Magazine honors 1965 HHS grad as outstanding lawyer

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York

Hazelton Standard Speaker
June 22, 2004
By ED CONRAD

Attorney Tom Kline is light years away from the time in his youth when his very first job was filling local coal bins in Hazelton.

The 1965 graduate of Hazelton High School was saluted in the June edition of Law & Politics magazine as an outstanding lawyer in Pennsylvania.

Kline, a former teacher in the Hazelton Area School District, is featured on the front cover aside the title of an article "Pennsylvania Super Lawyers 2004," based on a survey of attorneys throughout the state.

"I had always wanted to be a lawyer (while growing up)," he said. "But I never dreamed I'd be honored by my colleagues across the state" as a super lawyer.

Kline said his days shoveling coal around his boyhood home on Diamond Avenue had give him a realistic view in his successful legal profession dealing with personal injury law.

Kline, a member of the Kline & Specter law firm of Philadelphia, has had a spectacular scorecard of winning lawsuits.

After he graduated from Albright College with a degree in political science, he returned to the Hazelton area in 1969 and took a job teaching social studies to disadvantaged sixth-graders at Foster Intermediate School from 1969 to 1974.

That's when he fell in love with - and eventually married - a fifth-grade teacher named Paula Wolf. They have two children, Hilary and Zachary.

While Kline taught, he also continued his own education, earning a master's degree in American history from Lehigh University and working on a doctorate in the same subject.

But even before he finished the final draft of his dissertation, he decided to follow through with his lifelong desire to be a lawyer.

He attended Duquesne University in 1975 and was the recipient of the law school's Distinguished Student Award.

"After graduating from Duquesne in 1978, he became the last clerk to work with state Supreme Court Justice Thomas Pomeroy. Then he returned to Philadelphia to work with preeminent personal injury attorney James E. Beasley," according to Law & Politics magazine.

"Kline credits both men with shaping his career - Pomeroy with schooling him on the intellectual side of the law, and Beasley with teaching him the practical side," the magazine reported.

By 1995, Kline already had many successes to his name.

"At Beasley he won a $5.2 million verdict in a Dalkon shield intrauterine device suit, and another against the pharmaceutical company Merrill Dow over the nausea drug Bendectin, culminated in a $19.2 million verdict," Law & Politics reported.

Kline and fellow Beasley attorney, Shanin Specter, son of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, then left that firm to start their own practice.

"(The law firm of) Kline & Specter has grown, both in terms of payroll and practice areas. The firm now deals in class action and malpractice lawsuits, in which Kline has a special passion for cases involving cancer.

"His mother and father - the late Isadore and Jeanne Kline - both fought that disease and Kline is currently supporting his wife in her battle with breast cancer," according to Law & Politics.

"Once he had his own firm, Kline's cases became a regular feature on the evening news," the magazine reported.

Among the biggest was a $51 million verdict in 1999 after a 4-year old boy's foot was torn off in an escalator accident.

Since then, Kline has continued to win other well-known cases.

For example, he successfully represented the families of a woman killed in the Pier 34 collapse in Philadelphia, a boilermaker who died in the Motiva Refinery explosion in Delaware, and his latest, a mentally ill inmate who died at the hands of his violent cell mate in Camden County jail.

He had been recognized and honored by groups and publications such as the National Law Journal, an organization of the "nation's most celebrated lawyers," according to the Washington Post.

Kline, whose father managed a factory in Hazelton, keeps a reminder in his office as to what may have aspired him to the heights he has reached - first college, then law school, then as a successful lawyer.

He recalls bringing home a metal object he had made in shop class as a seventh-grader at Grebey when he showed it to his father, then the manager of Rival Dress Co. in McAdoo.

"I still have this funnel that I made in seventh-grade shop class," Kline said with a smile.

"When I brought it home, my dad inspected it and then turned to me and said, 'It's clear that you're going to have to make your living with your head rather than your hands.'