Robert Kelley
Proven VerdictsAbout Robert Kelley
Robert W. Kelley is a founding partner of Kelley | Uustal Trial Attorneys in Fort Lauderdale. Over his career he has tried more than 100 jury trials in cases involving boating, trucking, and automobile accidents, construction site accidents, medical malpractice, traumatic brain injuries, catastrophic injuries, and defective products, winning more than 25 multimillion dollar verdicts. He gained national attention, including a 60 Minutes segment, for a six-month jury trial against General Motors that exposed an internal value analysis weighing a $2.20 per vehicle fuel tank shield against the cost of fire deaths; the verdict became the largest wrongful death and personal injury judgment ever paid by GM. He was lead trial counsel in Naugle v. Philip Morris, the 2009 Broward County tobacco case that produced a $300 million verdict, reported by the National Law Journal as the seventh largest jury verdict in U.S. history at the time and the largest product liability award in the country that year.
Kelley has been board certified in civil trial law by the Florida Bar for more than 20 years, edits the Jury Selection Blog, and served as an adjunct professor at Nova Southeastern Law Center. He earned his J.D. cum laude from Nova University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Nova Law Review, and a B.S. in physics and astronomy from Vanderbilt University. In 2026 he was inducted into the Broward County Bar Association Hall of Fame. A licensed U.S. Coast Guard captain who worked his way through law school on commercial fishing boats, he founded The Dive Bar, an underwater bar association of scuba certified lawyers dedicated to preserving the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and the Bahamas.
Proven verdicts and settlements
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.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
