David J. Berg

David Berg attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he earned an undergraduate degree in International Affairs in 1984. He completed a joint degree program in law and business administration at Syracuse University, and was awarded a J.D. and an M.B.A. in 1987. After leaving Syracuse, he took a 1 year judicial clerkship with the New Hampshire Superior Court in 1988. Following the clerkship, he worked for a small general practice firm in a small town in coastal New Hampshire for 3 years before resolving to return to city life. A lifelong Red Sox fan, he decided to move to Boston. He joined Latti & Anderson in 1992, and has been here ever since.

David, along with the other members of the firm, specializes in representing injured commercial fishermen, merchant mariners, marine construction workers, pleasure boaters, and ferry and whale watch passengers. He also represents people injured on land, such as victims of car accidents, construction site accidents, defective products, and slip and falls. Additionally, he handles the office's workers' compensation cases, under both state law and the federal Longshore & Harbor Workers' Compensation Act. He is admitted to the state and federal bars of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, and the First and Fourth Circuit Courts of Appeals. He has also represented clients in numerous other states around the country on a pro hac vice (temporary admission) basis, among them, California, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

David has been representing victims of negligence in personal injury cases for almost 20 years now. He thinks that the majority of personal injury victims actually suffer 2 injuries the first injury, the physical injury, was from the person or company who did it, but, in many circumstances, that person is then hurt again and made worse by the insurance industry and by the "system". He says, "I can help their physical injuries by making sure that they are getting the best medical care that they can get, but, with respect to fighting the system, that is where they really need my help."

David has had many interesting and challenging cases over the years, but 3 in particular stand out as his most fascinating and meaningful.  The first involved a welder on the Big Dig who was hit in the left arm by a large steel pin that flew out of a grapple bucket while it was being lifted by a crane. As a result of this accident, his left forearm was crushed and rendered unusable, and he suffered numerous other injuries. He was never able to regain any use of his left arm, and was never able to return to work. Because he was injured at work, he was entitled to workers' compensation benefits under the federal Longshore Act. Because the grapple bucket was not owned and leased by the client's employer, he was entitled to file third party lawsuits against the owner and lessor.  However, the liability insurer and the workers' compensation insurer were different subsidiaries of the same insurer, so it was essentially the same company insuring and defending all aspects of the case.

This case really appealed to David because the client was a very nice person who was seriously injured, but who had an extremely difficult case.; The case involved the application of two separate areas of law, the federal Longshore & Harbor Workers Compensation Act and standard negligence law. While the workers compensation part of the case was relatively straightforward, the third party case was extremely difficult for several reasons. First, the bucket owner and lessor claimed that they had no employees and that, because they had no employees, the only negligence could have been by the plaintiff's fellow employees, which would have prevented him from winning. Second, because the plaintiff had hooked up the bucket to the crane before it was lifted, the defendants claimed that he did it wrong, and thus the accident was his own fault (which he denied). Third, although the company's post-accident investigation showed that there were 2 separate unsafe conditions in the bucket which contributed to the injury, it was agreed that no one knew when those conditions occurred, who caused those conditions, or that the defendants ever knew about those conditions. The case went to trial with the parties rather far apart, but, after 3 days of trial, the parties were able to arrive at an excellent settlement.

The second case also involved a Big Dig accident. That case, a workers' compensation case, involved a construction superintendent who was crushed between a tire fender and a pier. This client also had a significant problem in his case in that, although he was disabled, his diagnosis was rather minimal. In a nutshell, the insurer simply did not buy that his condition of an aggravation of his pre-existing arthritis was disabling. The insurer contested the extent of the client's damages vigorously. It sent him to multiple insurance medical exams and subjected him to continuing surveillance, but got nowhere. The biggest battle was when David filed a request to have the client placed on permanent and total disability, i.e., disability for life. The insurer submitted the reports and testimony of 2 separate physicians to rebut the testimony of the client's physician, as well as the testimony of its investigator, along with the surveillance photos and videos. David had to carefully analyze the testimony of all 3 physicians in order to be able to explain to the judge why the treating physician's opinions were more credible (which they were). David was able to catch both insurance physicians in misstatements and other unfavorable admissions, and was able to minimize the impact of the surveillance videos, thus clearing the way for the judge to rule in the client's favor, and award the client benefits with a present value of approximately $1,030,000.

The last case was a non-maritime case. David once received a call asking if he was interested in representing a man who had been injured in a collision with another skier on a downhill ski slope. This was a case in which the defendant's insurance company had already denied the claim of prior counsel on the grounds of no liability. As a skier himself, he jumped at the case. Having been almost run over on the slopes himself a number of times, he felt a personal connection to the client and the case. After hearing the client explain how the incident happened and, after going up to the ski mountain to ski and photograph the trails where the collision occurred, he was able to put himself figuratively in the client's ski boots and understand exactly what had happened and why the defendant was negligent. During the pretrial process, the defense attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the defendant did not owe a duty to other skiers to ski carefully and reasonably. David researched the law of skier to skier liability for every ski state in the country, and filed a response which showed that the national consensus of ski law was that skiers did indeed owe each other a duty to ski reasonably. He was able to settle the case for a very favorable amount shortly before trial.

David is a member of the Boston, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire Bar Associations, and has recently written articles for the Massachusetts Bar Association Section Review on pretrial investigation and post-settlement issues in personal injury cases. He also volunteers his time as a pretrial conciliator at the Boston Municipal Court through a program developed by the Boston Bar Association and represents clients pro bono through Bet Tzedek, the legal division of the Jewish Family & Children's Service of Greater Boston. When not at work, David relaxes at home with his beloved wife and dog, reads, travels, plays softball and street hockey, and works in his garden.

Bar Admissions:

• Pennsylvania, 1988
• New Hampshire, 1988
• Maine, 1989
• Massachusetts, 1992
• U.S. District Court District of New Hampshire, 1990
• U.S. District Court District of Massachusetts, 1993
• U.S. District Court Eastern District of New York, 2002
• U.S. District Court Southern District of New York, 2002

Education:

• Syracuse University College of Law, Syracuse, New York, 1987, J.D.
• Syracuse University, 1987, M.B.A. 
• Lafayette College, 1984, B.A.

Professional Associations and Memberships:

• Massachusetts Bar Association Member
• New Hampshire Bar Association Member

Past Employment Positions:

New Hampshire Superior Court, Law Clerk, 1988 - 1989

Pro Bono Activities:

Volunteer Conciliator for Boston Municipal Court, 2003 - Present