What is
Elawvate?

Meet the Hosts

Elawvate is where the practice of trial law meets personal growth. To succeed as a trial lawyer and build a successful law firm requires practice skills, strategic thinking and some amount of business and entrepreneurial savvy. Elawvate is a place to learn and share skills and strategies for success.

But it is also a place to dig deeper and achieve personal growth.

Those who succeed as trial lawyers at the highest levels cultivate character, principle, integrity, leadership, courage, compassion and perseverance.  

We learn and draw inspiration from those who have achieved this success.

Mostly, we hope Elawvate will be a place where we, as trial lawyers, can communicate honestly with each other, confront challenges and overcome fears and obstacles that sometimes hold us back, and through this process, elevate ourselves--both within and outside the law.

We look forward to taking this journey together.

The
Hosts

Photo of Benjamin R. Gideon
Benjamin R. Gideon Email Benjamin Visit Website

Ben is a founding partner of Gideon Asen LLC—a plaintiff trial firm located in the State of Maine. Ben is fascinated by human nature and politics, loves to study people, read biographies and books written by other lawyers and better understand what makes people tick and how people and groups, especially juries, make important decisions.

Ben grew up in Maine, attended Cornell University and earned his JD from The Yale Law School in 1999.  Following law school, Ben clerked for the Honorable Justice Kermit V. Lipez on the United States District Court, First Circuit Court of Appeals.  Ben began his legal career in the litigation department of the New York City Office of Latham & Watkins. 

In 2003, Ben returned to Maine to join a plaintiff trial firm.  While there, Ben had many great successes—including a landmark $22.5 million verdict in Burlington, Vermont, and more than 27 verdicts and settlements of more than $ 1 million across five separate States—and some disappointing failures.  In 2020, after 17 years at one firm, Ben left to open a new firm, Gideon Asen LLC, which focuses on medical malpractice on behalf of patients and other high-value personal injury cases, industrial and maritime accidents, product liability and toxic tort cases.

In 2019, Ben became only the second lawyer in Maine to be inducted into the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the best 100 plaintiff lawyers in the United States.  In 2020, Ben (along with co-host, Rahul,) were inducted as Fellows in the American College of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only group limited to the top 1% of lawyers.

Ben lives in Freeport, Maine, with his wife Sara, and their three children, Julian, Aleksandr, and Anna Josephine.  Sara recently completed two terms as Maine’s Speaker of the House and was the 2020 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine.

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Rahal Ravipudi
Rahul Ravipudi Email Rahul Visit Website

Rahul Ravipudi is a partner and trial attorney at Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP – a plaintiffs' firm with offices in California and Nevada. Rahul has spent his legal career handling catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases involving commercial vehicles, pedestrians, industrial or construction accidents, utility negligence, dangerous conditions of public and private property as well as cases of sexual abuse and sexual assault. He also represents consumers in class actions against businesses who engage in unfair/illegal business practices and public entities in cases where corporations have endangered the safety, health, property, or comfort of the public.

Rahul currently serves as Plaintiffs' Co-Lead Counsel in the Social Media Cases litigation involving cases of children and young adults harmed or driven to suicide by social media algorithms. He also serves as Plaintiffs Co-Lead Counsel in the Southern California Fire Cases litigation as well as Public Entity Plaintiffs's Co-Lead Counsel in the JUUL Labs Product Cases, representing school districts and other public entities in California involved in litigation against the e-cigarette manufacturer.

A past recipient of the Consumer Attorneys Association of California's Trial Lawyer of the Year award, Rahul has obtained numerous landmark verdicts including a $160.5 million jury verdict in Nevada for a man who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of vicious beating by security personnel and a $46.475 million jury verdict in California for a beginning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu student who suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury while sparring with an instructor who performed a technique on him, rending him an incomplete quadriplegic.

Rahul also serves as an agent for change to ensure that the tragedies experienced by his clients do not happen to another person or family. Two school injury cases arising from the death of a student and led by Rahul have been the catalyst for change in California legislation -- the "Paul Lee School Bus Law" requiring all school buses in the state to be equipped with a child safety alarm system that must be deactivated by the bus driver before departing the bus, and "Alex's Law" requiring a school district or charter school to have at least one adult with valid CPR certification present at an event where children will be in or around a school swimming pool.

A member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, Rahul is also a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, a Fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and a Fellow of the International Society of Barristers. He is an Associate of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) where he is honored to serve on the Executive Committee as well on the Diversity of Membership Committee for the Los Angeles Chapter, and a Board Representative for National ABOTA. He also serves on the Nevada Justice Association Education Committee and as a committee member of the Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Civil Jury Instructions [CACI].

Rahul lives in La Canada, California with his three sons and wife, Smitha, who serves as Chief Executive Officers at USC Care & Ambulatory Care Services at Keck Medicine of USC.

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