About James Farson
James Ahlers Farson is a personal injury attorney with Farah & Farah, working from the firm's Athens, Georgia office, with more than three decades of legal experience and a 33-year bar admission record. He has been licensed in Florida and Georgia and represents clients in personal injury, insurance disputes, and related matters.
Farson was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve and served in the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps. As the Navy's Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, he handled civilian prosecutions in federal district court. After leaving active service in 1997, he developed practices in both personal injury and insurance law and ran a successful private practice for approximately 20 years before joining Farah & Farah.
Farson earned his B.S. in Business Finance from Miami University of Ohio and his J.D. from the University of Kentucky School of Law. He also earned a Master's degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 2018. He is admitted to The Florida Bar, the State Bar of Georgia, and the Kentucky Bar Association.
Proven verdicts and settlements at Farah & Farah
These results are credited to Farah & Farah. A result appears under an attorney's own name only when a published source names them as counsel on the case.
A federal jury in Jacksonville found for Judith Berger, a forty-year smoker with end-stage COPD, on all claims against Philip Morris USA in September 2014. It awarded $6,250,000 in compensatory damages and $20,760,000.14 in punitive damages. The trial court set aside the fraud claims and the punitive award, but the Eleventh Circuit reinstated them in 2018 and held in 2021 that the punitive award was not unconstitutionally excessive.
A federal jury in Jacksonville found that cigarettes made by R.J. Reynolds were a legal cause of a Florida man's death from lung cancer in 1996. It awarded his widow $5.9 million in compensatory damages and assigned 27.5 percent of the fault to him, which produced a judgment of $4,277,500. In October 2014 the Eleventh Circuit reversed over the exclusion of evidence of his alcohol use and remanded for a new trial, and the case settled on undisclosed terms in January 2015 before any retrial.
A Duval County jury returned a $1.83 million verdict against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in the wrongful-death claim of Kenneth Hiott, a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer; the trial court reduced the award to $730,000 based on comparative fault, and Florida's First District Court of Appeal affirmed in January 2014.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
