Matthew Casey
Matthew Casey, a founding partner of Ross Feller Casey, LLP, has achieved record-setting results as a catastrophic injury lawyer. His practice includes every area of catastrophic injury litigation, including workplace injuries, medical malpractice, toxic tort and product liability. Casey's courtroom victories speak for themselves:
In 2008, Casey obtained a stunning $85 million compensatory damages verdict in a Philadelphia premises liability case. The plaintiff, Marcus Gustafsson, a 30 year-old University of Pennsylvania medical student, injured his spinal cord in a 20-foot fall through an open manhole.
During the three week trial, Casey proved that the company that owned and operated manholes throughout the city had prior notice that its covers were being removed. Just moments before the jury announced its mammoth verdict, Casey, with his client's authority, rejected a $10 million settlement offer made by the AIG insurance company. According to Lawyers USA, the Gustafsson verdict was the largest personal injury verdict in the United States for 2008. It is also the largest premises liability verdict in Pennsylvania history, and the second-largest compensatory verdict ever in the state (read about this case).
Most recently, Casey won a $23.1 million verdict in Lehigh County for a 55-year-old woman who lost both her legs as a result of medical negligence.
A home care nurse failed to properly evaluate and timely report Sharlee Ann Smoyer's infected catheter. The delay resulted in a bloodstream infection that ultimately caused Smoyer to have both legs amputated below the knees.
According to The Morning Call of Allentown, the September 2011 verdict is among the highest ever for a medical malpractice case in Lehigh County (read the story). And the Legal Intelligencer noted that the verdict was among the highest of its kind in all of Pennsylvania over the past decade (read the story).
Earlier in 2011, Casey won a $10 million verdict for a man who was misdiagnosed with having ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.
Plaintiff Eric Davenport never had the fatal neuromuscular disease and the misdiagnosis delayed treatment for his actual condition, spinal cord compression. As a result, Davenport will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
The April 2011 verdict against a noted ALS specialist was nearly double the largest medical malpractice jury verdict in Philadelphia for all of 2010 (read about this case).
In 2010, Casey obtained a $10 million settlement in a case of a 40-year-old welder who was killed when a pressurized tank he was working on exploded. Reached after several days of trial testimony, the settlement is one of the largest ever reported in Pennsylvania for a product liability case involving a single death (read about this case).
Casey has a proven record of taking on the tough cases with tenacity and has never shied from the powerful entities he faces. In 2001, Casey led the investigation that resulted in a truly spectacular result for the family of Jeffrey Davis, who was killed in an oil refinery explosion at Motiva Enterprises in Delaware City, Delaware. Casey personally analyzed over 40,000 documents and probed beyond the cursory look that the state and federal agencies had taken when investigating the case. Dozens of depositions by Casey and the intensive investigation that he led revealed that a corroded tank had leaked hydrogen and that this hydrogen was the source of the explosion. Casey also proved that Motiva had been aware of the inherent danger. The case was settled for $36.4 million, ranking nationwide among the largest single-victim settlements ever for a wrongful death case. Findings uncovered by the case led to the passage of a new Delaware law governing aboveground storage tanks. It also caught the eye of Philadelphia Magazine, which in 2003 placed Casey among its "It List" of people to watch, tapping him as "The Lawyer" in Philadelphia who would become a household name in the next decade (read about this case).
Casey worked on another case highlighted by the magazine, working as co-counsel with another lawyer to recover $10.5 million in a product liability case for the family of a kindergartener who was killed when a folding table collapsed on him in a Philadelphia school cafeteria. Through intensive analysis of thousands of documents and dozens of his depositions, Casey discovered that Midwest Folding Products had been aware of the safety problems connected with their folding tables. In order that other children could also be warned about the potential danger of the folding tables, the settlement in the highly publicized Cozzolino case was not kept confidential (read about this case).
Casey has served as lead counsel or co-counsel on a series of other notable cases that resulted in huge victories. Among them:
- A $29.6 million settlement in the case of the Pier 34 collapse, in which three women were killed and dozens were injured (read about this case).
- A $22.9 million dollar settlement in a premises liability case.
- A $19.1 million verdict in a case of a women who was struck by a van while working along a roadside construction site in Hazleton, Pa.
- A pre-verdict settlement of $12.25 million for a 2-year-old boy who fell from a window when a screen popped out of its casting at a Philadelphia apartment complex.
- A $8 million settlement for a 23-year-old man who was injured in a workplace accident. The case settled for the full extent of the available insurance coverage.
- A $6.6 million verdict for the family of a 8-year-old boy who drowned after the lifeguards at his summer camp abandoned their post.
- A $6.25 million settlement for a 70-year-old man in a medical malpractice case against a vascular surgeon.
- A $6 million settlement in a medical malpractice case involving a death after emergency room negligence.
- A $2.7 million verdict in a case of a women who died after her bowel was perforated during elective surgery. Casey's verdict was the largest medical malpractice verdict in a case involving a death in the history of Lackawanna County (Pa.).
And Casey has tried cases -- and won -- in regions of the state not known as friendly personal injury venues. In 2004, for instance, he achieved a $1.5 million settlement for the family of a learning disabled woman who died after giving birth. While the number isn't one of Casey's highest, the settlement has particular significance because it is one of the largest medical malpractice settlements ever achieved in Pennsylvania's conservative Franklin County.
Also that year, Casey won a $5.2 million verdict for a 76-year-old woman who suffered a stroke because doctors improperly read her MRI/MRA results and failed to detect and treat a constricted artery in her neck. It was among the largest medical malpractice verdicts in Pennsylvania in 2004, a year in which intense publicity of the so-called "malpractice insurance crisis" made achieving such verdicts difficult.
Casey is currently litigating several high-profile cases. One is a Philadelphia case involving the electrocution of a power company worker, a husband and father to a young family, as a result of utility company and other negligence. Others involve young children who suffered brain injuries at birth as a result of alleged obstetrical and pediatric malpractice.
Casey graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Notre Dame. He received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.
He was selected into the December 2005, 2006 and 2007 editions of Pennsylvania Super Lawyers Rising Stars, a distinction reserved for only the top 2.5 percent of attorneys 40 and younger. Every year since 2008, Casey has been named a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer.
Casey was also honored in 2006 and again in 2007 by his appointment as a member of the Judicial Council of Pennsylvania, an advisory body that assists the state's highest court in managing the complex administrative issues of the Commonwealth's Unified Judicial System.
