Victor B. Maddox

Vic has a broad range of appellate experience. He has conducted dozens of appellate arguments before the various state and federal courts, including the Sixth, Ninth and Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Courts of Indiana and Kentucky. He recently was retained by a major reinsurer to take over the representation of a firm in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, after the client had been found liable for a $27 million judgment in an earlier trial. In the Indiana Supreme Court, he has argued on behalf of a class of bondholders contesting an Indiana municipal bond authority’s controversial decision to escrow a low interest rate bond issue to maturity. Before the Kentucky Supreme Court, he successfully sought and obtained reversal of a decision that would have denied a client from developing a major retail and commercial center in Jefferson County.

Vic has also represented various clients on significant constitutional matters, drawing on his experience as a member of the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance in the mid-1990s and his earlier service as counsel to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He argued on behalf of the Minority Leader of the Kentucky Senate in a challenge on state constitutional grounds to the 1996 redistricting by the Kentucky General Assembly. Later, when a gubernatorial candidate brought an equal protection clause challenge to Kentucky’s public financing law for gubernatorial elections, Vic represented the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance in the United States Supreme Court. More recently, he successfully brought an equal protection challenge on behalf of a group of citizens challenging the failure of the state General Assembly to enact constitutionally valid redistricting legislation following the 2000 federal census.

Before helping found FMHD in 1995, Vic had for eight years been partner at one of Kentucky’s largest law firms. There he played a key role in various major complex proceedings, including the coordination of multiple party joint defense arrangements and the management and trial of multidistrict litigation. For example, during 1989 and 1990, Vic was one of the lead trial attorneys for a coalition of approximately 100 defendants in a Multi-District Litigation proceeding in the federal court for the District of Puerto Rico arising from a fire at the San Juan Dupont Plaza Hotel. Initially, Vic served as one of the lead trial counsel for a group of third-party plaintiffs seeking to pierce the corporate veil of a complex web of partnerships and corporations involved with the ownership of the hotel in which the fire had taken place. That phase of the litigation resulted in a successful ten-week jury trial. Later, Vic coordinated the discovery and served as co-lead counsel at trial and was principally responsible for the trial defense of the toxicology and pathology components of the case, as well as for the defense of several high-profile product defendants. That phase of the litigation led to more than fifteen months of a federal jury trial, as well as appeals to the First and Ninth Circuits on novel issues involving the reach of the District Court’s subpoena power in order to compel trial testimony by satellite from remote locations.