Matt Casey
Catastrophic injury, medical malpractice, product liability, organizational accountability, and insurance bad faith
Work ethic was a big part of growing up in my house.
The Sidewalk Opens
On a June morning in 2004, Marcus Gustafsson stopped for coffee and walked toward his usual bus at 19th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. A 250-pound cover had been pried from the steam-system manhole minutes earlier. The sidewalk opened beneath him.
He fell eighteen feet and fractured his spine.
Gustafsson had graduated from Brown and was pursuing combined medical and doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed the biology doctorate. The injury ended the clinical work required for the medical degree — the physician's career gone in the length of a fall.
Matt Casey tried the case against Trigen-Philadelphia Energy Corporation and presented evidence that the company had known for years that manhole covers were being removed, and had welded some covers shut. After three weeks of trial, the jury returned a unanimous $85 million verdict and assigned 99.99 percent of the fault to Trigen — the highest premises-liability verdict in Pennsylvania history.
The number tells only half the story. A pre-verdict high-low agreement guaranteed at least $1 million from Trigen, capped its payment at $18 million, and barred an appeal; other defendants had agreed to pay $4.9 million. Immediately before the jury returned, a separate $10 million offer arrived. Casey and Gustafsson turned it down and waited for the verdict. The confidence was not bravado; it was the product of three weeks of evidence Casey believed the jury had understood.
Growing Up on Work
Casey traces his practice to the house he grew up in, where effort was the family currency, and to a conviction that people who have had terrible things happen to them — and who find themselves up against powerful interests — deserve someone willing to outwork the other side.
He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Notre Dame and earned his law degree at Georgetown University Law Center. In 2006, he co-founded Ross Feller Casey with Robert Ross and Joel Feller. Since then he has helped build one of the nation's premier catastrophic-injury firms, personally obtaining verdicts and settlements at a pace few trial lawyers anywhere can match — including one four-year stretch in which he recovered more than $430 million, nearly 200 verdicts and settlements of at least $1 million, and more than 40 recoveries that each topped $10 million — six of those through verdicts.
The Policy Limit Allstate Wouldn't Pay
Patrick Hennessy lost his right leg after a chain collision on Roosevelt Boulevard. In July 2009, he was riding with Ryan Caruso when Caruso rear-ended a stopped vehicle at about two in the morning. Hennessy got out to help push the disabled car from the road. An uninsured driver struck him and crushed him against the vehicle.
Before trial, Hennessy offered to resolve his claim against Caruso for Caruso's $250,000 Allstate policy limit. The personal-injury case proceeded instead, and a Philadelphia jury awarded $19,145,000, allocating forty-five percent of the liability to Caruso and fifty-five percent to the uninsured driver.
Then Casey did what the moment demanded: he followed the case into the insurance file. Caruso assigned his rights against Allstate to Hennessy, and the assigned action alleged contract breach, statutory bad faith, unfair trade practices, and negligence in the insurer's investigation, communications, and handling of the policy-limit demand. Casey's team obtained remand from federal court by establishing colorable claims against Pennsylvania employees, and in 2014 Allstate settled for $22 million — encompassing the underlying verdict, delay damages, and interest, and standing as the largest insurance bad-faith recovery of its kind in Pennsylvania.
Handling both stages required two different records: first the crashes and Hennessy's permanent loss, then the insurer's communications, its policy-limit decision, its notice to its insured, and its response after the verdict. Casey built both.
Seven Days in Lehigh County
Sharlee Ann Smoyer developed septic shock after a feeding-catheter infection while receiving home nursing care following intestinal surgery. Doctors amputated both legs below the knee and a finger on her left hand.
Casey tried the case for seven days in Lehigh County. The medical testimony connected nursing observations, the bloodstream infection, Smoyer's Crohn's disease, and the treatment opportunities that passed — giving the jury a precise record of when an earlier report and earlier treatment could have changed everything. The jury found the nurse and St. Luke's Miners Memorial Home Care negligent and awarded $23.1 million, among the largest verdicts in the county's history.
Three Years with the Wrong Diagnosis
Eric Davenport was told in 2003 that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — a death sentence — although imaging showed spinal-cord compression that surgery could have treated. The diagnosis was corrected more than three years later, after Davenport had sustained permanent neurological damage and required a wheelchair.
Casey tried the malpractice case for two weeks, presenting nine experts on liability, causation, radiology, surgical treatment, life care, earnings, and damages. The jury awarded $9,654,551 in April 2011; the trial court added $515,989.46 in delay damages, producing a judgment of $10,170,540.46. The court denied every post-trial challenge, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined further review in September 2013, and Davenport ultimately recovered more than $11.6 million with accrued interest.
In April 2024, Casey's opening statement alone reset a case's trajectory: after openings in a medical-malpractice trial against Reading Hospital, he secured a $32.5 million settlement for the family of a boy living with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy — resources for a lifetime of care, without the family having to endure the remainder of trial.
The Tank at Delaware City
Jeffrey Davis was killed when a 415,000-gallon spent-sulfuric-acid tank exploded at Motiva's Delaware City refinery on July 17, 2001. Casey served as co-counsel with Thomas Kline for Davis's family and led the civil discovery — more than 40,000 documents and depositions concerning corrosion, inspections, hydrocarbon contamination, tank condition, prior warnings, and hot-work decisions. The engineering record identified flammable vapors inside the tank and a carbon-arc welding operation as the ignition source.
The family settled for $36.4 million two weeks before trial in September 2003, among the highest single-victim wrongful-death recoveries in the nation. The case outlived its settlement: separate safety, environmental, criminal, and legislative proceedings followed, and Delaware enacted the Jeffrey Davis Aboveground Storage Tank Act — the dead man's name attached, permanently, to the law meant to prevent the next explosion.
A Five-Year-Old and a Folded Table
Jonathan Cozzolino died after a folded portable cafeteria table toppled at Hamilton Disston Elementary School in February 2001. The folded table stood about six feet high, rolled on wheels, and weighed hundreds of pounds; federal safety officials had warned school districts about deaths and injuries involving top-heavy portable tables since 1989, calling for adults to move such units and for folded tables to be secured away from children.
Casey served as co-counsel in the product-liability action, which examined the table's locking and stability features, its warnings, the prior safety information, school handling, and the chain from manufacture to use. The recovery was $10.5 million — and Philadelphia inspected approximately 5,000 tables, removing roughly ten percent because of damage. A citywide sweep of a hidden hazard, set in motion by one family's case.
The Milk Room at Geisinger
Eight premature infants in Geisinger Medical Center's neonatal intensive care unit tested positive for Pseudomonas between July and September 2019. Regulators traced the organism to equipment used to prepare donor breast milk — a measuring cylinder and cleaning brush among it — along with improper storage temperatures, sink-splash exposure, failures to clean and sanitize, and the absence of an adequate written sanitation policy. The systemic infection-control failure was classified as immediate jeopardy.
Casey represented three families: two whose infants died and one whose child sustained serious brain injury. The cases resolved in July 2020, after approximately eight months of litigation, with monetary terms confidential. What was public mattered as much: Geisinger apologized, accepted legal causation for the two deaths and the injury involving Casey's clients, and identified concrete changes to donor-milk preparation, equipment cleaning, storage alarms, staff training, and single-use equipment. The structure protected the families' privacy while making the accountability — and the fixes — a matter of record.
Seven Survivors
Ross Feller Casey represented seven people in the civil process arising from Jerry Sandusky's sexual abuse — more than any other firm — including the men identified as Victims 2, 3, 7, and 10 and Sandusky's adopted son, Matt Sandusky.
Penn State announced a $59.7 million survivor settlement program in October 2013. Casey and Joel Feller secured completed resolutions for all seven clients, and the harder, quieter work sat underneath the numbers: each survivor had to decide how much evidence to disclose, whether to preserve anonymity, which parties to release, and whether a negotiated resolution served him better than years of litigation. Casey's work protected those individual choices inside a very public program.
What Clients Remember
Casey's practice spans catastrophic injury, medical malpractice, product liability, premises liability, wrongful death, organizational accountability, and insurance bad faith — cases built from medical testimony, industrial records, insurer files, product evidence, survivor accounts, and future-care proof. Juries see the courtroom command. Clients tend to describe something else. As the widow in one of his wrongful-death cases put it: "He showed that he had a heart, and that mattered a lot to me."