About A. Clifford Edwards
For more than 40 years, Clifford Edwards has practiced law throughout Montana, based in Billings, representing individual Montanans and their small businesses. He has represented Montanans injured through the fault of others, pursued insurance companies that denied benefits owed to policyholders, and sued toxic polluters, including Burlington Northern Santa Fe, over environmental damage to Montanans' properties. His firm has also represented workers injured in Bakken oil field incidents and landowners in disputes with out of state oil companies drilling on their land.
Clifford was named Montana Trial Lawyer of the Year in 1996 and has been listed in the Best Lawyers in America since 1987. In 1996 he was invited to join the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, an organization limited to 500 members nationwide, and he later served as the Academy's Dean. In 2002 he was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers. In 2007 he was named one of the American Association for Justice's top 100 trial lawyers in America, and he has been listed among the top 75 Mountain States Super Lawyers since 2008. He holds the distinction of the largest Montana jury verdict ever affirmed intact, with statutory interest, in the state's history.
Clifford is a third generation Montanan, raised in Denton, Montana. He graduated from Carroll College in Helena and the University of Montana School of Law in Missoula. His sons, Christopher and John, are also attorneys with the firm.
Proven verdicts and settlements
Ralph Hutt worked 18 months at W.R. Grace's asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mill in Libby, Montana in the late 1960s and developed asbestosis decades later. A Cascade County jury found the mill's workers' compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty Company, breached an independent duty to warn him about hazards it tracked through undisclosed chest X-rays, and awarded $36.5 million in February 2022. The trial judge completed Montana's mandatory review of the punitive portion in January 2023 and declined to reduce it, calling the insurer's conduct reprehensible. Maryland Casualty appealed, but the appeal ended in a confidential settlement in 2024, so the verdict itself, not any later court reduction, is what stood.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
