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About Jerome Block
Jerome H. Block is a partner at Levy Konigsberg LLP who specializes in high-stakes plaintiff litigation nationwide. He has secured multi-million dollar verdicts against major corporations in asbestos, tobacco, and institutional sexual abuse cases. He earned his Juris Doctor from Emory Law School, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor of the Emory Law Journal and was inducted into The Order of the Coif. He clerked for two years for the Honorable Jean C. Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
He gained national prominence in Johnson and Johnson baby powder asbestos cases and appeared in CNN's 2023 documentary "Shaken: Baby Powder on Trial." He has been recognized by Best Lawyers in every edition since 2005, named to Super Lawyers, and was named Lawyer of the Year in Product Liability by Best Lawyers in 2021. He currently leads sex abuse litigation involving hundreds of survivors in juvenile detention centers across Illinois, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Proven verdicts and settlements
A Manhattan jury found in May 2019 that asbestos in Johnson's Baby Powder and Shower to Shower caused Donna Olson's pleural mesothelioma, awarding $25 million in compensatory damages and $300 million in punitive damages, the largest talc verdict in New York history. Jerome H. Block of Levy Konigsberg tried the case. The trial court cut the award to $120 million in November 2020, and on July 19, 2022 the Appellate Division, First Department reversed outright and directed judgment for Johnson & Johnson, holding that the plaintiffs' medical expert never gave a scientific expression of the minimum lifetime exposure needed to cause the disease.
A Boston jury awarded $43.1 million on October 12, 2018 to the widow and son of Louis Summerlin, a former brake mechanic and lifelong menthol smoker who died of lung cancer in 2015 at 73, finding R.J. Reynolds' Salem and Kool cigarettes defectively designed and the company guilty of fraud, while clearing Philip Morris and an auto parts distributor. Jerome Block of Levy Konigsberg tried the case with Michael Shepard of Shepard Law. It was the first trial in the country to take a lung cancer claim to verdict against both tobacco and asbestos defendants, and the largest verdict in New England that year.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
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