Shanin Specter

 Shanin Specter is a partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Kline & Specter, P.C. Since opening the firm in 1995, he has won a litany of large verdicts and settlements as well as accolades from professional oprganizations.

 Specter waged an epic battle against the Ford Motor Co. on behalf of the family of Walter White, a three-year-old boy who was run over and killed when the parking brake in his father's F-350 spontaneously disengaged. Specter has won two verdicts in the case -- for $153 million and $52 million -- and continued to litigate this case, which was settled weeks prior to its scheduled third trial in June 2008.

 Specter has won many verdicts for catastrophically injured people, including nine which were in eight or nine figures. Of those, four were medical malpractice cases, two involved a defective product, two arose from improperly maintained premises and one resulted from a motor vehicle accident.

 Specter, who earned his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and an LL.M. with First Honors from Cambridge University, has compiled a lengthy record of professional accomplishments.

 Specter received the 2008 Michael A. Musmanno Award, the highest honor conferred by the Philadelphia Trial Lawyer's Association. In 2007 he received the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association's (now the Pennsylvania Association for Justice) highest honor, the Milton D. Rosenberg Award "in recognition of those qualities of leadership, service and devotion to the Association's cause." The National Law Journal selected Specter as one of the top ten litigators in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, while other organizations have named him as among the best attorneys in the state and in the nation.

 Most recently, he won a nationally publicized $7.5 million settlement against La Salle University for a football player who suffered a concussion in practice and was prematurely cleared to play and later sustained a severe brain damage in a game.

 In 1995, six months after opening the firm with partner Tom Kline, he won a $24.25 million jury verdict for a little girl left severely brain damaged in a swimming pool accident. Two years later Specter won a Delaware-record $19.9 million verdict against a hospital after a 15-year-old patient was accosted by a visitor, the attack resulting in catastrophic nerve damage. In 1998 Specter won a $6.8 million verdict for a man injured in a motorcycle accident while wearing a defective helmet.

 In 2000, he won the then-largest medical malpractice verdict in Pennsylvania history for David Caruso. a 20-year-old who was left in a near-vegetative state after receiving negligent care at a Philadelphia hospital. Specter demonstrated his ability to captivate a courtroom in that case, giving a closing speech in which he spoke for Caruso in the first-person, as if he were the young man who would never be able to again enjoy life's simple pleasures. Many in the courtroom were moved to tears, including members of the jury, which awarded $49.6 million.

 Among his most well known cases, Specter in 2001 won an unusually large settlement in a suit involving a defective BB gun that badly brain damaged and led to the death of a teenage boy. The Mahoney case, and Specter's investigation of the gun, resulted in an exposé on the ABC program 20/20 featuring Specter and led the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to seek the recall of 7.4 million defective Daisy BB guns.

 In March of 2009, Specter, along with Kila Baldwin and Dominic Guerrini, tried the wrongful death case of Joseph Blumer, 43.  Blumer was killed when the parking brake on the 2002 Ford F-350 tow truck he was operating spontaneously disengaged, trapping him under the truck.  An Allegheny County jury awarded his wife and two daughters $8.75 million.  The defective parking brake was manufactured by Dura, the successor corporation to the parking brake manufacturer in White v Ford.  Specter is seeking review of by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the safety of these successor brakes, which were installed in the 1999-2004 F-Series trucks.

 Specter has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 1995 (including the latest 2010 edition) and is AV-rated in Martindale-Hubbell.

 Super Lawyers magazine for five straight years has named Specter as among the best lawyers inPennsylvania, while Lawdragon, the legal services information firm, has named Specter as among the best 500 attorneys in the nation.