Shanin Specter

“There would not have been time for them to feel any physical pain when they hit the ground,” Dan Webb said in his opening statement to a federal jury in Chicago in November 2025. Webb, a former U.S. attorney, was defending Boeing in the first trial over the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the 737 MAX that went down minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa for Nairobi on March 10, 2019, killing all 157 people aboard. Boeing had already accepted responsibility for the crash. The jurors were there to decide what the company owed the family of one passenger, Shikha Garg, and a contested point at trial was whether Garg suffered pain in her final moments. Webb asked the jury to focus on “fair and reasonable” compensation.

Shanin Specter tried the case for Garg’s family, with his Kline & Specter colleague Elizabeth Crawford, before U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso. In his own opening, Specter showed the jurors a photograph of Garg as a bride, smiling, in a sari and holding flower garlands in keeping with Indian tradition, a few months before she boarded the flight. “She was a beautiful person inside and out,” he said. He showed them a second photograph, taken the day of the crash, of the crater the airplane left in the ground. At trial Specter described a young, accomplished woman for the jury and called her death “senseless” and “preventable.” “Money is an entirely inadequate substitute for the life of Shikha Garg,” he told them.

Garg was 32, an Indian citizen, a PhD candidate and a United Nations consultant traveling to a U.N. environmental assembly in Nairobi. She had joined the United Nations Development Programme in 2013 and spent four years helping India’s environment ministry with its climate policies, including the national climate pledge India submitted under the U.N. climate treaty. From 2017 she worked inside the ministry as a consultant on the Sustainable Development Goals, concentrating on resource efficiency. She had married Soumya Bhattacharya, who worked for U.N. Environment in New Delhi, less than three months before the flight, after three years together. He was supposed to fly to Nairobi with her until a last-minute change of plans kept him in New Delhi, and the couple had planned a vacation for after her return. After boarding she texted him: “I have boarded the flight and will call you once I land.” From nearly the moment the pilots took off in their new Boeing jet, alarms sounded for six minutes while they fought to fly it, and then the airplane went into a final nosedive at nearly 700 miles per hour.

Fault Admitted, and a Fight Over the Final Minutes

Investigators determined that a faulty software system on the then-new MAX had repeatedly forced the airplane’s nose down in both crashes. In 2021, Boeing reached an agreement with most of the Ethiopian victims’ families under which it admitted sole responsibility for the crash and the families agreed not to pursue punitive damages. Boeing has said it settled over 90 percent of the civil suits from the two accidents and paid billions of dollars through lawsuits, a deferred prosecution agreement and other payments. On November 5, 2025, a week before the Garg verdict, Boeing settled three more Ethiopian cases on terms that were not released.

Specter had called for accountability beyond damages before either trial began. In an October 2022 op-ed, he and Robert A. Clifford wrote that the Securities and Exchange Commission had found that Dennis Muilenburg, then Boeing’s chief executive, suggested removing the flight-control redesign issue from a Boeing press release. Muilenburg’s successor, David Calhoun, was then running the company. “It’s time for the criminal justice system to look at the behavior of both Muilenburg and Calhoun,” they wrote.

With fault admitted, the Chicago trials concerned compensatory damages alone. The jurors heard who the passenger was, what she went through after takeoff and what her death took from her family. Boeing’s defense went to the amount, and in the Garg trial to Webb’s position that the passengers did not experience physical injury before impact. Boeing had tried earlier to keep the passengers’ last minutes out of the trials altogether. In 2023 it argued that Illinois law allowed no compensation for their pain and suffering because they had died the instant the airplane hit the ground, that evidence of what they went through would be speculation, and that such testimony would be “inflammatory and have an unfair impact on jurors.” Alonso ruled against Boeing that May, and the families’ lawyers were free to call experts to tell jurors what the passengers likely suffered before the crash.

Soumya Bhattacharya’s Testimony and the Verdict of November 12

On the witness stand, Bhattacharya described his late wife as a “brilliant” young professional who was studying renewable energy. Webb challenged the testimony of a witness for the family about how much Garg had suffered before she died. In his closing argument he turned to Bhattacharya to apologize for Boeing in open court, reminded the jurors, as Alonso’s instructions did, that sympathy could not decide the case, and told them that “this trial only has to do with compensation.” Boeing’s lawyers proposed $11.95 million. Specter’s closing turned on what Garg would have gone on to do. “Part of Soumya’s grief is knowing that he doesn’t get to see her do that,” he said. “He doesn’t get to share that with her.”

After two hours of deliberation, on November 12, 2025, the jury returned a $28.45 million verdict, the first in the dozens of lawsuits filed after the Ethiopian crash and the Lion Air crash in Indonesia five months earlier, which together killed 346 people. Of that amount, $10 million was for the “pain and suffering and emotional distress” Garg experienced before the crash, and another $10 million was for grief. Under a deal the parties had struck that morning, Garg’s family would receive the full verdict plus 26 percent interest, and Boeing would not appeal. The total was $35.85 million. “We and the family are gratified by the jury’s verdict,” Specter and Crawford said. “It provides public accountability for Boeing’s wrongful conduct.” “We happily accept the verdict,” Bhattacharya said. “We came here for a jury trial and it’s absolutely acceptable.”

Samya Stumo’s Trial and the Minutes Before Impact

Samya Stumo was 24. She grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2015 and had recently joined ThinkWell, a nonprofit working to strengthen health systems in developing countries. She was on her way to her first major project with the organization when Flight 302 went down. Her father, Michael Stumo, spent the years afterward publicly pressing Boeing, regulators and Congress over what families viewed as the failures that allowed the 737 MAX to keep flying after the first crash, off the coast of Indonesia. “We don’t want to be doing this,” he has said. “But we want to avoid a third crash.” Her mother, Nadia Milleron, has said that Samya “got on the plane completely trusting.”

Specter and Crawford, with James Power of Power Rogers in Chicago, represented her estate in the second Chicago trial, which opened May 4, 2026, before U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso. Her parents and her brothers, Adnaan and Tor, sat in the front row of the gallery. In his opening statement Specter told the jurors that Samya had taught herself to read at three, finished high school at 16 and earned a full scholarship to the University of Copenhagen, and that she was on the first assignment of her dream job when she died. He called her “extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily accomplished.” Before the verdict, Webb expressed Boeing’s sorrow over the crash and said the company’s “only disagreement” with the Stumo family was “on the exact amount of compensation.” Specter told the court that Boeing was “negligent,” that the aircraft was “unsafe” and that “Boeing caused this crash and these deaths.” “This crash was preventable, this crash was senseless,” he said.

Her relatives testified about what came after the crash. Michael Stumo spoke for hours, in a composed voice while his wife sobbed in the gallery, about “Sammy,” his “sophisticated and charismatic” daughter. Of learning about the crash in the middle of the night, he said, “It felt like my organs were crushing inside my body.” The family had already lost a son, Nels, to cancer when he was an infant. “We had lost Nels before,” he said. “How could we lose two?” His wife no longer listened to music, the family’s karaoke nights had ended, and Tor, once the happiest of the three children, had withdrawn into himself. “It feels like since she’s been gone, we don’t have permission to be happy,” Michael Stumo told the jury. “Sometimes you catch yourself being happy, and you correct yourself, like you shouldn’t be.”

Both sides called experts to describe what Stumo and the other passengers experienced before the crash. The trial ran nearly two weeks. The eight-member jury deliberated for two hours and on May 13 unanimously awarded $49.5 million: $21 million for Stumo’s experience on the flight, $16.5 million for her family’s loss of her companionship and $12 million for the family’s grief. The Garg jury had put $10 million on Garg’s suffering before impact. Specter said afterward that he believed the expert testimony from both sides about what the passengers went through had made an impression on the jurors. “Samya was an exceptional young woman with a close-knit family who have suffered greatly by her passing,” he said. Boeing paid the verdict with prejudgment interest, $63.96 million in all.

Christopher Ellison’s Blood Pressure at the Philadelphia VA

Christopher Ellison, a Philadelphia Marine Corps veteran who had served 20 years in the military, was 49 and working as a calibration technician at Kandel Electronics when he went to the Philadelphia VA in September 2007 to have eight teeth removed as part of his treatment for gum disease. A VA oral surgeon began at about 9 a.m., with a dental student assisting. During the first injections of local anesthetic, Ellison said he felt nauseous, and his blood pressure read low. The surgeon stopped, reclined the chair, waited about ten minutes until the pressure came back up and Ellison said he was all right, and went on. Three more times his blood pressure fell to dangerously low levels, once more during the injections and twice during the extractions, and each time the surgeon reclined the chair, waited for the pressure to rise, got Ellison’s consent and continued. The procedure went ahead anyway, through every interruption. At about 10:30 a.m., after 10 to 15 minutes in the reclined chair and a review of his post-operative instructions, Ellison was released without monitoring. The surgeon later testified that Ellison “was moving his arms and legs and looked fine” when he left, and that he had taken the drops in pressure for vasovagal syncope, a fainting reaction, or for anxiety.

Ellison stopped at the VA pharmacy and then set out alone in his car. Minutes after he left, he had a catastrophic stroke while driving home and crashed his car two-tenths of a mile from the VA. He was not found for several hours. At about 1 p.m. a tow-truck driver came upon the car with Ellison unconscious inside. The stroke was in the left middle cerebral artery, and it required a left hemicraniectomy, the surgical removal of part of the skull. He had not reached a hospital in time for the therapy that can sometimes prevent a stroke’s permanent damage.

Cheryl Ellison, his wife and guardian, brought a malpractice suit in December 2008. Because the care had been given at a VA hospital, the United States took the place of the original defendants, and under the Federal Tort Claims Act the case would be tried to a judge without a jury. Specter, with Charles L. Becker and Regan S. Safier, represented the Ellisons against the United States. Their claim was that the extractions should have stopped and that Ellison should have been watched for hours instead of sent home, and the proof rested on two physicians. Dr. Stuart Super, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon with more than 37 years of teaching and practice, gave the opinion that once Ellison’s blood pressure first fell, the procedure should have been discontinued, a medical consultation obtained, and Ellison kept under supervision for several hours, in the dental clinic or an emergency room. Dr. Scott Kasner, the neurologist who treated Ellison at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that the stroke came from a blood clot stemming from an earlier heart attack, that the pressure drops during the procedure contributed to its extent, and that proper treatment and longer monitoring could have prevented it or made it less damaging.

The Justice Department went after both witnesses. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Thomas F. Johnson and Stacey L.B. Smith moved to exclude their opinions as unreliable under the Supreme Court’s Daubert standard, on the view that losing either expert would end the case on summary judgment. They argued that Super had no medical literature behind his standard-of-care opinions, had conceded that he had no way of knowing whether a significant number of oral surgeons would disagree with him, and contradicted a leading dental textbook. Against Kasner, they pointed to his concession that no test could show absolutely where the clot came from, and to his failure to use the stroke-subtype classification method described in a textbook he had himself edited.

On November 10, 2010, Senior U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr. rejected the motion. He found that the government was making too much of an isolated deposition answer: Super had also said that he knew of other oral surgeons who would act in a similar manner, which showed that his opinion described the general standard of care rather than a personal one. Yohn cited Third Circuit precedent disavowing any requirement of supporting literature and treated his own gatekeeping job as limited to asking whether the opinion rested on good grounds. Super’s decades of managing patients with blood-pressure problems and teaching dental students and oral surgeons how to respond to emergencies supplied those grounds. “A standard of care opinion may be reliable even in the absence of medical literature on point,” Yohn wrote. He found Kasner’s method reliable as well. Differential diagnosis, ruling out other explanations until the most probable cause remains, is reliable under Third Circuit law when appropriately performed, and courts reject it only when a doctor engages in very few of the standard techniques for ruling out other causes and offers no good explanation for why the conclusion remains reliable.

Specter tried the case with Safier before Yohn in 2011. The government argued that Ellison’s existing health problems had caused the stroke. In September 2011 Yohn found the VA oral surgeon, Dr. Mark Abel, negligent in not stopping the extractions. The failure to stop after the first drop in blood pressure, Yohn found, was “a substantial factor in causing Mr. Ellison’s stroke,” and the failure to refer Ellison for observation was “a significant factor in the severity of the stroke.” Ellison, he found, “has suffered a catastrophic brain injury resulting in severe permanent cognitive and physical injuries.”

Yohn’s $17.5 million verdict, part of it in periodic payments, set out the losses item by item: more than $3.1 million for past and future medical expenses, more than $1.1 million for past and future lost earnings, $2.5 million for the pain and suffering Ellison had already endured and $7.5 million for the pain and suffering ahead of him, $226,000 for a new, accessible home, and $3 million to Cheryl Ellison for her loss of consortium. It was the VA’s largest malpractice payout in a decade. “This is about as devastating an injury as a person can have, and that’s what the award reflects,” Specter said. Johnson said the verdict would be reviewed for a possible appeal. The solicitor general decided not to pursue one, the government dropped its appeal, and the Third Circuit dismissed it; the verdict was paid in full in 2012. Specter called the decision “a ringing endorsement of Judge Yohn’s judgment.” The idea that Yohn would be reversed, he said, “was always, to use a fancy legal term, silly.”

Ellison was left permanently paralyzed. Home video from his family showed him struggling to walk, to communicate, even to peel a banana on his own, and in 2013 he required care around the clock. Specter has said he has never had a client who would not have traded the money for the injury.

Venue Rules and the Uncompensated Patient

Specter has also written about what he called “the uncompensated victims of medical negligence.” In an October 2014 Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed titled “Victims of medical negligence pay for reforms,” he noted that medical-malpractice claims, payments and insurance rates had dropped sharply over the previous decade. “Unfortunately, it’s not due to better health care,” he wrote; studies still showed very high error rates. He tied the decline to Pennsylvania’s tort changes, damage caps in 31 states, and the wholesale transfer to the suburban counties of cases that once would have been filed in Philadelphia. “It is extremely difficult to win a medical-malpractice trial in the suburban counties,” he wrote, citing reports that law firms accept only about 1 percent of malpractice inquiries. He proposed allowing malpractice suits wherever a defendant regularly does business, as the rules already allowed in motor-vehicle and premises cases, and questioned whether the special rules for medical defendants were consistent with equal protection.

The rule behind that transfer dated from 2002, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court provided that a malpractice action against a health care provider could be brought only in the county where the cause of action arose. From 2000 to 2003, Philadelphia accounted for 407 of the state’s 1,144 medical-malpractice verdicts; in 2019 it accounted for 17 of 78. In January 2019, after the court’s Civil Procedural Rules Committee proposed letting injured patients sue providers wherever they regularly do business, Specter called the prediction that malpractice cases would surge “advocacy without evidence,” pointing out that filings and insurance rates were both down. The bar, he said, had been unhappy for 17 years about having two sets of venue rules, one for health care providers and one for everyone else. “So this change is a long time coming,” he said.

In June 2022, with House Bill 2660, introduced by Rep. Rob Kauffman, proposing to amend the state constitution so that the General Assembly could set venue in civil cases by statute, Specter objected. “That is troubling because it seeks to upset the delicate balance among our three branches of government,” he said. Asked what legislative control of venue would do to cases outside medical malpractice, “It’s highly unpredictable,” Specter said, “and that’s part of the reason why the constitution should not be amended in this regard.” On August 25, 2022, the Supreme Court adopted its rules committee’s amendments, effective January 1, 2023, and the special venue rule for health care providers came to an end. A majority of the committee “did not find justification for the continued disparate treatment of victims of medical malpractice,” and malpractice claims became subject to the same venue rules as other professional liability claims and tort claims in general.

Dimes in a Camden Parking Meter, 1982

Specter learned to try cases from James E. Beasley. He had come to the University of Pennsylvania’s law school from Haverford College, where he graduated with honors in political science in 1980 and won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship. “As a first year law student in March 1982, I wrote twelve letters to potential summer employers,” he recalled in a 2015 remembrance. Beasley telephoned the next morning, before any other reply arrived, and asked him to come over. In the interview Beasley “asked a series of short questions in rapid fire succession, maintaining a direct gaze on my pupils,” and his last question was when Specter could start.

Specter spent that summer on Monaco v. G.D. Searle, Inc., a seven-week trial in federal court in Camden in which a dentist claimed that the high blood pressure drug Aldactone had caused him to develop female breasts and shrunken testicles. “My job during the trial consisted largely of putting dimes in the parking meter and joining Beasley and Kline for dinner every night after court,” Specter wrote. Kline was Tom Kline, then an associate in Beasley’s office. Specter tried to contribute more. He checked the curriculum vitae of the defendant’s main witness, found that it listed three children where another biographical reference listed four, and “foolishly urged” Beasley to confront the witness with the inconsistency. Beasley declined. “Later research revealed that the witness had suffered the death of one of his children, thereby explaining the discrepancy and guaranteeing a horrific answer for our side if Beasley had followed my novice advice.” The verdict for the plaintiff was “nearly $8 million, an astounding amount for a case like that in 1982.”

Beasley gave him three rules early on. The first was “listen to your clients,” and Specter came to see why: “Our clients had a lot to say and often they were right and our instincts and alleged wisdom were wrong.” The second was to take abuse from no one, a judge included. The third was that “there is no case more complicated than an intersectional collision.” After preparing and trying many of them, Specter found that “the issues of time, space and perception were as subtle and subject to the powers of advocacy as any issues in our most rarified cases.” Beasley also told him about a medical-malpractice expert of his who “did extremely poorly on cross examination.” Instead of taking notes and planning a redirect, Beasley tried to balance a sharpened pencil on its point on his table. He won the case, and as he left the courthouse he asked a juror what he had thought of the expert. The juror replied: “we didn’t think he did very well, but we saw that you didn’t seem to care.”

Specter earned his law degree at Penn and an LL.M. in international law at the University of Cambridge, both in 1984, and practiced in Beasley’s firm from 1984 until 1995, when he and Kline founded Kline & Specter. “His preparation was astounding; no matter how early I got into the office, when Jim Beasley was on trial, he was always there first,” Specter wrote. Beasley’s distance from the lawyers who worked for him, Specter wrote, contributed to their leaving, “a painful moment in Tom’s life, my life and Jim Beasley’s life,” and relations between Beasley and Specter “turned frosty.” With time, they thawed. When Specter sued the practice of Beasley’s own cardiologist on behalf of the estate of a very wealthy Philadelphian, Beasley came to jury selection, pulled him aside and said, “you know, Shanin, juries don’t give much money to rich people.” Specter replied, “Jim, that’s the kind of problem you taught me to get around.” Beasley laughed, and the discomfort was gone.

On August 26, 2004, Specter wrote Beasley a letter, and Beasley replied on August 30. “Twenty years ago today, I walked into 21 S. 12th Street and began my practice of law with you,” Specter’s letter began. “Whatever I have achieved in these twenty years is due in substantial part to you. Thank you.” Beasley’s reply sent his regards to Kline, “with my hope to both of you for a continued bright future.” A few weeks later Beasley died. “This exchange of letters hangs in my office.” It is, he wrote, a reminder of “the importance of telling people you appreciate them.”

Teaching Evidence, Torts and “How to Ask a Question”

“After a string of verdicts,” Specter wrote, Penn Law’s new dean, Mike Fitts, asked him to teach trial advocacy, and he began in 2000. He later added courses in trial skills, law practice and impact litigation, and in 2015 began teaching on the West Coast as well, at UC Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco), Berkeley Law and Stanford Law. His regular rotation now includes Evidence and Torts as well as electives such as “How to Ask a Question” and “The Civil Justice System as an Agent of Change.” In 2024, UC Law San Francisco, where he is a professor of practice, dedicated a courtroom in his name and unveiled in it a painting by Michael Shane Neal whose moral is “listen, write, speak.”

He also gives a talk at law schools called “How to Get a Job You’ll Really Like,” in which he tells students to put liking their work ahead of chasing the largest starting salary and to go somewhere “where you can shine.”

In a 2024 essay in the UC Law Journal, Specter wrote that the legal academy and legal practice “move in parallel,” each with little to do with the other, “to the detriment of both,” and he urged practitioners to teach. He described what four decades of practice let him see in a casebook: “When I read a case in a torts textbook, I understand from handling thousands of tort cases over four decades why the plaintiff’s lawyer took the case, pled and sought to prove specified theories of liability, and refrained from others. I understand why the case was defended as it was. I understand the trial and judicial approach to the legal issues.”