Similar personal injury attorneys in New York
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
About Elliot Shields
Elliot Shields is a civil rights and personal injury litigator at Roth & Roth, LLP with broad trial and appellate experience. He has handled personal injury, police misconduct, prisoners' rights, wrongful conviction, First Amendment, Freedom of Information Law, and protest-related cases, representing hundreds of clients in New York City and Rochester in constitutional claims of false arrest, malicious prosecution, and excessive force. In November 2025 he was trial counsel in Harger Da Silva v. New York City Transit Authority, an $81.7 million federal verdict in the Eastern District of New York, the first US verdict holding a transit system liable for failing to install platform barriers. Elliot has won several precedential FOIL decisions on access to police body-worn camera footage and attorney's fees, including the request that produced the video of Rochester police officers killing Daniel Prude, and he is lead counsel in more than thirty cases arising from the 2020 racial justice protests in Rochester.
His injury verdicts include $5,632,962 for a passenger injured in a rear-end collision and $750,000 in a wrongful death case for one minute of pre-death conscious pain and suffering after the decedent was run over by a taxi. He grew up in Rochester, attended the University of Rochester, and graduated magna cum laude from New York Law School in 2012. He co-chairs the Civil Rights and Liberties Committee of the New York County Lawyers Association and belongs to the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, the American Association for Justice's Civil Rights Committee, and the National Police Accountability Project.
Proven verdicts and settlements
A Brooklyn federal jury awarded $81.7 million to Luisa Janssen Harger Da Silva, a Brazilian student who fainted onto the tracks at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station in 2016 and lost her left arm and left leg, in the first US verdict holding a transit system liable for failing to install platform barriers, but the money is far from paid: the MTA says it will appeal, and its fully briefed motions to throw out the verdict entirely or order a new trial are still pending before Judge Frederic Block.
Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Rochester man in the middle of a mental health crisis, died in March 2020 after police officers put a spit hood over his head and held him face down on the pavement until he stopped breathing. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide from asphyxia during restraint, though a state grand jury declined to indict the officers. Elliot D. Shields of Roth & Roth, LLP filed the family's federal civil rights suit against the City of Rochester in September 2020. On October 6, 2022, a federal judge approved a $12 million settlement, split evenly between pain-and-suffering and wrongful death claims, with the city admitting no liability.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
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Proven verdicts and settlements from other New York firms
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.