About Paul Rathke
Paul Rathke is a personal injury and workers' compensation attorney at Farah & Farah's newly opened Greenville, South Carolina office. He brings decades of legal experience to the firm's growing South Carolina presence, with a career that has spanned both defense and plaintiff work in personal injury and workers' compensation matters.
Rathke began his career on the defense side, working in product liability and auto defense, before transitioning to plaintiffs' practice to advocate directly for injured clients. He later expanded his practice to include workers' compensation alongside personal injury. Senior partner Chuck Farah has described him as combining 'trial toughness with genuine empathy,' with his dual-perspective background giving clients a strategic edge.
Rathke earned his B.S. in Business Administration with concentrations in Finance and Management from the University of South Carolina and his J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law. He is admitted in South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, and is a member of the South Carolina Association for Justice (SCAJ).
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.
