Tom left the U.S. Attorney’s Office and joined our firm in 1993. Tom grew up in Indiana, where Tom’s father was on the administration at the University of Notre Dame. After graduating from Notre Dame with a degree in business, Tom continued his education at Notre Dame’s Law School.
After graduation with distinction, Tom worked for the Federal Trade Commission as an antitrust litigation attorney, then worked as a trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Department, Tax Division, and then as an Assistant United States Attorney where he prosecuted tax and white-collar fraud cases while in the Northern District of Indiana. Tom has been teaching trial advocacy to law students since 1989, including students at Notre Dame Law School and at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, Birmingham, AL and has been a faculty member of the National Institute For Trial Advocacy. Tom has been admitted to the state bars of Alabama, Illinois, and Indiana.
Tom has tried many cases for our firm, including several million dollar verdicts. Most recently he obtained a 35 million dollar verdict. Prior to that, he obtained a $4.4 million verdict on behalf of an electrician who was injured when the he attempted to move a heavy steel beam blocking the path of an aerial lift truck. The beam fell crushing his foot. Before that, he obtained an $11.11 million jury verdict in a medical malpractice case involving failure to diagnose bacterial meningitis in an adult. He also won a jury verdict that stands as the record knee verdict in Illinois, at $5.36 million, on behalf of a union plumber who fell on a slippery surface at a construction site. He also has the largest verdict for an unoperated compression fracture for a lumbar disk, at $1.2 million, on behalf of a tile setter who fell off a bucket used as a ladder. Tom’s settlement of cases run into many millions of dollars including ones on behalf of a man who suffered a mild brain injury when his nurses failed to appreciate a deterioration in his respiratory condition while he was on a pain medication following surgery, a case in which a post polio patient on a scooter was injured when she backed into an elevator that dropped a couple of feet, and a case for $4.1 million in which a lady died at work when she dropped a flammable substance used in her work that exploded in an area recently renovated by a landlord who failed to abide by the code that provided for fire protection measures that would have saved her.