About O. Nicole Smith
Nicole Smith handles a wide variety of product liability and personal injury cases at Langdon & Emison, where her strong research and writing skills serve clients across the firm's personal injury and mass tort dockets. She manages petitions and complaints, other pleadings, briefs, and discovery. A National Trial Lawyers 40 Under 40 honoree in civil plaintiff's litigation, Nicole joined the firm in 2018 after clerking for the firm during law school.
Earlier in her career she clerked for judges at the state appellate and county levels and worked for a mass tort firm. She earned a scholarship from the Lafayette County Bar Association for her excellence as a law student at the University of Kansas, where she served on the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy. Nicole is a graduate of the KCMBA's Bar Leadership Academy and is active in the Association for Women Lawyers of Greater Kansas City and other professional organizations.
Proven verdicts and settlements at Langdon & Emison
These results are credited to Langdon & Emison. A result appears under an attorney's own name only when a published source names them as counsel on the case.
A Chittenden County jury returned $43,101,162 against Johnson Controls, the seat manufacturer, after a Vermont woman was left with a catastrophic spinal-cord injury when the single-sided recliner mechanism in her car seat collapsed during a rear-end collision she should have survived. The trial court entered final judgment at $36,948,123, and the appeal was later dismissed by stipulation.
A Jackson County jury held Ford Motor Company liable for a defective fuel tank design after three members of a Missouri family burned to death when their F-150 pickup ruptured and ignited during a 1999 highway collision.
A 1993 federal jury awarded $11.3 million to the sons of Beverly Garner, a passenger killed when a defective fuel pump ignited an engine fire in her 1985 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer, a verdict whose admissibility fight over a former GM insider's testimony traveled all the way to a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the plaintiffs' favor.
A Cook County jury awarded locomotive engineer Christopher Cravatta $5.3 million under FELA after he slipped on oil-coated flooring and an icy step-down gap at Chicago's Union Station, suffered a disc tear requiring spinal fusion, and was permanently disqualified from railroad work.
A federal jury awarded $4.5 million to U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Aaron Eckerberg after a commercial van driver for Inter-State Studio and Publishing Co. blew a stop sign on a Missouri highway and slammed into his truck, causing a fractured thoracic vertebra and traumatic brain injury that ended his career as a combat helicopter pilot.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
