Richard Perque

Shareholder

Biography

Richard Perque is a Shareholder in Daly and Black’s New Orleans office after twenty years of trial practice in Louisiana state and federal courts, including two Supreme Court appointments to the bench of Orleans Civil District Court. 

Richard sat as District Judge Pro Tempore in Division “B” in 2022 and in Division “G”, presiding over the same docket where he had spent his career trying cases. That vantage point shapes how he builds a case, because he knows what persuades a judge at the pretrial hearing and what a jury actually hears when the argument finally lands. 

He has spent more than a decade taking on corporate defendants in mass tort litigation. Richard served on the Plaintiff Steering Committee in the Texas Brine litigation over the 2012 Bayou Corne sinkhole, representing homeowners whose property was destroyed and landowners whose acreage was left worthless. The homeowner class settled in 2015. The land claims resolved against Occidental Chemical Corporation and Vulcan Resources in 2018. Earlier in his career he worked the complex litigation that followed a 2003 natural gas well failure, a case that turned on causation, warranty, and comparative fault. 

Richard was also counsel in Robicheaux v. Caldwell, the Eastern District of Louisiana case challenging the state’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, which ended in the plaintiffs’ favor after Obergefell v. Hodges. He served six years as a commissioner on the Louisiana Commission on Human Rights and, before that, on the City of New Orleans Human Relations Commission. 

He ran his own firm on Camp Street from 2008 until joining Daly & Black. He is admitted in Louisiana, Texas, and Massachusetts; in all three federal districts of Louisiana and the Southern District of Texas; in the Fifth Circuit; and before the United States Supreme Court. Martindale-Hubbell has rated him AV Preeminent since 2011, and he has been a Super Lawyer every year since 2019. 

Richard earned his J.D. from Loyola University New Orleans in 2006 and his B.B.A. from Loyola in 2000, and he studied at the Sorbonne before that. He speaks regularly to the New Orleans Bar Association on trial practice and procedure, and he serves on the board of the Dinerral Shavers Educational Fund.

Licensed

• Louisiana
• Texas
• Massachusetts

Education

• Loyola University New Orleans – New Orleans, Louisiana
• Loyola University New Orleans College of Law – New Orleans, Louisiana
• Sorbonne, University of Paris IV