Theodore H. Friedman, a high-flying negligence lawyer whose ferocious advocacy ground opponents down, and who was disbarred for unethical conduct — but who won back his law license 16 years later by advocating just as ferociously for himself — died on July 30 at his home in Inverness, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 94.
The cause was heart disease, said Benjamin Meyers, a law associate of Mr. Friedman’s.
Before his license to practice was revoked in 1994, Mr. Friedman was one of New York’s most prominent personal injury lawyers in the 1970s and ’80s. He was known for doggedly raising the same objections at trial after being overruled, for dressing down judges and opposing lawyers, and for reminding fellow officers of the court that he had a Harvard law degree and they did not.
He once told Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, “You’re either corrupt or ignorant, and it doesn’t matter which.”
Mr. Friedman’s aggressiveness won clients big payments, including $11 million for the family of the singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, who was killed in a car accident, and $854,000 for Virginia O’Hare, whose plastic surgeon left her navel off-center during a tummy tuck.
He also represented the writer Sidney Zion in his yearslong suit against New York Hospital over the death in 1984 of his 18-year-old daughter, Libby, a case that publicized young doctors’ grueling schedules and led to limits on their hours.
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