Paul “Chip” Ferguson purportedly brought in nearly $60 million in fees during his 26-year association with Provost Umphrey, often by suing parties tenuously connected with purported victims of alleged injuries.
Blaming those parties was his modus operandi. Why? Because the right parties, if any, often lacked the wherewithal to make Ferguson's legal actions unprofitable.
Stalin's KGB chief, Lavrenti Beria was known for targeting persons for arrest and then coming up with their crimes. Ferguson seems to like targeting parties of means and tieing them to his torts.
He once filed a product liability suit against Ford Motor Co. on behalf of a man whose wife had died when her Explorer rolled over – after hitting an 8-inch 4x4 on Interstate 10 and blowing out a rear tire with tragic results.
Another time, when filing a wrongful death suit on behalf of a woman whose husband died after slamming into a vehicle and an RV blocking both lanes of Highway 69, he named the previous owners of the RV as defendants.
In what was at once his greatest triumph and his most agonizing defeat, he sued Domino’s Pizza on behalf of the estate of a married couple whose vehicle was struck head-on on S. Major Drive in Beaumont by a pizza delivery boy – driving his own car, with worn tires, in bad weather. Ferguson somehow managed to secure a $32 million judgment against Domino's, but lost it on appeal.
No longer associated with Provost Umphrey, Ferguson is still following his sometimes successful business model of seeking out deep-pocketed targets for his lawsuits, no matter how implausible the case and the defendant’s culpability.
He currently is pursuing a $1 million suit against Fedex in Jefferson County District Court on behalf of a man who allegedly tripped, a year and a half ago, over a large package left on his doorstep by the delivery company.
We might wonder whether the plaintiff really fell over the package or not, but we do know that Chip is a trip.