lawyer Nick Rowley lead the Outer Realm conference, built on the principle that leading attorneys should share their techniques openly and commit a portion of their fees to causes they believe in, and he and his firm established the Claggett & Sykes Charitable Foundation.