About Laura Smith Hatch
Laura Smith-Hatch is an attorney at Kelley | Uustal Trial Attorneys who focuses her practice on mass tort litigation, including cases involving defective medical devices, dangerous drugs, and medical negligence. After law school she advocated for juvenile justice in New Orleans and worked with Kenneth Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility before joining Hanly Conroy Bierstein Sheridan and Hayes in 2011, where she spent two years on the Plaintiff Steering Committee for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation. She has since contributed to major mass tort dockets involving Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants, Actos bladder cancer claims, transvaginal mesh, hernia mesh, IVC filters, and Taxus stents, serving on the Plaintiff Steering Committee in the Cook Medical IVC filter MDL in the Southern District of Indiana and on the Law and Motion Committee in the Bard IVC filter MDL in Arizona.
Smith-Hatch earned her J.D. from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, where she was president of the Student Bar Association and completed an international law exchange at the University of Vienna, and a B.S. in public relations from the University of Florida. She is a member of the California Bar and the American Association for Justice. A mother of three, she serves as Dania Beach's Arts and Culture Commissioner by appointment of the City Council and is active in the Dania Beach Women's Club.
Proven verdicts and settlements at Kelley | Uustal Trial Attorneys
These results are credited to Kelley | Uustal Trial Attorneys. A result appears under an attorney's own name only when a published source names them as counsel on the case.
A Broward County jury awarded Robert and Connie McGee and their daughter $60 million in 1998 after the fuel tank of the station wagon they were riding in was punctured and exploded in a low speed collision, killing the couple's 13 year old son and severely burning the three of them. General Motors defended the tank as safe. The jury found the automaker liable for the burns caused by the fire and declined to award punitive damages. A trial court setoff briefly cut the family's recovery to about $33 million for the fault the jury assigned to the driver whose trailer broke loose, but Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal vacated that reduction, holding that comparative fault does not reduce damages for the enhanced injuries caused by a defective fuel tank, and the full verdict was entered by amended final judgment in 2003. A second appeal, decided in 2004, confirmed that interest runs from the May 18, 1998 verdict date.
Marc Laspes, a 26-year-old Navy veteran, was driving near Sheridan Street and North 35th Avenue in Broward County on August 2, 2017 when his vehicle collided with a car driven by Talena Castillo. He woke in a hospital bed three days later unable to feel his legs, paralyzed from the chest down by a burst fracture in one of his vertebrae. He sued Castillo for negligence in Broward County Circuit Court, case CACE-17-017741, and on July 13, 2021 the jury returned a verdict of $35 million. No appeal, remittitur or reduction of the verdict has surfaced in Florida's appellate record or in later coverage of the case.
Dr. Alberto A. Casaretto, Sr., a Fort Lauderdale nephrologist, used Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder daily for close to five decades and was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma in October 2017. He and his wife sued Johnson & Johnson in Broward County Circuit Court in 2018, alleging the company's talc was contaminated with asbestos; he died of the disease in 2022 at 79, and his son continued the case as a wrongful death claim. After a trial that opened in late September 2025, a Broward County jury found Johnson & Johnson liable on design defect and manufacturing defect claims and awarded the family $20,000,000 in compensatory damages on October 28, 2025. Johnson & Johnson has said it will appeal, arguing its talc does not contain asbestos or cause cancer; no appellate ruling has been reported.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
