About Richard Lantinberg
Richard Lantinberg is a Jacksonville Beach, Florida personal injury attorney at Farah & Farah, with more than three decades of experience representing injured consumers, defrauded investors, and business clients in both state and federal courts. His practice has focused heavily on tobacco product liability, where he has represented hundreds of injured smokers in litigation against major cigarette manufacturers and obtained multimillion-dollar verdicts and settlements on their behalf.
In 2017, Lantinberg secured Florida's largest product liability verdict of the year — $36 million in Wallace v. R.J. Reynolds. He has been recognized as a Florida Super Lawyer in class actions and mass torts, has been featured in 904 Magazine as one of Jacksonville Beach's top lawyers, and is rated by Martindale-Hubbell.
He earned his B.S.B.A. in Accounting and Finance from American University and his J.D. from the University of Florida College of Law. He is admitted to The Florida Bar.
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.
