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.