about me

I worked for just under nineteen years as  a maritime personal injury lawyer with Latti & Anderson LLP in Boston, where I represented injured commercial fishermen, merchant mariners, marine construction workers, longshoremen, pleasure boaters, and ferry and whale watch passengers throughout New England and nationwide, in addition to handling general personal injury and state and Longshore workers' compensation cases.

I have written hundreds of trial and appellate court briefs and memos over the years on all areas of personal injury law, maritime law, workers' compensation law, civil  procedure, and evidence, and received favorable decisions on the vast majority of my motions, objections, and briefs.
 

Before joining Latti & Anderson, I did a one year clerkship with the New Hampshire Superior Court and then worked for three years with a small general practice firm in New Hampshire.

I now specialize in legal research and writing in all areas of pretrial procedure and civil and criminal substantive law.

As a consequence of research that I had done on a client's case a number of years ago, I became a national authority on an extremely important issue in personal injury litigation: how, if at all, a plaintiff’s attorney should protect Medicare’s rights to future reimbursement when settling the personal injury case of a client who is or may soon be entitled to Medicare benefits. I gave a presentation on this issue at the 2010 American Association for Justice (formerly ATLA) National Convention. As a result of my presentation, AAJ asked me to update my previous article on the subject for their national magazine, Trial.
 

Because I had been interested in food rights for some time, I had offered to do some pro bono legal research for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. As a result of some of that work, I developed the idea for an article that was published in 2014 in the Journal of Food Law and Policy on whether the right to purchase food of one's choice is a fundamental right as a matter of constitutional law. I argued that it is a  fundamental, although limited, right, and laid out an outline for how to prove it within the rather narrow constraints of recent Supreme Court constitutional law decisions.
 

I have been admitted to numerous state and federal Bars over the years, but now limit my work to assisting other lawyers and so I am no longer engaged in the active practice of law.

Education

Syracuse University College of Law, Syracuse, NY, J.D., M.B.A., December 1987.

Lafayette College, Easton, PA, A.B., International Affairs, May 1984.

Publications
 

Food Choice as Fundamental Right, Acres U.S.A., November 2014.
 

Food Choice is a Fundamental Liberty Right, 9 J. Food L. & Pol'y 173 (2013).
 

Caselaw supports a plaintiff's right to statement pre-deposition, Mass. Academy of Trial Lawyers Journal, November 2013.
 

Dealing with last minute confidentiality clauses in settlement, American Association for Justice Admiralty Law Section Newsletter, Spring 2011.
 

Clearing up the confusion about Medicare Set-asides, Trial, December 2010.
 

Medicare set-asides and personal injury cases – what is the practitioner to do?, Mass. Bar Association Section Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2010).
 

The discoverability of witness statements taken shortly after an accident, Mass. Bar Association Section Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2005).
 

Allocation of settlements in personal injury cases: a word to the wise, Mass. Bar Association  Section Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2004).

State v. Brown, 2021 WI App 41, 398 Wis.2d 630, 962 N.W.2d 261 (per curiam).

S.W. [Wallace] v. Atlantic Container Service, 43 BRBS 118 (2009).
Van Almkerk v. Thompson, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40787 (D.N.H. 2006).
Cruz v. Block Island Parasail, Inc., 2006 WL 3488702 (D.R.I. 2006).
Cruz v. Block Island Parasail, Inc., 2006 WL 889212 (D.R.I. 2006).
Brege v. Lakes Shipping Co., 225 F.R.D. 546 (E.D. Mich. 2004).
Poulis-Minott v. Smith, 388 F.3d 354 (1st Cir. 2004).
Cribby v. Stinson Seafood Company, L.P., 2001 WL 228431 (D. Me. 2001).
Chisholm v. UHP Projects, Inc., 205 F.3d 731 (4th Cir. 2000).
Chisholm v. UHP Projects, Inc., 30 F.Supp.2d 928 (E.D. Va. 1998).