About Matthew Schiappa
Matthew A. Schiappa is a partner at Lomurro Munson LLC concentrating in personal injury, medical malpractice, and product defect litigation, and also representing petitioners in workers' compensation matters. He earned his J.D. from Seton Hall University in 1996 and his B.A. from Boston University in 1993. He was admitted to the New York and New Jersey Bars in 1997 and received his certification as a Certified Civil Trial Attorney from the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2013.
He is also admitted in Pennsylvania and in the U.S. District Courts for the District of New Jersey and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, as well as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Third Circuits. Before joining the firm, he defended asbestos, toxic tort, and construction defect cases at Clemente Mueller, P.A., then developed a plaintiffs' medical malpractice practice at the Galex Law Firm before that firm merged into Lomurro in 2012. He served as co-counsel with Donald and Jonathan Lomurro in the 2023 Fiore v. Highlight Motor Freight trial, which resulted in a $17.6 million verdict.
Proven verdicts and settlements
A Monmouth County jury awarded John Fiore $6.5 million in compensatory damages and $11.15 million in punitive damages after a drug-impaired Highlight Motor Freight driver caused a multivehicle crash on Route 440 in Perth Amboy that killed another motorist and left Fiore unable to work.
Philip Pantano, a refrigeration mechanic at a shared shipping yard on Doremus Avenue in Newark, lost his left foot after a forklift operator on an affiliated trucking company's payroll dropped a container generator on it in November 2013. A Middlesex County jury in December 2019 found the operator 70 percent at fault and awarded $1,230,000, molded to $861,000. The trial judge then threw the verdict out on the theory that the operator was a borrowed employee of Pantano's own employer, which would have barred the claim. The Appellate Division reinstated the verdict in 2022, and the New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed in June 2023, ordering a final judgment for the Pantanos.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
