I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm, founded in 1958. Our clients have been awarded over $2 billion through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, et cetera. The Firm’s legacy speaks for itself; the law school at Temple University was re-named the Beasley School of Law in honor of the Firm’s founder, James E. Beasley. In 2012, for example, we obtained three of the top twenty jury verdicts in Pennsylvania, more than any other law firm.

One day when I was picking my kids up from pre-school, the class was playing “20 questions” with the kids to guess what each parent’s job was. After a couple questions, the teacher helped them narrow my job down to “lawyer,” after which the teacher asked me, “so what does a lawyer do?”

Good question. After a minute, I said: “I make sure things are fair.”

I make sure people injured by greed and negligence can hold corporations and insurance companies accountable under the law. That’s fair. I’ve successfully represented a wide variety of injured clients, including within the past few years:

• the parents of an 18-year-old who needlessly died during liposuction (a case that required a five week trial in 2008, resulting in a $20.5 million jury verdict, including the largest punitive damages ever awarded in a Pennsylvania medical malpractice case),
• a baby boy injured at birth by a hospital that refused to perform a c-section for hours (resulting in a $3 million settlement),
• the estate of a 19-year-old woman killed by a fatigued truck driver who was encouraged by his employer to fabricate his log book so he could spend more hours on the road (resulting in a settlement for the full insurance policy limits of $3.5 million).

I’ve also successfully represented a number of individuals and businesses with financial damages, including a small electronics business defrauded by a wealthy former contractor and the co-founder of a home furnishing fabrication business who was forced out of his own business. In May 2012, after a two-week trial, a jury awarded the business co-founder $4.2 million. (Here’s a Philly.com story on the verdict.)

I see the law as a profession, and so I spend a lot of time informing the public about the law, both through my blog and through contributions to non-legal publications such as Emergency Physicians Monthly, where I debated a physician about malpractice issues, and NYC Aviation, where I discussed the Reno Air Races disaster. I help manage The Beasley Firm’s recent journalism project, BigTrial.net, where we hired two award-winning veteran journalists to provide full gavel-to-gavel coverage of the biggest trials in Philadelphia, with no editorial restrictions and entirely free for the public to read.

I’ve been referenced as a legal analyst in publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic and Business Insider. Recently, I was:

• quoted by WHYY’s ”It’s Our Money” project discussing Occupy Philadelphia,
• cited by Vanity Fair discussing the Facebook ownership lawsuit from The Social Network,
• quoted by Reuters news discussing the Penn State child abuse scandal,
• quoted by the Baltimore Sun discussing sexual abuse cases in general,
• quoted by the Philadelphia Daily News discussing the Sandra Fluke / Rush Limbaugh controversy, and
• quoted by The Morning Call on Pennsylvania’s antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA.

If you want to see what I’m like in person, here’s an interview from July 2012:

Within the law, I was selected by my peers to be included in Super Lawyers magazine as a Pennsylvania Rising Star several times, including this year (2013). I also teach Continuing Legal Education seminars for the Pennsylvania Bar Institute,  have contributed to legal publications such as The Jury Expert, and have been quoted by publications like Inhouse Counsel and the American Association for Justice’s Trial magazine.

I’ve also written one legal book (with Jim Beasley, Jr.), a guide for civil lawyers in Pennsylvania, that was published earlier this year, and am working on another one (also with Jim) for civil lawyers nationwide, due in another two years.

I graduated from Yale University with Honors in History and from the Beasley School of Law at Temple University as a Law Faculty Scholar and a member of the Rubin Public Interest Society. At Yale I wrote an award-winning paper on the history of the Federal Reserve. At Temple Law I was a Teaching Assistant in Constitutional Law for Dean Robert Reinstein and a clerk in the Federal Court Clerkship Clinical program.

Looking for a lawyer?

We might be able to help. Check my legal services page for more information about my work, or contact me through the form below or by calling my office at (215) 931-2634. Our firm represents most of our clients — e.g., those with personal injury, medical malpractice, or motor vehicle accident lawsuits, as well as some non-injury cases like patent infringement and whistleblower claims — on a contingency fee basis, where our fee is a portion of the money recovered in the lawsuit and we don’t charge a fee if we lose. For contingent fee business lawsuits, we generally charge a non-refundable retainer for representation to ensure we are all partners in the litigation.

Our law firm’s cases typically involve plaintiffs or defendants in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, but our work also extends North to New York City and South to Washington, DC, where we represent clients in conjunction with local firms. For certain types of cases, like birth injury and product liability, we often partner with other firms to extend our representation nationwide. For the prescription drug and medical device lawsuits, like diabetes drugs that cause pancreatic cancer, vaginal mesh erosion, Da Vinci surgical robot injuries, and heart attacks caused by dialysis, we represent clients nationwide.

Do you provide legal advice on your blog?

I’m a licensed attorney and do provide legal advice, but I only provide legal advice to my clients — people who have a written agreement with me — and I don’t provide legal advice through this site. I don’t know of any lawyers who offer legal advice through their website or weblog. You shouldn’t take anything you read on the internet to be legal advice.

The discussions you see here — or on my Twitter feed or my Google+ page or anywhere else — aren’t any different from reading a newspaper or magazine article by a lawyer or watching a lawyer on a television show talk about a case. I might write about a legal issue relevant to your situation, but professional legal advice requires an in-depth discussion with you about your case, a thorough investigation into all the relevant facts, and substantial research into the relevant laws.

What is the copyright for the content of this blog?

Litigation and Trial is the copyrighted work of Max Kennerly, all rights reserved. You may quote portions of writings in a manner consistent with fair use and with attribution, accompanied by a followed link back to the source URL of the writing. I’m usually quite happy to share pieces in full with attribution, just ask in advance.