Michael Leizerman

Robert Gerner told the police at the scene that the motorcycle had turned left in front of him. It was September 18, 2017. Gerner had been driving a Chevrolet 5500 utility truck in the southbound left lane of State Route 7 in Jefferson County, Ohio, near Steubenville, and at the intersection with State Route 213 the truck’s left side struck Michael Shank’s motorcycle. Shank had been in the northbound left-turn lane, his motorcycle past the stop line, waiting to turn onto Route 213.

Shank, who was thirty-three, could not answer him. He had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury with an epidural hematoma, and he has no memory from that morning until twenty-eight days later. Whether the truck or the motorcycle had crossed into the other’s path would have to be proved from the pavement, from three lay witnesses, and from the driver himself.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol’s findings put the blame on the motorcyclist, and the patrol’s crash reconstruction worked against him. No lane lines ran through the intersection, and the collision had happened very near its unmarked centerline.

In September 2025, after a four-day trial in the Jefferson County Court of Common Pleas, eight jurors signed a verdict that found Gerner negligent, held the two companies he worked for vicariously liable, assigned Shank no share of the fault, and awarded $82,105,345.70. Michael Leizerman, the Toledo trial lawyer who founded The Law Firm for Truck Safety, tried the liability case with his colleague Jon Bond. Leizerman had taken the deposition in which Gerner conceded that his statement to the police was inaccurate, and he had hired the reconstructionist whose work placed the truck over the midline of an unmarked intersection.

Hundreds of Feet Past the Impact

After the impact the truck kept going. It traveled hundreds of feet, crossed a cement median, rotated 180 degrees at high speed, skidded backward, and crashed into the cement median on the opposite side of the road.

Shank’s left lower leg was nearly torn away, and surgeons amputated in stages—below the knee, then at the knee, then above it. His left humerus was shattered, a torn artery in that arm had to be stented, and the elbow joint was destroyed. Surgeons fused the elbow at about ninety degrees with internal hardware and spent well over a year trying to save the arm while he lived with pain he rated between seven and ten out of ten. In January 2019, sixteen months after the crash, nerve conduction studies of his brachial plexus showed no prospect of recovery, and he lost the arm too. He also had nine fractured ribs, two collapsed lungs, fractures of the C6 and C7 vertebrae, and internal bleeding that required exploratory surgery. He spent twenty-eight days at UPMC, and the records from that stay alone ran to about 6,000 pages.

Shank is a husband and a father, and he still volunteers in his community. At trial the jury heard about the phantom pain and phantom sensation he lives with, and about what eight years of severe pain had done to him and to his marriage.

Two Family Companies and a $350,000 Offer

Gerner worked for Hilltop Energy, an explosives company, and maintained vehicles for D.W. Dickey & Son, a cement company. Two brothers owned both companies. Gerner had more than thirty years of experience driving commercial vehicles. Neither company had ever trained him as a commercial vehicle driver, neither had a budget for safety programs, and his employer had no safety policy for its commercial drivers beyond instructions to follow the law.

The defendants contested liability from the start, and their account of the crash was Gerner’s: Shank had turned left in front of the truck, and the collision happened on the truck’s side of the intersection. One witness had seen the motorcycle dangerously close to the unmarked centerline. The companies had agreed before trial to provide insurance coverage for Gerner without accepting liability for him, and at trial both suggested that they had not been his employer.

The insurers refused to tender their policies, which were represented as totaling $37 million, and made no offer before suit. At a judicial settlement conference the defense’s highest offer was $350,000. Shank’s lawyers sent detailed demand letters that warned of insurance bad faith, and the case went to trial.

One More Deposition

Shank had begun with other lawyers. After the Shanks ended that representation, George Sidiropolis, a West Virginia personal-injury lawyer, took the case, and in June 2023 he brought in Aaron DeShaw, a lawyer who tries amputation cases, and Leizerman. Discovery was largely complete by then. The court allowed the new trial team one additional deposition, and Leizerman used it on the truck driver.

Leizerman has described going into a deposition with a beginner’s mind. “There’s a feeling like I’ve never done one before,” he said in a 2018 podcast interview, and he pairs that openness with a firm sense of what he needs the testimony to give him.

Leizerman deposed Gerner in early 2025. Gerner admitted that he had looked away from the road for more than 400 feet, and that when the truck hit something he did not know what it was. He acknowledged that he had misrepresented to the police at the scene that the motorcycle turned left in front of him. He had seen Shank’s motorcycle about a quarter mile before the crash, he said, and never saw it again before the impact. “Michael Leizerman’s deposition of the defendant driver in early 2025 changed the likelihood we would win,” DeShaw wrote after the verdict.

A Fifteen-Foot Intersection

Leizerman also rebuilt the intersection for the jury. He hired a team to scan the area of the crash and print it as a graphic three feet wide and fifteen feet long. He retained a crash reconstructionist who laser-scanned the scene and then photographed the whole area in high resolution with drones. The reconstructionist’s 105-page report concluded that the truck had been over the midline of the unmarked intersection, which put the collision on Shank’s side of the road.

The reconstructionists put the truck’s speed at impact between fifty-nine and sixty-four miles per hour, in a fifty-five zone. Three lay witnesses had seen the truck before the crash: two put it at sixty to sixty-five miles per hour, and one saw it swerve left of the centerline. At trial the jurors heard from an eyewitness, Jordan Beidling.

The Defense’s First Witness

The case was tried before Judge Michelle Miller about eight years after the crash. Leizerman and Bond handled every part of liability. DeShaw handled damages and the medical proof, working from roughly 10,000 pages of records.

The defense called a police officer first. He had reached the scene just after the crash and had taken many photographs. One of them showed a gouge mark that officers at the scene had spray-painted as the first point of impact. It lay before the spot the state police reconstructionist had used as the point of impact. Leizerman asked the officer whether that mark was from the crash. DeShaw, describing the exchange after the verdict, wrote: “The jury already knew what that meant.”

Minutes earlier, defense counsel had told the judge that he planned to call his crash reconstructionist. He rested without calling any expert witness. Sidiropolis and DeShaw had found an earlier case in which that reconstructionist testified to the opposite of his opinion in Shank’s case, and the cross-examination they built on it was never needed.

Dr. Tarkin’s Two Hours

The damages case ran through the surgeon who had operated on Shank. Dr. Ivan Tarkin, chief of orthopedic surgery at UPMC, said he remembered Shank’s surgeries out of the thousands he had performed because it was the worst elbow injury he had ever seen. No medical imaging, he said, could show how severe it was: the joint was destroyed, with small fragments of bone scattered through the elbow. His direct examination lasted about two hours. Defense counsel asked him no questions.

An upper-extremity prosthetist chosen for the case testified about the prosthetic care Shank would need. DeShaw conducted the direct examinations of the surgeon, the prosthetist, and an economist. From the original DICOM imaging files of the hospital and radiology facilities he built two- and three-dimensional images of the injuries, and High Impact Graphics drew illustrations over the imaging so the injuries could be shown without alienating the jury. Brittany Shank, his wife, brought her own claim for loss of consortium.

Zero Percent

Of the $82,105,345.70, the jury awarded $79,105,345.70 to Michael Shank and $3,000,000 to Brittany Shank. The award covered past and future medical care, prosthetics, lost earning capacity, and noneconomic losses.

“Our client’s life changed in seconds,” Leizerman said after the verdict. “The jury held the driver and the companies behind him accountable.” “This case required the jury to look beyond early conclusions and examine the real evidence as it actually existed,” said George Sidiropolis, who had brought Leizerman into the case.

Three defense lawyers at Lewis Brisbois drew their own lesson for trucking defendants in October 2025: the verdict showed that trucking cases, even in relatively conservative jurisdictions, have the potential to “go nuclear.” Every detail of a reconstruction had to be examined, they wrote, because the defense expert’s apparent failure to identify the point of impact correctly had cost the defendants a rebuttal reconstruction expert.

Two Seconds on Summerfield Road

Two years before the Shank trial, Leizerman tried a wrongful-death case to a federal jury in Michigan. At about 7:38 on the morning of April 27, 2018, Dillon Montie, twenty-one, was driving his Honda Civic east on Summerfield Road in Monroe County, Michigan, on his way to his job in Toledo. Logan Goodrich had stopped a Ford F-250 owned by his employer, Crossfire, LLC, at the stop sign at the end of the northbound exit ramp from US-23. He pulled forward to turn left onto Summerfield Road, saw Montie’s car about two seconds before the crash, and accelerated, but could not avoid the collision. The Civic struck the driver’s side of the truck. Montie died at the scene; Goodrich and the co-worker riding with him survived.

Joseph Montie, as personal representative of Dillon’s estate, sued Goodrich and Crossfire in federal court in February 2019, with Leizerman as the estate’s lawyer. Goodrich testified that it was “harder to see to the left” at the intersection and that he had to move up “to a point where [he could] see.” In his deposition he admitted that his actions, at least in part, contributed to the collision.

The defense put the blame on Montie and on the road. Goodrich and Crossfire raised defenses that Montie had been speeding, that he had been using his phone, and that the design of the intersection caused the crash. The phone defense rested on what a detective found afterward: Montie’s phone unlocked, with Snapchat open and a story displayed on the screen. The story had been viewed with a “limitless” setting that keeps an image on screen regardless of the phone’s lock timer. The detective’s extraction found no evidence that Montie was using the phone at the time of the crash, Snap had no communication logs for his account that day, and no witness saw him on the phone.

On November 30, 2020, Judge Stephanie Dawkins Davis ruled on the estate’s motion for partial summary judgment. With nothing in the record to show when the phone or the story had been opened, there was, in her words, “no more reason to believe that Montie was looking at his phone than there is to believe he was looking at the radio dial, the speedometer, or the road ahead of him.” The phone defense failed as a matter of law. “The court therefore concludes that Defendants’ roadway design affirmative defense fails as a matter of law,” she wrote. She held as well that if Goodrich was found negligent, Crossfire was vicariously liable. The question of Montie’s speed was left for the jury.

The case was tried in May 2023. Montie’s father testified about how close he and his son had been and about Dillon’s plan to take over his father’s fishing charter business. His mother, Tracy Montie Allison, testified that she and Dillon texted and talked every day and kept a weekly dinner date. Before trial the defendants’ insurer had offered $500,000, and the family had turned it down. The jury deliberated for about an hour and returned a unanimous verdict of $18.5 million. “There is no legal outcome that can undo the devastating loss experienced by the Montie family,” Leizerman said after the verdict.

A File Clerk at His Uncle’s Firm

Leizerman grew up in the Detroit area. “I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer, ever since I was 8 years old,” he said in 2015. At seventeen he was recruited as a file clerk at his uncle’s law firm, EJ Leizerman & Associates, and it is the only law firm he has worked for. Before law school he served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1985 and 1986, on an appointment from Representative John D. Dingell, and studied philosophy and film and video at the University of Michigan. He graduated from the University of Toledo College of Law in 1994, was admitted in Ohio that year, and from 2001 to 2006 taught jurisprudence, pretrial practice, and negotiation at the law school as an adjunct professor. He has practiced since 1994 at the firm, now called The Law Firm for Truck Safety.

The case that turned him toward trucks came to him there. A trailer-truck driver had rear-ended another 18-wheeler, and Leizerman was ready to tell a jury that his client was not at fault: the other truck’s brake lights were out. The case showed him how common mechanical failures on trucks were, and in the late 1990s he began taking more truck cases and fewer car cases. He took up truck cases, he said in 2015, because he “saw an area where I could really help from a safety advocacy standpoint.”

By 2004 he was describing a case built on a driver’s own messages: “He told the company he was at his service limit, and they sent him back out anyway.” Proving a truck case meant reading driver logs, credit-card receipts, cell-phone records, bills of lading, drug and alcohol test results, and in-cab satellite messages, because, as Leizerman said, “if drivers are falsifying their hours, who cares what the laws are?”

A Trial Lawyer With a Class A License

In 2002 he became the founding chair of the American Association for Justice’s Interstate Trucking Litigation Group. In 2005 West published Litigating Truck Accident Cases, a three-volume treatise he writes with his wife, Rena Leizerman, and updates every year. He wrote “Finding Insurance in Truck Crash Cases” for Trial magazine in 2008. While running his law practice he went to truck-driving school, passed the commercial driver’s license exam on his first attempt, and earned a Class A commercial driver’s license, which he holds with endorsements for double and triple trailers and for tankers. He is board-certified in truck accident law by the National Board of Trial Advocacy, helped write the certification exam, and in 2015 co-founded the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys.

He has taken at least fifteen truck and bus cases to trial. In 2014 he obtained a $34 million settlement for two Ohio residents hurt in August 2012 on the 80/90 Turnpike in Fulton County, Ohio. A tractor-trailer had broken down and was parked on the shoulder, and a tow-truck driver was helping when an eastbound tractor-trailer struck the disabled rig and pinned the tow-truck driver between the two trucks. The tow-truck driver suffered a brain injury and lost both legs; the driver of the disabled truck suffered a skull fracture, brain damage, and a broken leg. In May 2014 he testified before the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee under the title “It’s Time to Adjust Federal Minimum Insurance Levels.” The federal insurance minimum for large trucks has stood at $750,000 since 1980.

In early 2015 he filed nine pages of comments for the American Association for Justice’s trucking group in response to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking on that minimum. He and other safety advocates asked that it be raised to $4,422,000 for most large trucks. By his calculation, $750,000 would have covered about sixty years of an average worker’s salary for the family of someone killed in a large-truck crash in 1980, and about sixteen years by 2015. “This inflationary adjustment will help pay lost wages to a widow,” he said. “It will allow for victims to pay for life care plans when there is brain damage or paralysis,” he added, instead of leaving Medicaid and other government programs to pay.

The Physical Core

In 2018 Trial Guides published The Zen Lawyer: Winning with Mindfulness, which Leizerman wrote with Jay Rinsen Weik, a Zen Buddhist priest at the Zen Buddhist Temple of Toledo who had been his teacher. He is a formal shoken student of Rinsen Roshi at the Toledo temple. Leizerman had spent his first fifteen years as a trial lawyer studying trial strategy and working with trial consultants. As he went deeper into Zen practice—mindfulness and the moral precept of do no harm—he found it increasingly influencing the decisions he made in cases, and he came to see how fully present he was in the courtroom as the best predictor of a large verdict. The book grew out of recorded conversations with Weik about applying Zen practice to lawyering, and Leizerman later brought Weik together with the trial consultant Joshua Karton to teach those skills at workshops. Leizerman had also attended Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College in 2008.

The book is organized in five parts, which Leizerman calls the physical, emotional, logical, motivational, and Zen cores. The first part concerns what happened in the physical world. “It is critical for a jury to fully understand what physically happened,” he wrote. Jurors are more easily confused, he warned, when a lawyer describes an event with words and a couple of photographs. “You can assure their full understanding by physically immersing them in the case.” He put it as a rule: “One of the important lessons of the physical core is don’t tell the jury the story of what happened, show them.” In the Shank trial that meant a fifteen-foot print of the intersection, laser scans of the scene, and drone photographs of the road where Shank’s reconstructionist put the truck over the midline.

The introduction, under the heading “Zazen Is the Starting Point,” takes the practice into the courtroom. “In the middle of trial, if the police officer testifies that he was mistaken about his calculations and now believes your client was speeding and the crash was her fault, a repetitive closed-eye mantra is not helpful,” Leizerman wrote. A lawyer in that moment, he went on, cannot go back to counsel table and tell the judge that the witness’s testimony was stressful.

In a 2015 interview about the book he explained where its examples come from: “I’m a truck accident lawyer. I sue unsafe truck companies, so there are a lot of examples in the book that come from truck crash litigation.” In the same interview he said, “There are two questions that predict whether someone will do well at trial.” The first he asks himself: “Am I present at trial? Am I aware what’s going on? Am I mindful?” The second is whether he is emotionally connected.

He has warned that lawyers “tend to bring the anger of a case to the courtroom without allowing the jury to experience it,” taking from jurors an anger they need to feel for themselves. On damages he talks about what a defendant took from his client and sets aside the phrase pain and suffering: a defendant that cannot give back what it took must pay its value. Compassion and mindfulness, he has said, do not make a lawyer a wimp. “I like to say you can be compassionate and be a badass.”

From the Employer to the Broker

Shank’s jury reached the companies that employed the driver. In 2026 the Supreme Court decided whether state law reaches the company one step further back: the freight broker that chooses which motor carrier will haul a load. Shawn Montgomery had stopped his tractor-trailer on Interstate 70 in Illinois on December 7, 2017, when a tractor-trailer driven by Yosniel Varela-Mojena for Caribe Transport II rear-ended it. His injuries included a leg amputation. C.H. Robinson Worldwide had arranged the shipment, and Montgomery alleged that it negligently hired Caribe despite the carrier’s conditional federal safety rating.

The Seventh Circuit held the claim preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act; the Sixth and Ninth Circuits had ruled the other way. The issue was whether a negligent-hiring claim against a broker falls within the act’s exception preserving “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” C.H. Robinson argued that reading the exception that broadly would let it swallow the preemption clause, and that Congress had preempted state regulation of intrastate brokers without any safety exception.

On May 14, 2026, the Court unanimously reversed. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the Court that a claim that one company negligently hired another to transport goods is not preempted, because the states retain authority to regulate safety “with respect to motor vehicles,” and a broker’s choice of carrier concerns the trucks that will carry the goods. On the odd fit between the intrastate and interstate provisions, she wrote: “Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, concurred. “In my view, this case is closer than the Court’s opinion perhaps might suggest,” he wrote. Trucking companies, he observed, are best placed to monitor their own trucks and drivers, and brokers that act reasonably and arrange transportation with reputable carriers should be able to defend successfully against state tort suits.

Rena Leizerman, Michael Leizerman’s wife and co-author and a partner at the firm, worked on the case, and the firm recruited and coordinated the amicus coalition: attorneys general from Ohio, Texas, Illinois, New York, and more than twenty other states filed in support of Montgomery. Rena Leizerman has described a deliberate amicus strategy built around safety, truck drivers, and the states, rather than plaintiff groups. Paul D. Clement represented Montgomery in the Supreme Court.

“Freight brokers have spent years and millions of dollars trying to convince courts that they are untouchable, even when a broker knowingly hires an unsafe truck company,” Michael Leizerman said the day the Court ruled. The case was remanded for further proceedings. Rena Leizerman has said it is headed toward trial, and that brokers are now pressing their position with regulators and legislators.