The Anti-Terror Attorney: Andrew Hall’s Life Is a Story of Survival Against Tyranny
Andrew Hall is now taking on Cuba’s Castros. Photo
by Tom Salyer.
One could say that for Andrew C. Hall, life has always been a battle against terror. Hall, founder of Hall, Lamb and Hall in Miami, is credited as the first attorney to win a case in the United States against a country labeled a state sponsor of terrorism.
Though he specializes in the trial of complex commercial cases, Hall has successfully sued Iraq, Libya and the Republic of Sudan—and brought in roughly $60 million, he says—for acts of terror that injured or cost American lives over the past two decades.
But then he’s dealt with terror from before he even was born. He almost didn’t make it past the first few hours of life.
Born in a coal cellar in Poland in the midst of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II, Hall weighed in at a couple of pounds. He probably wouldn’t have survived without an emergency blood transfusion from his mother.
The very circumstance of his birth plays into the cases Hall chooses and the manner in which he pursues them. He uses whatever avenue is available to achieve his goal in making terrorists actually pay for the carnage they wreak. It often takes years and much maneuvering in both the courts and Congress before he sees results.
Hall says the longest fight was 11½ years on the Iraq case. “On the Libya case it was five years, and seven years for the USS Cole. Clearly these matters require constant perseverance,” he says.
“Other than the complexities involved,” Hall says, “terrorism litigation matters are not so dissimilar from the other areas of my practice. In fact, there is a synergy between these cases and other litigation matters in which I am involved, namely securities and complex commercial litigation. And while the cases are quite time-intensive, they have their own time schedule, allowing us to shift resources as necessary—which is what we do with all cases.”
James Cooper-Hill, a solo practitioner from Rockport, Texas, who has teamed up with Hall on numerous anti-terror cases, calls Hall “very simply speaking, the best trial attorney I’ve ever seen.”
Click here to read the rest of “The Anti-Terror Attorney” from the September issue of the ABA Journal.
