Newest Honor Brings Kline's Career Into Sharp Focus

Pennsylvania - New Jersey - New York - Nationwide

Amaris Elliott-Engel
September 5, 2007

When Tom Kline graduated from law school in 1978, he had a romantic vision of the shape of his future lawyerly life. He was going to become a small-town lawyer in upstate Pennsylvania.

But one weekend in the autumn of 1979, as he walked with his wife, Paula, and their 6-month-old daughter in the mall in Reading, Kline recounts she gave him the only ultimatum of their 32-year marriage.

He'd already had a clerkship with Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Thomas W. Pomeroy. Paula thought that he should think about doing something a little bit more high profile with his law degree than take a job with a small-town firm. She "prodded" Kline, he said close to 30 years later, to send a letter to that well-respected attorney in Philadelphia a friend had mentioned might have a job opening at his firm.

Kline wrote a two-paragraph letter on his green electric typewriter to James Beasley Sr. Beasley gave him an interview, hired him and in January 1980 Kline started his successful career of six-, seven- and eight-digit verdicts.

He didn't know the path he had set upon, but he quickly became enamored with the power to change things through successful litigation.

"How different things turned out, and you can quote me on that," he said with a grin.

Besides Kline's high-profile, emotional wins in cases like Hall v. SEPTA, with its $51 million verdict, Kline has reached such career heights as chairing the regional Federal Judicial Nominating Commission for the U.S. Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania and writing and performing his one-man show Trial as Theatre, demonstrating how to use drama and emotion in jury trials.

"Tom Kline is a lawyer from whom all lawyers can learn to try a case," said Richard Sprague, the prominent trial attorney who first met Kline when Kline assisted Beasley in representing Sprague in a lawsuit against The Philadelphia Inquirer. "He has a natural instinct. When he tries a case, he's a producer producing a play. His product is a masterpiece that really overwhelms the lawyer on the other side."

But Kline recently may have reached the highest pinnacle a plaintiffs litigator can aspire to with his selection in August as the president of the Inner Circle of Advocates. He was selected in August 2005 as vice president.

Arizona solo practitioner Richard Grand conceived the Inner Circle of Advocates as an information-sharing platform for top plaintiffs attorneys. Originally membership required at least one $1 million verdict and the completion of 50 personal injury cases, but now members must have at least three verdicts over $1 million or one verdict over $10 million; the freshest verdict can't be older than five years ago. Membership is capped at 100 and is by invitation only. Johnnie Cochran, John Edwards and Morris Dees, cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, have been members.

"If you go among attorneys in the whole state and ask them who is the top lawyer in Pennsylvania, you'll get almost everybody saying it's Tom Kline," said Marshall Bernstein, a retired Philadelphia plaintiffs personal-injury attorney and an emeritus member of the Inner Circle of Advocates. "He's one of the top lawyers nationally. No question, he's at the top."

Following his selection last month to lead the Inner Circle for a year, Kline sat down in his office with a bird's-eye view of the city to reflect on his career and to talk about some of the changes in litigation he has witnessed since joining The Beasley Firm in 1980.

Tort reform might seem like an obvious big change to point to, but Kline said he finds that the technology revolution is the most significant change he has witnessed in litigation.

He remembers conducting "cutting-edge social science research" while doing graduate work in American history at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. He was able to collate data from court, census and tax records for his dissertation on whether immigrants to the Scranton area were socioeconomically upwardly mobile on punch cards that fed into a large IBM computer.

Now courtrooms have gone from being exclusively paper-based institutions to transitioning to online. The legal field is much more efficient, Kline said, because of electronic communication.

As for the goal of tort reform to place caps on the amount of awards juries can give, he dismisses the goal as the "propaganda of interest groups that seek to change, upset the balance that exists. This jury system has never been broken and doesn't need to be fixed."

Such caps destroy the ability for plaintiffs to recover damages that will hold bad actors to accountability and check destructive behavior, Kline said.

He said the most talented lawyers would not take some cases if the amounts of damages that can be recovered were limited. Medical malpractice cases have been restricted with the requirement to obtain certification of merit, but those cases are not so restricted plaintiffs cannot recover in "meritorious" cases, Kline said. Without caps, he argues the civil litigation system remains "a great equalizer with the ability to call to task anyone for wrongdoing."

Kline has focused on cases involving catastrophic injuries, patient safety and product safety. He is a member of the plaintiffs multi-district litigation steering committee over the Vioxx pain medication.

Shanin Specter, Kline's partner in Kline & Specter since its 1995 founding, remembers Kline's closing argument in Hall v. SEPTA, in which a 5-year-old boy's foot was ripped off in an escalator.

Kline asked the jury to remember that the boy had lost his sneaker besides losing his foot. He asked them, if nothing else, to remember the cost of the sneakers.

"The powerfulness of the comparison between losing a sneaker and losing a foot was just awesome," Specter said. "The jury ended up awarding $51 million and the exact cost of the sneakers . . . they were sending a message," Specter said.

Specter and Kline first met when Specter clerked at The Beasley Firm and Kline was a young associate.

Specter still marvels that Kline doesn't follow trial notebooks and question outlines. Instead Kline learns a file, outlines the case in his mind and tries the case with just a few notes. Juries find it refreshing, and witnesses must be careful, he said.

"He has a sincere, empathetic relation to people who are terribly injured," Specter said. "He's able to communicate to them in a very basic, elementary way when they're on the witness stand or through medical testimony, and get across to a jury in a way that is totally honest, no phoniness, no lily-gilding but is staggeringly persuasive."

With the public's negative view of the court system at large and lawyers in particular, attorneys have a "small reservoir" to establish their credibility and succeed in a jury trial, Kline said.

Kline believes he succeeds by appealing to jurors' intelligence and their senses of fairness, and by being honest and direct in his approach.

Kline also has secured large settlements, including a $36.4 million settlement for a Motiva Enterprises oil refinery employee killed in an explosion. The settlement is believed to be the largest-ever for a single worker's death.

Don Camhi, a partner with Post & Schell and chair of its professional liability department, said Kline has the courage to turn down reasonable offers of settlement that most other attorneys would accept. Camhi said he believes Kline's experience has taught him he can do better in a courtroom than he can with settlement offers.

"The guy's got the guts to do a lot of things other people don't do," Camhi said.

Trial lawyer Alan Feldman, of Feldman Shepherd Wohlgelernter Tanner & Weinstock, has both worked with Kline on cases and has directly competed with him. Kline, Feldman said, has incredible leadership skills and great business sense to meet his objectives.

"Tom is an icon in this city," Feldman said. "With his partner Shanin Specter, they've built an extremely successful law firm. They are so successful they keep my firm and all their competitors on their toes."

A self-described "product of Pennsylvania," Kline grew up in the working class, immigrant town of Hazleton where his dad managed a factory and his mother was a homemaker; completing his bachelor's at Albright College in Reading, teaching elementary school between 1969 and 1975 while working on his history dissertation. Kline ended up choosing law school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh over finishing his dissertation.

Kline likes to pull out an imperfectly made funnel from his shop metal class; he tells the anecdote that his dad said he should make a living with his head, not his hands. Kline said he always wanted a job with a suit and tie, and he's happy to wear his black suits to work every day.

In 2004, two pillars of Kline's life passed away. First it was the death of his mentor James Beasley, then his wife, Paula, who died from cancer.

While Kline left teaching, Paula was a fifth-grade teacher. Their daughter, Hilary, is a kindergarten teacher and their son, Zachary, is completing graduate studies in musical theater writing at Tisch School in New York.

Like Kline, Beasley also was a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates. Only a small number of Pennsylvania trial lawyers have been invited into the group, including Marshall Bernstein, Herbert Kolsby and Joe Quinn Jr. Kline is the first Pennsylvania attorney to serve as president.

Kline describes the group as a think tank where attorneys can share expert witness "intelligence" and strategies for trying cases.

The group helps recognize the most outstanding trial lawyers in the United States, and communicates daily online and semiannually in person about trial experts and strategies, Quinn said. Kline has been particularly good at sharing advice about cases, Bernstein and Quinn said.

Kline believes that if you have the capacity to do something well, there is not much more that you can ask for. But its important to Kline to have fun while working the field that he has a talent for.

"While we see much tragedy and sorrow, which I've seen in my personal life as well," Kline said, "you have to apply to the practice of law optimism, enthusiasm and a measure of humor in order to succeed in the long haul."