'Fairdale Destroyer': Louisville attorney Chad Gardner racks up million-dollar verdicts

It was like something out of a Netflix thriller: Just a few weeks before trial, an anonymous whistleblower left a letter for Chad Gardner’s client, the widow of beloved former Judge Daniel Schneider.

Signed “concerned citizen,” the note said Schneider died at the Louisville Masonic Home − where he had gone to recover from a hip infection − because he didn't get a single dose of a powerful antibiotic he was supposed to be given daily.

It seemed like strong ammunition to use at trial, but Gardner knew it would be inadmissible unless he could identify the writer and get her to agree to testify, so he went to work, said since-retired Judge Charles Cunningham, to whom the lawsuit was assigned.

Relying on word of mouth, including from a Masonic Home employee he met in a smoky Southern Indiana mobile home, Gardner identified the whistleblower. When he then met her at a McDonald’s and showed her the letter, she broke down in tears, admitted she had written it and agreed to testify. She never had to, though, because the case was quickly settled for $13 million for Joann Schneider and her sons.

The 2019 settlement, which included $1.9 million from another defendant, put Gardner, who was already well-regarded, firmly on the map as a star among plaintiff trial attorneys.

Since then he has won four verdicts at trial totaling $119 million. And those wins have vaulted him into the stratosphere.

The Kentucky Trial Court Review, the Bible of the state’s trial lawyers, has called Gardner − son of legendary Fairdale High boy’s basketball coach Lloyd Gardner − the “Fairdale Destroyer.”

Retired Judge Barry Willett, now a mediator, jokes that he tells young plaintiff attorneys to announce on the eve of trial that Gardner is joining their team to scare defendants into settling.

Given Gardner’s recent results, Willett said, “I don’t know why anyone would try a case against him.”

The mega-verdicts Gardner won by himself or with co-counsel include:

• $50.5 million for the widow and three children of ironworker Joey Snyder, who was asphyxiated as he hung from steel cables over the Ohio River making repairs at the Kosmos Cement Co. Gardner won the verdict despite evidence the defendants said showed Snyder was high on amphetamines and opiates. Gardner kept that evidence out, arguing there was no proof Snyder was impaired. The verdict included $25 million in punitive damages after Gardner told the jury “Kosmos didn’t fix anything until it broke because management applied pressure to keep production going.”

• $44.4 million for the widower and three children of Ashley Nicole Phelps, who died of pneumonia after her oncologist at U of L’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center failed to give her the antibiotic Bactrim after stem cell treatment for Hodgkin's disease – as is routine in such procedures. Gardner won despite parachuting into the case at the last minute at the invitation of the plaintiff's team. The verdict was the largest compensatory award ever in Kentucky in a single plaintiff personal injury case, according to Kentucky Trial Court Review. The raw verdict was reduced to $17.8 million because of a settlement that already had been paid by one defendant.

• $21.3 million against Bowling Green’s Graves Gilbert Clinic, for cutting an elderly woman’s bowel during hernia surgery and failing to discover the error for 10 days, poisoning Alice Duff’s blood and causing her to go legally blind. The clinic claimed the verdict was so large it had to go into bankruptcy. The verdict included $8 million for Alice’s husband, Dean, who gave up a second career to care for his wife.

Gardner's Fairdale roots part of his success

Willett, the retired judge and himself a former trial lawyer, said Gardner doesn’t have a secret to his success, except for hard work.

“He finds witnesses other lawyers don’t,” Willett said. “And he has an innate, God-given ability to communicate with jurors.” The lawyer who invited him to join the Phelps case, Mark Alcott, calls him the "jury whisperer.”

Fellow lawyers, including adversaries, say his Fairdale roots allow him to speak directly and simply to working class jurors, especially ones from the South End.

“When he talks to the jury, they see him as just a normal guy who has explained the facts in an honest way,” said Jake Grey, one of three associates on “Team Gardner," as Gardner calls his law firm. “They don’t think he’s trying to trick them into anything.”

In a long interview with The Courier Journal, Gardner put his relationship to Fairdale this way: “Fairdale is my life.”

Chadwick Gardner, 53 (he calls himself Chad in court), said his mentors, former Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Martin Johnstone and the late Tom Conway, a giant in the trial bar, both came from Fairdale. And Gardner said he became a lawyer because of them.

Louisville attorney Keith Kamenish, who shared office space with Gardner for about 20 years, said Gardner’s beginnings in the modest and sometimes maligned Fairdale community have motivated him.

“He takes nothing for granted,” Kamenish said.

Gardner attributes his success in part to "seeing myself more like the people I represent and in the jury box than as a lawyer. Coming from Fairdale has helped this come naturally."

Kamenish also said Gardner is “smarter than a whip.”

At Fairdale High, from which he graduated in 1988 as valedictorian, Gardner was a wunderkind who never missed a day of class and won dozens of college scholarships.

His father, known as Pinky, said when he asked Chad one day as a ninth-grader if he had finished his homework, his son was insulted.

“He said, 'Ask me that if I ever get a B,'” Pinky Gardner recalled. He never did. He got straight A's the rest of high school.

To improve himself, Gardner would ask his English teacher every day at school to give him a new vocabulary word. (Gardner admits he was a bit of a nerd.)

He said he briefly played basketball for his father but decided to quit because “I was terrible.” His father made him stay on the team long enough to cut him, though.

“I wanted to be able to tell parents of other kids I cut that I cut my own son,” his father likes to say.

Gardner went on to Centre College, where he also was valedictorian.

After earning his law degree at the University of Louisville, he cut his teeth in Conway’s office and practiced on his own behind a barber shop in Fairdale.

In his first case to make it into The Courier Journal, Gardner showed an off-duty Louisville Metro Police officer who ran into 22-year-old Sarah Bearden, killing her, was driving at 83.6 mph. Gardner recovered a $700,000 settlement for her estate.

Later, he wrested $6 million from Metro Louisville for victims of the 2009 train derailment at the Louisville Zoo, including one boy who had to undergo eight surgeries.

Gardner has made mistakes. Willett said he had to throw out one of Gardner’s cases because he failed to name a “personal representative” for an estate, a technical requirement under the law.

Gardner also readily admits defense lawyers have sometimes gotten the better of him, including in his first trial, a car wreck case, in 1996 or 1997. “I got my butt kicked,” he said.

More recently, in a case against LG&E in which two children were killed in a house fire, Gardner said after opposing counsel “filleted my expert,” Gardner voluntarily dismissed his case against the utility because defense lawyer Jeremiah Byrne showed his theory of the case was wrong. Gardner collected against other defendants

Defense lawyers, including Byrne, said Gardner is so effective because he cares deeply about his clients and juries see that. (In his closing argument against Graves Gilbert Clinic, he told the jury he “loved” clients Alice and Dean Duff.)

Byrne, a partner at Frost Brown Todd, said he has told his wife to hire Gardner if he is ever injured or killed.

Kamenish, who shared space with Gardner, said he turns into a “bulldog” if he senses a client’s injury or death was caused by injustice.

“Unlike attorneys who advertise they stand up to big insurance companies and corporations,” Kamenish said, “Chad does it.”

Gardner keeps Fairdale ties

Today, Gardner, who is a divorced father of three, lives in Eastern Jefferson County's Wolf Creek subdivision and practices in a two-story office in Prospect. But he maintains strong ties to Fairdale.

He bestows at least one college scholarship a year on a graduating Fairdale High student, supports a Christmas shopping spree for student-athletes from low-income families, and his firm sponsors the King of the Bluegrass basketball tournament founded by his father.

Gardner has yet to collect a dime on this three eight-figure verdicts, though he acknowledged he doesn’t hurt for money.

He divides time between his $565,470 house in Wolf Creek, a condo on Hilton Head Island and a cabin on Nolin River Lake.

He said he drives a Ram 1500 pickup “most of the time” but sheepishly admitted he owns a Porsche. “I am not a Porsche kind of a guy,” he said. “I don’t even know how to pronounce it.”

Gardner said he bought the luxury sports car only because the Schneiders asked him to after the settlement to honor Dan Schneider, a “car guy” who loved Porsches.

Gardner teared up at his memory of the judge. He said he bought a vanity plate for the car that says “DAS-6” − Schneider’s initials and his division in Jefferson Circuit Court.

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Gardner said the things that are most important to him include his family by blood and his law firm family, as he describes it. He said his longtime paralegal is his “best friend.”

Tearing up again, he said his mother, Sandy Milburn, taught him the importance of “being there for people. “ He said she postponed a career to be there for him and his siblings until she later went back to school to get a degree in pediatric physical therapy. He said his father taught him the value of "discipline, hard work, a competitive spirit, doing for others and giving more than you take."

Gardner’s young associates said he is demanding but generous (he recently put their names on the side of his building), and an idiosyncratic perfectionist.

He insists all documents be typed in Calibri size 12 font – and in Corel WordPerfect. (“I hate Microsoft Word,” he said.) The good stuff in depositions must be highlighted in yellow and the great stuff in pink, attorney Savannah Nolan said.

His biggest peeve is the phrase “reach out to you,” as in “reach out to me if you have any question,” and he has banned it in the office.

“Sometimes I include it in my memos just to see if he notices and is actually reading what I give him," Nolan said. "And of course, he always notices.”

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 396-5853 or awolfson@courier-journal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville attorney Chad Gardner winning million-dollar verdicts