Kelly K. Iverson

On August 21, 2018, two drug dogs and their handlers went through Maurice D. Able’s cell at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and found no narcotics. Then, Able alleged, an officer not assigned to his cell asked him for some of his candy, Nips and Frooties. When Able said no, the officer asked, “You want to play like that?” and left. He came back, took Able’s candy and a box of his belongings, and searched the cell at length, emerging with a black glove holding white powder from the base of Able’s lamp and pieces of wet paper from a Nips box.

Able testified that the powder was salt or baking soda, which kept the lamp from falling over. He was charged with possessing a controlled substance and contraband and moved to the Secure Residential Treatment Unit, a level 5 unit for mentally ill prisoners, though he alleged that nothing in his record showed mental illness. The possession charges were dropped. He stayed in solitary confinement anyway, fifty days in all.

Seven and a half years later, in March 2026, a federal jury in Pittsburgh heard what those fifty days had been. Kelly Iverson tried the case with Rachel McElroy of McElroy Law Firm; the court had appointed the two of them co-lead trial counsel, with Connor Hayes of Lynch Carpenter assisting, and none of the three lawyers was paid. Iverson had come to the trial from a career that began on the other side of the docket, and from co-leading the Philips CPAP litigation, which resolved for more than $1.6 billion.

From the Insurer’s Side

For four years before law school, Iverson worked at Travelers Insurance as a claim representative, handling automobile liability claims. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, she had studied business management at Chatham University; at Duquesne University School of Law she competed on the school’s trial advocacy team, which won the Buffalo-Niagara Invitational Trial Competition in 2008, and she graduated summa cum laude in 2009.

Her first decade as a lawyer ran on both sides of the docket. She went to work at Dentons Cohen & Grigsby, a large Pittsburgh firm, representing personal-injury and products-liability plaintiffs in some matters, and insurers and corporate defendants, including in shareholder litigation, in others. Over her career she has sat first or second chair in jury trials and arbitrations, and as lead trial counsel in a federal medical-malpractice case she won her client a verdict for the maximum statutory damage award. From 2010 through 2017 she also advised the mock-trial teams at Fort Cherry High School and the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy. In 2018 she left that practice and joined Lynch Carpenter, then called Carlson Lynch, a Pittsburgh firm that represents only plaintiffs, and has not represented a defendant since.

Knorr, Wabtec, and a Hiring Pact

Within her first year at the new firm, a federal court gave her a role in her first multidistrict case. On April 3, 2018, the Justice Department had sued two rail-equipment makers, Knorr-Bremse and Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies (Wabtec), and on the same day filed a proposed settlement barring both from agreements not to compete for each other’s workers. The department alleged that beginning no later than 2009, the companies had agreed not to solicit, recruit, or hire each other’s employees without approval; a Knorr Brake director’s letter of January 28, 2009, to a senior Wabtec executive referred to their agreed practice of not targeting each other’s personnel. The department said both companies had made similar pacts with the North American arm of Faiveley Transport, which Wabtec acquired in November 2016, and that a Wabtec Passenger Transit executive had written to colleagues that a candidate was good but that he did not want to violate his own agreement with Faiveley.

Workers’ class actions followed and were consolidated in Pittsburgh as In re Railway Industry Employee No-Poach Antitrust Litigation, which accused four railway-equipment makers—Knorr-Bremse, Wabtec, Faiveley Transport, and Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems—of agreeing not to recruit employees from one another, a pact the plaintiffs said suppressed wages and blocked workers’ movement across the industry. On October 1, 2018, an amended motion filed on behalf of plaintiff Joann Agostini asked the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania to name Iverson liaison counsel, attaching her résumé. Judge Joy Flowers Conti granted it on November 7, naming her to work alongside Roberta Liebenberg and Dean Harvey, whom the judge had appointed interim co-lead class counsel the day before. Two of the defendants, Knorr and Wabtec, settled for a combined $48.95 million. The court granted preliminary approval in March 2020 and final approval that August.

Two Hundred Dollars in Cash

In April 2018, the lawyer Joshua Ward filed a class action against Howard’s Towing on behalf of drivers including Morgan Herzing. Herzing said she had parked in a lot on South Highland Avenue in Shadyside for about twenty minutes, inside the lot’s one-hour limit. “I came back out and my car was already gone,” she said. The tow-truck driver told her it would cost $200 in cash to get the car back, and she paid it. From October 2017 to July 2018, the city of Pittsburgh capped the fee for a nonconsensual tow from a private lot at $135.

Iverson joined Ward on the cases against Howard’s. In September 2018, in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, their firms sued Howard’s Towing and Recovery and its owner, Howard Szuminsky, on behalf of Alan Jones and Richard Gross over tows from the parking lot at 235 South Highland Avenue; an amended complaint added Arhaus, LLC, whose location the lot served. The drivers alleged that Howard’s hooked unauthorized cars, held them until their owners paid, and routinely charged about $200 a tow, in violation of the city code, the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, and its Fair Credit Extension Uniformity Act. “I served as co-lead counsel for Plaintiffs and oversaw the prosecution of the entire action,” Iverson later swore.

Arhaus’s defense was that it had never towed or held a car, never controlled Howard’s, never asserted a lien, and never received a dollar from any driver, and the defendants argued that the drivers had been trespassers when they parked. The court overruled the defendants’ preliminary objections after argument. Class counsel deposed Szuminsky and Arhaus’s corporate representative, and after discovery limited to class issues, the court certified the class on June 29, 2021: everyone Howard’s had towed from the lot without consent, with a subclass of those who had paid more than the city code allowed. In certifying it, the court credited counsel’s “candor and dedication to their ethical commitments,” and appointed Iverson and Ward class counsel.

At a conciliation session before Judge Philip A. Ignelzi on February 8, 2022, the parties reached a settlement in principle. Under the Arhaus agreement, each driver who stayed in the class would get back whatever he or she had paid Howard’s, plus a share of what remained in the fund, without filing a claim; the class of about 56 drivers stood to receive about $178 each, more than the $100 minimum the state consumer-protection law sets for statutory damages. Arhaus agreed to give written consent for any tow from the lot, keep copies, and take reasonable steps to keep any towing company it hired within the city’s fee limits. Money left unclaimed would go half to the Pennsylvania IOLTA Board and half to 412 Food Rescue. Ignelzi approved the settlement as fair, reasonable, and adequate on August 4, 2023, and no class member opted out. Across six coordinated cases against Howard’s and the property owners who hired it, the settlements came to more than $500,000, divided among roughly 2,300 vehicle owners.

Seventy-Five Applicants

In June 2021, Philips recalled millions of CPAP, BiPAP, and mechanical ventilator machines, about 10.8 million in all, after acknowledging that the polyester-based polyurethane foam it used to quiet the devices could break down and release particles and chemicals into the airway. By December, Food and Drug Administration inspectors had found that the company knew of the foam’s degradation, and of field complaints about it, by 2015 or earlier. Since 2008 it had received more than 222,000 complaints containing words such as “foam,” “debris,” and “particulate,” and since 2016 it had run at least 14 tests or assessments in which its staff were aware of possible degradation. In 2018 its own tests confirmed that the foam could break down in heat or high humidity, and the company decided against a design change and kept using the foam in its ventilators. Executive management knew of the potential degradation by January 2020, the inspectors found, and the company took no corrective action until April 2021. The FDA said its findings fell short of a final determination.

The consolidated complaints that followed accused the company of knowing about the degradation for more than a decade before the recall. The cases were consolidated in the Western District of Pennsylvania as MDL 3014, before Judge Joy Flowers Conti, who had appointed Iverson in the railway case. Conti received applications from 75 lawyers seeking a role in the litigation’s leadership and, because COVID-19 cases were surging, interviewed every applicant by Zoom. On February 15, 2022, she named Iverson one of the plaintiffs’ four co-lead counsel, with Sandra Duggan, Christopher A. Seeger, and Steven A. Schwartz.

The order made the four responsible for organizing the plaintiffs’ side, presenting its positions to the court and to Philips in briefs and oral argument, filing the master complaints, and briefing and arguing motions, and it directed them to prosecute every kind of claim in the case: class, medical monitoring, and personal injury. Conti named Roberta Liebenberg, Iverson’s co-counsel from the railway case, to chair the settlement committee. In all she appointed more than 30 lawyers to the plaintiffs’ leadership, 18 of them women and eight of them lawyers of color.

Comment k and the Consent Decree

Philips moved to dismiss the personal-injury and medical-monitoring claims. Its lawyer John Lavelle argued that the plaintiffs had failed to adequately allege that the degraded foam caused cancer or exposed them to a harmful substance linked to a latent disease. The motions were heard on July 10 and 11, 2023, and went to Special Master Thomas Vanaskie, a retired judge of the Third Circuit, for recommendations.

Philips’s lawyers also asked the court to hold that Pennsylvania law categorically barred strict-liability claims against prescription medical devices, under comment k to section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. On January 24, 2024, Conti refused. “The text of comment k does not infer a blanket exemption for all medical devices,” she wrote, and she adopted the special master’s recommendation to let the Pennsylvania strict-liability design-defect claim proceed.

That April, Philips Respironics agreed to a consent decree with the federal government, entered by Judge Robert J. Colville of the same court. It barred the company, with exceptions for medically necessary devices, from making and distributing machines at or from its plants in Murrysville and New Kensington and a remediation site in Mount Pleasant until an outside expert had inspected its operations, it had completed an FDA-approved plan to fix the recalled devices, and the FDA had told it in writing that it appeared to comply with the law. The government’s claims remained allegations; the decree made no finding of liability.

Economic Loss, Personal Injury, Medical Monitoring

The litigation produced three separate settlements, each covering a different kind of claim. In September 2023, Philips agreed to pay at least $445 million to people who had purchased, rented, or leased one of the recalled machines, plus another $34 million to health insurers and other payers who had covered the cost of those devices—a combined $479 million. Owners were to be reimbursed between $55.63 and $1,552.25 for each device, plus $100 for each machine they returned, and Philips admitted no liability. The four co-lead counsel said in a joint statement that the settlement “provides substantial monetary compensation to those who were sold or paid for defective devices.” Judge Conti granted final approval of the economic-loss settlement on April 25, 2024; with no cap on payments, it was valued by the end of that month at no less than $506.3 million.

That same month, Philips agreed to a second settlement, which also paid for the third: $1.1 billion in all, $1.075 billion of it to resolve tens of thousands of individual personal-injury claims from people who alleged the foam had caused cancer or respiratory disease, and $25 million for medical monitoring. Philips admitted no fault or liability, and its chief executive, Roy Jakobs, said the test results to date showed that use of the devices “is not expected to result in appreciable harm to health.” Its insurers separately agreed to pay Philips €540 million toward its recall-related product-liability claims. The co-lead counsel thanked the court-appointed mediator, Diane Welsh, a retired federal magistrate judge, and said the combined agreements “accomplish what we sought to achieve when this litigation began.”

A third settlement, covering people who had used a recalled device but had not developed a qualifying injury, set aside $25 million for their future medical monitoring; Conti granted it final approval that December. Across the three settlements, the litigation resolved for more than $1.6 billion.

Two Data Breaches

Iverson held smaller leadership roles while the CPAP settlements moved through the courts. In September 2023, a federal court in the Southern District of Georgia appointed her co-lead counsel in litigation over a data breach at TMX Finance that had exposed personal information belonging to 4.8 million people; the case settled for $35 million in cash payments and debt relief, with final approval in August 2025. In December 2025, state and federal courts in Massachusetts both granted final approval to a separate $15.35 million settlement in litigation over a data breach at Shields Health Care Group, where Iverson also served as co-lead counsel. Her other breach work includes committee roles assisting the leadership in the Equifax, Marriott, Wendy’s, and Arby’s data-breach litigation, and in 2021 the Sedona Conference selected her for the brainstorming group of its Working Group 11, on data security and privacy liability; in 2022 she joined the team drafting revisions to one of its commentaries.

Fifty Days in a Mental-Health Unit

In July 2025, her partners elected her Lynch Carpenter’s managing partner of operations, overseeing the firm’s workflow, policies, recruiting, and training. Able’s case had by then been in federal court for more than four years. His complaint, filed in Pittsburgh in January 2021, named more than a dozen state corrections officials and was captioned Able v. Wetzel; it alleged that they had violated his Eighth Amendment rights by placing him in solitary confinement for fifty days in a unit that housed mentally ill prisoners, without clean underwear, hygiene items, religious materials, reading material, or time outdoors.

In those weeks, he alleged, staff denied him clean clothing, a toothbrush and toothpaste, reading material, his legal papers, time outdoors, and sleep. Other men on the unit screamed and banged around the clock, and he broke down, mentally and emotionally, in front of the prison psychologist. Six days in, he asked for yard time, clean clothes, and his legal papers. About twenty-three days in, he said, Officer Michael Beers told him: “They don’t have the manpower to do it right now. The only thing I can tell you is, we’ll get to you when we can.” The legal papers came eight days later. On October 10, 2018, his fiftieth day, he returned to the general population.

Imperfect Paperwork

The trial ran six days before Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in the Western District of Pennsylvania. Able had to prove both halves of the test the Supreme Court set in Farmer v. Brennan in 1994: a deprivation that was, objectively, “sufficiently serious,” denying “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” and an official who “knows of and disregards an excessive risk to inmate health or safety.” A jury may add punitive damages in such a case, the Court held in Smith v. Wade in 1983, when a defendant acted with evil motive or intent, or with reckless or callous indifference to the plaintiff’s federally protected rights.

The state attorney general’s office, defending the corrections staff, aimed at the first half. Its lawyers argued that the officers had met Able’s basic needs and had failed only to record each time they provided sleep, clean clothes, and fresh air. “The defendants are not on trial for imperfect paperwork,” Senior Deputy Attorney General Joan Ohwe Ojo said. Able had gone to the mental-health unit, she said, because of problems with bed space, and he had testified that he received two pairs of boxers and two T-shirts in September 2018. “There is no credible evidence of a serious or extreme deprivation,” she said.

McElroy’s answer went to the second half. She argued that the officers had each pushed responsibility for Able’s basic needs onto someone else. “Not my shift, not my problem, is not a defense,” she told the jury.

The jury deliberated for more than six hours on Monday, March 2, 2026. It found the Eighth Amendment violation and found Candice Lackey, the unit manager, and Beers liable, awarding Able $37,500 in punitive damages against Lackey and $1 in nominal damages against each of them. McElroy said she was happy “to see the jury acknowledged what Mr. Able went through.”

“This verdict sends a clear message that constitutional rights do not stop at the prison door,” Iverson said after the verdict.