David Mazie

An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.

A 43-year-old utility pole that Verizon had been told to remove in 1999 snapped and fell on attorney Maria Moser Meister at a Union City bus stop in 2017, leaving her with a severe brain injury and paralysis. In May 2020 a New Jersey judge approved a $125 million settlement, reported as the largest personal injury settlement in state history.

A Bergen County jury ordered stadium concessionaire Aramark and drunk driver Daniel Lanzaro to pay roughly $135 million after Lanzaro, served beer at Giants Stadium despite visible intoxication, crashed into the Verni family's car and left their two-year-old daughter paralyzed from the neck down. The verdict was reversed on appeal in 2006, and the case settled in 2008 for $25 million in cash and annuities.

A gas explosion at a converted multi-family house in Elizabeth, New Jersey on November 11, 2015 badly burned six members of the Henderson family and, over the following weeks and months, killed three of them. The family sued the gas utility and the property owner, alleging an improperly capped gas line caused the blast. On February 11, 2019, a Union County Superior Court judge approved a $19.2 million settlement, reached in mediation, apportioned among three estates and three surviving claimants.

A boy born at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in 1998 developed cerebral palsy after doctors waited too long to perform a cesarean section despite clear signs of fetal distress. In April 2010, an Essex County jury awarded $18.5 million, and the family recovered $16.75 million under a high-low agreement reached during deliberations.

In February 2013, a jury in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Atlantic City awarded Linda Gross, a registered nurse from Watertown, South Dakota, and her husband Jeffrey $3.35 million in compensatory damages after finding that Ethicon, Inc. and its parent Johnson & Johnson failed to give her implanting surgeon adequate warnings about the Gynecare Prolift vaginal mesh device and made a fraudulent misrepresentation to Gross herself. Days later, the same jury added $7.76 million in punitive damages, bringing the verdict to $11.1 million. Gross had gone through 18 operations to repair the damage after the Prolift was implanted in July 2006. Ethicon and Johnson & Johnson appealed, but the New Jersey Appellate Division affirmed the verdict in March 2016, and the New Jersey Supreme Court denied certification that December, making the $11.1 million verdict final.

A Middlesex County jury found that a Perth Amboy oral surgeon committed malpractice by extracting a 21-year-old man's wisdom teeth without first obtaining medical clearance, despite knowing the patient had a hereditary condition that made routine dental trauma dangerous. Twelve hours after the August 2005 surgery, the patient's throat swelled shut and he suffocated. The jury cleared the referring family dentist and awarded the man's family more than $11 million against the oral surgeon. David Mazie of Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman represented the family at trial.

Brian Coven, a transactional attorney who spent his entire career at Sills Cummis & Gross, went to Summit Medical Group with pneumonia symptoms in January 2019 and again in February 2020, and both chest X-rays showed a lung infiltrate that went unaddressed. He was not diagnosed with cancer until after later losing weight without explanation, and he died of the disease in 2024 at age 68. His estate sued Summit Medical Group and four of its physicians in Essex County, and the group agreed to pay $10.5 million on the physicians' behalf. David Mazie of Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman represented the estate.