Michael Schlesinger

A Queens County jury awarded Zeng Guang Lin, an immigrant construction worker who was 20 when he fell 20 feet from a roof at a Bronx job site, $62,060,086.27 on December 17, 2014 after finding property owner Hutch Realty Partners LLC and contractor Gamut Consulting Inc. liable under New York Labor Law for failing to provide him fall protection. Lin suffered a traumatic brain injury along with spinal fractures, rib fractures, a lacerated spleen, a renal hematoma, and lung contusions. Hutch Realty filed post-trial motions and appealed, and while both were pending the case settled for $6,000,000, against a judgment the defense firm on the appeal puts at $68 million. Benedict Morelli tried the case for Lin; trade-press coverage at the time identified his firm as the Morelli, Alters and Ratner Law Firm, the practice known today as Morelli Law Firm PLLC.

A Manhattan jury awarded Mark Perez approximately $102.1 million against Live Nation Worldwide for the traumatic brain injury he suffered when a forklift struck the vendor booth he was building at the Jones Beach Theater, though the courts later cut the award sharply: the Appellate Division reduced pain and suffering to $20 million (still the largest such award ever sustained on appeal in New York), and court records show the case ultimately resolved for about $55 million including interest.

Dominick Tenuto of Staten Island, New York, contracted paralytic polio in 1979 after his five-month-old daughter was given Lederle Laboratories' live oral polio vaccine, Orimune, and the shed virus reached him through a fresh surgical wound while he cared for her. The polio left him a permanent paraplegic. He sued Lederle for failing to warn physicians that a vaccinated child could shed live virus and infect an unvaccinated adult in close contact, a case that took 28 years to reach trial and produced a 1997 New York Court of Appeals ruling on a pediatrician's duty to warn parents. In March 2009 a Richmond County jury found Lederle liable and awarded $22.5 million. The trial court denied Lederle's motion to set aside or reduce the verdict and entered judgment for the full amount on February 17, 2010. No later appellate decision in the case has been published.

After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.