Each day, he wakes up to do what he loves, and what he loves is helping society’s injured and disabled. That’s why, for more than 30 years, he has fought tirelessly for the legal rights of injured and disabled workers.
As an avid advocate for workers and a successful litigator who holds several leadership positions within the legal community, Jerry may come across as someone who hails from generations of lawyers. But don’t let his professional confidence and calming presence fool you.
Jerry grew up in the small blue-collar area of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, just northwest of Pittsburgh. As a boy, he learned the value of hard work when his father, a plumber, took him along in his van on the weekends to install toilets and water heaters. His grandfather and uncles worked at the steel mill in town. Like them, Jerry worked hard, putting in 16-hour days at the mill between Memorial Day and Labor Day to pay for college and law school tuition.
An internship with the District of Columbia Public Defender’s Office during his last semester of college sparked Jerry’s interest in the law, and riding around with D.C. Police officers and participating in autopsies got him thinking about people’s injuries. After graduating from Allegheny College in 1982, Jerry attended Temple University School of Law, graduating from the school in 1985.
In 1983, when one of his law school professors left Temple Law to become Philadelphia’s City Solicitor, he offered Jerry a job in the workers’ compensation department of that office. Jerry jumped at the opportunity to gain real-world legal experience. In this case it was helping the City of Philadelphia’s lawyers defend the City in workers’ compensation cases against municipal workers who claimed they were injured on the job.
Jerry’s position with the City of Philadelphia was the first of a string of jobs, culminating with his position at one of largest corporate law firms in Philadelphia, where he was defending employers and insurance companies in workers’ compensation cases. After a few years handling that kind of work, he realized he was on the wrong side of those cases. He wanted to help workers collect the benefits they were legally entitled to—not help their employers and insurance companies deny them those benefits.
Switching sides within a few years, he began representing claimants exclusively in workers’ compensation and Social Security disability cases. As his legal practice representing injured workers’ grew, so too did his ambitions. He wanted to build the largest workers’ compensation practice in Pennsylvania.
For Jerry, this goal was personal. When he was young, Jerry saw firsthand how disruptive his father’s health issues were to his family. His father struggled to put food on the table, and the family was close to bankruptcy. Only after being admitted into the plumbers’ union and having access to insurance coverage as a union plumber was his father able to get back on his feet—literally and figuratively.
To this day, to Jerry, each injured worker he represents isn’t just a name on a file. It is a member of a family whose lives have been put on hold, whose livelihood may be at risk, and who face a potentially difficult legal battle. That is where he sees his opportunity to help.