One of Jim Krieg’s favorite career memories was deposing the comic Billy Crystal involving breach of contract litigation.
That’s according to a lawyer he mentored for 20 years.
“They got along very well and shared a sense of humor,” said Allison Lane, partner at Duane Morris law firm in San Francisco. “The deposition took about four times longer than it should have because they were cracking each other up.”
Krieg died last week at his Truckee, California home after a battle with cancer.
He was 70 years old.
“I will miss having somebody to check my gut instincts,” Lane told Southern California Record. "It never, ever could hurt and only could help to get his opinion. He was very, very wise.”
Together, they defended lawyers who had been sued for malpractice and even after he retired from Duane Morris law firm in 2017, Krieg continued his role as a mentor to Lane.
“A good chunk of what we do is psychotherapy,” Lane said in an interview. “You really have to understand what makes people tick to handle these kinds of cases and he did. Jim Kreig was enormously sensitive and had a very high EQ.”
Prior to founding the Los Angeles office of Duane Morris, Krieg worked at Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon along with his wife Mary Reilly, who is also of counsel, and four other attorneys. They grew the practice to 45 attorneys in just a decade.
“Given the amount of time that he had spent doing these kinds of cases, the relationship that he had with those in the legal malpractice defense community and plaintiff's lawyers, he always had something to add,” Lane said.
What made Krieg a successful liability defense attorney was curiosity and ability to communicate, according to Lane.
“He had a way of propelling an argument forward and he loved learning new things about these cases and new areas of the law,” she said. “He also had a sixth sense for the way cases were going to roll out. He knew what people were going to do and he was very proactive rather than reactive. He evaluated cases very, very early on and used that as a roadmap for getting to where we needed to go.”
Krieg earned his J.D. in 1976 magna cum laude from Boston University and his A.B. in 1971 from Princeton University.
"Jim and I got along well because of a shared sense of humor and a shared intellectual curiosity," Lane said. "He was incredibly well-read and could talk about anything intellectually. Those two attributes are what made him such a great legal malpractice lawyer and mentor."