Thomas Wallin

California nursing home abuse and neglect attorney

Thomas Wallin represents families across California whose loved ones were neglected or abused in a nursing home. He has practiced law for more than 25 years, and his practice is built on a background most plaintiff's attorneys do not have: before he represented families, he defended the facilities.

He started on the other side

Thomas began his career in 1998 at Elliot Snyder & Reid, a Redlands defense firm, where he defended medical malpractice and nursing home cases for facilities and their insurance companies. He took and defended the depositions, wrote the motions, sat with the claims adjusters, and prepared the trials. His partner, Michael Young, worked those same cases at the same firm. Together they learned how nursing homes respond when a resident is hurt: how the records get assembled, what the insurers tell their lawyers to concede and to fight, and where the weak points in a defense usually sit.

That is the perspective Thomas brings to every case now. When a home tells a family that a pressure sore was unavoidable or a fall was no one's fault, he has heard those explanations from the inside and knows how to test them against the facility's own documents.

A trial lawyer's path

After his years on the defense side, Thomas spent more than a decade in the courtroom. As a Deputy Public Defender in Riverside County he carried a full felony caseload, tried cases to juries, and argued motions daily. He later ran his own trial practice, and from 2006 to 2014 he served as a Judge Pro Tem for the Superior Court of California, County of Riverside, hearing more than a hundred cases a day: ruling on motions, arraigning defendants, and imposing sentences. Few attorneys who sue nursing homes have also run a courtroom from the bench. Since 2014 he has represented injured people as founder of Wallin Law Firm, whose practice includes nursing home abuse, personal injury, and mass tort cases.

Thomas was selected each year from 2009 through 2019 for The National Trial Lawyers: Top 100 Trial Lawyers, and from 2016 through 2019 he was named to the Nursing Home Trial Lawyers Association: Top 10 (Top 10 Nursing Home Trial Lawyers). Both are invitation-only professional organizations. Selection is not a guarantee of a result in any case.

Focus

Thomas concentrates on nursing home and elder abuse cases: pressure sores, falls and fractures, dehydration and malnutrition, sepsis and untreated infections, medication errors, and wrongful death under California's Elder Abuse Act. He handles cases in every county in the state.

Credentials

• Admitted: State Bar of California, 1998. Bar #195616, active and in good standing.
• Law school: J.D., Southwestern University School of Law, Los Angeles, completed through the school's 23-month accelerated program. Recipient of the Paul Wildman Scholarship.
• Undergraduate: University of California, Irvine, graduated cum laude.
• Judicial service: Judge Pro Tem, Superior Court of California, County of Riverside, 2006 to 2014.
• Public service: Deputy Public Defender, Riverside County, 2003 to 2005. United States Coast Guard, 1988 to 1990, followed by two years in the active reserves; his college education was earned on the GI Bill.
• Education community: Advisory Board Member, Paralegal Studies Program, College of the Canyons, 2017 to 2020.

Approach

Thomas builds cases from the records outward, the way he once defended them: the staffing sheets, the repositioning and medication logs, the inspection citations, and the facility's own timeline compared against the hospital's. He does not accept a home's first version of events, and he keeps families informed at each step rather than leaving them to wait.

Results

Over the course of his career, Thomas and the firm have recovered millions of dollars for elder abuse victims and their families. Every case turns on its own facts, and no result is ever guaranteed.

Reviewer of record

Thomas is the named attorney who reviews the educational content on this site, including the practice-area pages, the county guides, and the California Nursing Home Report Card. The goal is simple: families researching a nursing home should be able to trust that a California attorney stands behind what they read here.

Talk to Thomas

If your loved one was harmed in a California nursing home, call (888) 999-0169 for a free, confidential consultation, or send a message. The firm meets with clients at offices across the state, including Long Beach, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and Oakland. You pay nothing unless the firm recovers for you.

Disclaimer: this page is attorney advertising. It is not legal advice, and contacting the firm does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.