Five books have been published about Kline & Specter cases and litigation tactics. Below are summaries and the beginning chapters of the books. They are available as printed books or E-books on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble, either online or at select stores.
Unconventional Wisdom: How Two of America’s Top Trial Lawyers Win Cases by Robert Zausner is a book written for trial lawyers who handle wrongful injury cases. It’s about how to achieve great results for your clients.
Sure, most cases are settled, not tried. But to achieve the best settlement for your client, you have to be an able trial lawyer because it’s the apprehension of a big verdict that motivates opponents to settle. And trial skills are readily transferable to pre-trial skills, which help make cases better, whether or not they are eventually settled or tried. So excellent trial skills are indispensable.
This book is not about theory. It is about actual things that occur in a courtroom, or before or after trial. It is based on Tom Kline and Shanin Specter’s combined 80-plus years of knowledge, most of it since 1995 when they formed the Philadelphia-based law firm of Kline & Specter, PC, now the largest plaintiff ’s firm in Pennsylvania and one of the largest in the country.
This book often stands conventional wisdom on its head. Partly that’s because some conventional wisdom was never right. Partly that’s because as society, the law, and technology have evolved, time has upset many courtroom truisms.
This book teaches what Tom Kline and Shanin Specter believe works best in civil litigation and why.... But they don’t profess to know everything; every case and every situation is different, requiring different strategies for achieving a successful resolution. As they’re fond of noting: “You learn half of what you need to know in your first year as a lawyer and half of each remaining half in each successive year. You never learn it all.”
Danger Above: A Tragic Death, An Epic Courtroom Battle tells the true story of a terrible event that occurred on a sunny June day in 2009. A power line fell on Carrie Goretzka, a young mother, setting her on fire as her young children watched in horror from the front porch of their suburban Pittsburgh home.
What followed was an investigation and civil action against the Goretzkas utility, West Penn Power Company, which the family s lawyer, Shanin Specter, claimed had been not only negligent, but also reckless. The trial was a very difficult challenge for the attorneys representing the family and those defending the utility.
In their efforts to reduce the culpability of their clients, the defense at one point tried to claim that the victim was to blame for her own painful death by electrocution. Robert Zausner s chronicle of the case of Goretzka v. West Penn Power Company is an emotional one, begging the question: will justice be served against a dangerous, negligent corporation, or will the Goretzka family s story be ignored by the law?
The clock was ticking. Suzanne Matteo was 37 years old and she wanted to have a baby. An obstetrician/gynecologist herself, she knew that, biologically, time was running out. Ironically, she and her husband Tony, also an OB/GYN, had delivered thousands of babies for other women but were having no luck of their own. So they sought the help of a world-renowned fertility doctor, Jerome Check, M.D., and decided to go ahead with in-vitro fertilization. The procedure, considered radical when introduced in 1978, had become routine and now helped millions of women have babies. But along the way, things went wrong for Suzanne, terribly wrong. This is the story of a woman trying desperately to have a baby. And the story of three men: a renowned fertility doctor sued for malpractice, a husband accused of “the perfect murder,” and the lawyer who unravels it all in search of justice.
In Bad Brake: Ford Trucks Deadly When Parked, Robert Zausner tells the true story of three horrific incidents caused by one of America s automotive icons and the legal dramas that followed, in the process issuing a stark warning of the risk that still exists to anyone downhill of hundreds of thousands of Ford F-Series trucks.
They couldn't have been more different one a teenager from affluent suburbia, the other a little kid from the poor part of the city. However, both boys would come to share a common experience as random, unsuspecting victims of terrible tragedies not merely bad luck but the result of wrongful, egregious conduct. Partners in the same Philadelphia law firm would represent the families in their quest for justice against well-known corporate entities: the Daisy Manufacturing Company, a maker of powerful airguns marketed to children; and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), which failed to properly upgrade and maintain its escalators.