Donald Schlapprizzi – Schlapprizzi Attorneys at Law

Don Schlapprizzi tells the story like this: One day in 1960 or so, he was hustling around downtown St. Louis, wearing his only suit, trying to find a law firm that would hire him. He was fresh out of the U.S. Army, having earned his J.D. in 1959 from Washington University School of Law. Though he had been a star baseball player in college, he now needed a job — and he kept striking out.

Yet on the way back to his car that day, Schlapprizzi got caught in a downpour. He ducked under the overhang of a building. Waiting for the rain to subside, he reached into his jacket pocket and found a piece of paper he had forgotten. It showed the name and address of an attorney that a friend had suggested might be able to help him.

Schlapprizzi then realized: He was standing in front of that very address — 721 Olive Street. He walked inside, and within days, attorneys Charles E. Gray and James W. Jeans hired him.

“It turned out it was a premier civil-trial law firm,” Schlapprizzi said, calling it “divine intervention.”

Schlapprizzi spent about six years there, learning the ropes, then went to work for attorneys Jack Murphy and Byron Roche. The latter had fought as a pilot in World War II and taught him to never be afraid of trying a case.

“I took that to heart,” he said.

In 1974, Schlapprizzi represented a juvenile criminal defendant before the Missouri Supreme Court. On Halloween night in 1971, Jerry Lee McMillian and two friends had used a revolver to rob a man who was fatally shot in the ensuing scuffle. McMillian was charged as an adult and convicted of manslaughter. Schlapprizzi argued before the high court that the authorities had improperly achieved this result by using a statement McMillian had made to a juvenile officer without ever being warned of the consequences.  Schlapprizzi won. (Afterward, he remembers, the youth phoned him and promised to never get in trouble again.)

Schlapprizzi decided to focus exclusively on personal-injury law and, in 1981, hung out his shingle. Perhaps the biggest matter of his career came in the late 1980s: the dioxin contamination of Times Beach and other areas. One of those cases, he recalled, went to trial for a grueling nine months, while others settled. All told, the defendants reportedly paid the plaintiffs tens of millions of dollars.

These days, Schlapprizzi does not handle the bulk of his firm’s trials. The “heavy lifting,” he said, has fallen to his son, Craig, and his daughter, Toni, both of whom have become lawyers. And according to the recent results listed on the firm’s website — $800,000 for a motorcycle crash here, $700,000 for a trucking crash there — the litigating gene has survived into the next generation.

Among his accomplishments, Schlapprizzi has been inducted into the invitation-only International Academy of Trial Lawyers and the American College of Trial Lawyers.

He said he is surprised when he receives praise, for his motivation springs from a different source. As a kid in south St. Louis, Schlapprizzi said, he loathed bullies and got into fistfights. (In fact, one opponent ended up having a son who is now a client.)

That same underdog spirit animates him still.

“My burning [desire] is to be on the side of the injured person who needs help against the powers-that-be,” he said. “That sounds corny today, because everybody’s got their billboards and 1-800 numbers. But I really believe in the rule of law. We haven’t ever forgotten it.”