Thomas Demetrios Lambros

Thomas Demetrios Lambros (born February 4, 1930) is a former United States federal judge.

Lambros was born in Ashtabula, Ohio. He was the son of Greek immigrants Demetrios P. and Panagoula (Bellios) Lambros and the youngest of five brothers. He graduated from Ashtabula High School in 1948 and attended Fairmont State College in West Virginia, majoring in pre-law. In 1952 at age 22, he received his LL.B. from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, having accelerated his studies by attending summer and night classes at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Lambros was a claims representative for the Buckeye Union Casualty Company in Akron, Ohio from 1952 to 1953 while in law school. In 1991, Lambros was awarded an honorary doctor of law (LLD) degree from Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio.

After being admitted to the Ohio bar, Lambros joined the United States Army, serving as a law clerk in the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps from 1954 to 1956.

Lambros was in private practice of law in Ashtabula, Ohio from 1956 to 1961 as a trial lawyer in the firm of Lambros & Lambros. In 1960, he was elected at the age of 30 to the Ashtabula County]] Court of Common Pleas. He was reelected in 1966 without opposition. As a common pleas judge, he established a voluntary public defender program to provide free counsel to indigent defendants, as well as a mandatory domestic relations reconciliation program.

President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Lambros to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on June 5, 1967, to a new seat created by 80 Stat. 75. Confirmed by the Senate on August 18, 1967, he received commission the same day. He took the oath of office on August 28, 1967.

Lambros served as a member of the faculty and planning committees for seminars conducted at the Federal Judicial Center in 1970 and 1972 and the U.S. Attorney General's Advocacy Institute in Washington, D.C. He also conducted a pilot project on the use of videotaped trials, in conjunction with the FJC. In the early 1980s, he invented and perfected the Summary Jury Trial, a method of increasing the speed of resolving lawsuits and reducing the costs while continuing citizen involvement in the courts. He was a member of the Judicial Conference Committee on the Operations of the Jury System from 1985 to 1987. Lambros served as chief judge from 1990 until his retirement on February 10, 1995.

He has been associated with several law firms since leaving the bench, most recently with the Warren, Ohio, law firm of Ford, Gold, Kovoor & Simon, Ltd. At these firms he has provided advice to clients on the handling of lawsuits across the country in federal and state courts. He has also been asked to serve as an arbitrator and mediator in a wide variety of cases, including Boston's "Big Dig" and the child sex abuse claims involving the Catholic diocese of Cincinnati.

In the last two years he has added to his activities a distributorship with ViSalus, a company providing health and wellness products, conducting this business with his daughter and he family

Sources

• Thomas Demetrios Lambros at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.