Wayne Graver is a shareholder in the Industrial and Consumer Product Liability Practice Group in the Philadelphia office of Lavin O’Neil Ricci Cedrone & DiSipio and a member of the firm’s board of directors. He concentrates his practice on civil litigation including product liability defense, insurance defense and commercial litigation.
Mr. Graver has served as national counsel for a major automotive manufacturer for a defined class of cases. He has defended a foreign pharmaceutical company in more than 100 stroke cases in multi-district litigation, with no settlement payments or adverse verdicts. He currently serves as regional coordinating counsel for all liability matters within a five-state region for three of the firm’s Fortune 500 clients and is representing a global manufacturer of security and safety products involving hundreds of claims of hearing loss due to exposure to fire truck sirens.
In more than 30 years of practice, Mr. Graver has successfully tried 48 cases to verdict before juries throughout the United States in product liability, catastrophic injury, negligence, employment, commercial and patent matters. He has also successfully tried age/gender discrimination and employee termination cases on behalf of two of the firm’s corporate clients, who have honored him with awards acknowledging his long-standing service.
Throughout his career, Mr. Graver has won defense verdicts for manufacturers of pharmaceutical products, construction equipment, industrial machinery, elevators, automobiles/automotive components, garden and consumer products, which involved claims such as crashworthiness, wrongful death, brain injury, negligence and electrocution.
Examples of Mr. Graver’s significant defense verdicts at trial include:
· Claim of a defective back-up alarm involving a lower leg amputation.
· Front-end loader crashworthiness case involving brain-injured plaintiff seeking multi-million dollar recovery. The trial included multiple experts, creative crash-testing evidence and large client exposure due to unique allegations which, if successful, would have implicated all front-end loader designs.
· Seatbelt claim involving a brain-damaged plaintiff with multi-million dollar exposure to client; case received significant media coverage and required multiple in-trial strategy changes.
Mr. Graver graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and earned his Juris Doctor from Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia. Upon graduation, Mr. Graver served as a law clerk to the Honorable Louis G. Hill, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County. He is admitted to practice in the United States District Courts for the Eastern, Middle and Western Districts of Pennsylvania; the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the Supreme Court of New York (Third Judicial Department.)
Mr. Graver is a member of the Defense Research Institute, and the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York Bar Associations. He maintains an active practice in both states.
Personal
Mr. Graver is active in his community and serves as a member of the board of directors of the Hatboro-Horsham Educational Foundation.
