Personal Injury Attorneys in New Jersey

After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.

On Nov. 3, 2014, Howmedica Osteonics, doing business as Stryker Orthopaedics, settled the claims of about 3,000 people who had surgery to remove recalled Rejuvenate and ABG II modular hip stems. The deal was announced in the Bergen County courthouse and paired with a parallel proceeding in the federal MDL in Minnesota. It sets a base award per failed implant plus enhancements for complications, with no fixed fund, and was expected to pay out more than $1 billion. Thomas Anapol of Anapol Schwartz sat on the court-appointed Plaintiff Steering Committee for the New Jersey litigation.

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.