40 years of family legacy: Missouri law firm rises to national prominence in aviation law

Throughout its 40-year history, Robb & Robb Attorneys at Law has made a name for itself as a prominent aviation law firm. It has tackled high-profile national cases, including representing the family of Kobe Bryant after he and his daughter were killed in a helicopter crash.

The firm was started by Missouri Lawyers Media power list honorees Gary and Anita Robb in 1984. Gary and Anita Robb both spent time at large defense firms before deciding to create their own practice where they could focus on wrongful death and personal injury law.

“We were defending products liability cases and medical malpractice cases and we both had a lot of frustration and moral objection to doing that on some of the cases that we were forced to represent, we felt like we won for the wrong reasons, not because we were right, but just because we sometimes out lawyered or out financed the plaintiffs,” Anita Robb said. “So, 40 years ago, Gary and I decided to start our own firm, and it was our goal to represent only victims who were deserving and who were innocent and have been wrongfully injured or killed.”

Since the firm’s founding, their son Andrew Robb and his wife Brittany Sanders Robb have been named partners and will take over when Anita and Gary retire.

“Prior to joining the firm, my wife, Brittany and I both worked in New York City at big law firms, also on the defense side and had a similar experience where we felt like we wanted to maybe take a change in direction,” Andrew said. “We have a really great thing going here with four of us practicing together. We really are, when it comes down to it, a family helping other families in their greatest time of need.”

Among the families the firm has helped are the Bryants. After basketball star Kobe Bryant and his daughter were killed in a 2020 helicopter accident, the Robbs represented the surviving family members.

In 2021 the case was settled before trial after the Bryants argued the crash was caused by the pilots acting in a reckless careless manner.

Earlier this year the firm obtained a record setting wrongful death settlement in a Las Vegas helicopter crash.

“We got a $100 million settlement for one single wrongful death of a of a victim of a helicopter crash who was burned horribly and that was a record in Nevada, but it also was a nationwide record for the largest pre-trial settlement for a wrongful death in the history of the country,” Anita said.

As Missouri Lawyers Media previously reported, Robb & Robb represented the parents of Jonathan Udall, a 31-year-old English tourist who was among five people killed as a result of a 2018 helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon. They argued that if the helicopter company had retrofitted the aircraft with crash-resistant fuel tanks, he would have survived the crash.

Also this year, the firm obtained a $116 million verdict in New York for the family of a young man who was killed on a “doors off” helicopter tour. The passengers on the helicopter were unable to escape and drowned because instead of a safe release system, they were strapped in with a jerry-rigged restraint system that trapped them.

“We really hope to have an impact on this budding industry of doors off helicopter flights across the country and actually around the world, to make sure that if they’re going to do that, that this is a lesson to do it safely.”

When Andrew and Brittany Robb take over the firm someday and usher in its next era, they hope to continue the firm’s current mission.

“[We] just want to continue, like mom said, to try to make the world a safer place, one case at a time,” he said. “That’s always been the firm’s objective and that’s what Brittany and I want to try to do going forward too.”