Draft:Cyril V. Smith

Cyril V. (Cy) Smith (born August 4, 1960) is an American lawyer. He helped establish the National Football League (NFL)'s legal liability for brain injuries caused by repeated concussions from playing American football, and later exposed use of racially-based payment schemes for retired American football players injured by concussions.

Early life
Smith attended Groveton and George C. Marshall High Schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, where he led their debate teams, graduating in 1977. He then went on to earn his B.A. in government from Dartmouth College in 1981. While attending Dartmouth, Smith was a Sigurd Larmon Scholar and Rufus Choate Scholar, recipient of the Chase Peace Prize, and ranked first nationally for intercollegiate debate, 1980–1981. He earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1986.

Professional career
Smith began his career at the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro LLP (formerly Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky ) in Washington, D.C. In 1990, he and his wife, Adina Amith, moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he joined the law firm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP and became a partner in 1994.

Smith began work on NFL matters in 2004, when he filed a lawsuit for the estate of Michael "Mike" Webster, a former player for the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, who had died in 2002. Smith's lawsuit against the NFL's pension plan alleged that Webster's repeated concussions from playing American pro football had caused multiple brain injuries and ultimately led to Webster's total disability and inability to work after his retirement from football in 1991.

Smith won that case in 2005, with the federal trial court in Baltimore finding that Webster's estate was entitled to more than $1 million in unpaid disability pension benefits because Webster's concussions were the direct cause of his disability. In 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia upheld that finding. These legal rulings were the first to draw a direct link between American football and brain injuries leading to disability and dementia, as well as the first legal judgments of any kind against the NFL's pension plan. Smith later represented retired American football player Jesse Solomon in a case that further drew the link between football and the disease known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE.

The legal action brought by Smith heightened the focus on concussions at the pro, college, and amateur levels of football in America, and helped lead the NFL and other football leagues to acknowledge the significance of football-caused brain injuries and to adopt rules changes aimed at decreasing the number of concussions, although the effect of those changes has yet to be proven. It also precipitated a class action lawsuit against the NFL and others based on retired players' concussion-related injuries, and then to a settlement of that lawsuit, which required the NFL, beginning in 2017, to make compensation payments to retired players based on the severity of their mental impairments.

This compensation scheme, known as the NFL Concussion Settlement, led to Smith's role in exposing the use of race-based standards for evaluating players' settlement claims. The settlement based its payments on players' loss in cognitive ability compared to "norms" on neuropsychological tests adjusted for several factors, including whether the player was Black or White (some 70% of pro football players are Black). The norms, in turn, assumed that Blacks started with lower cognitive ability than Whites, so that White players were presumed to have lost more cognitive ability than their Black teammates.

In a 2020 lawsuit against the NFL, Smith, Justin Wyatt of J.R. Wyatt Law, and Edward Stone of Edward Stone Law challenged the use of this "race norming" technique, arguing that it placed Black players at a distinct disadvantage in applying for and receiving Settlement benefits. The lawsuit led in 2022 to comprehensive changes in the NFL Concussion Settlement, eliminating the use of race-norming and giving Black players the chance to receive benefits under race-neutral standards.

The public exposure of the race-norming practice has contributed to a reconsideration of race-based standards of care and evaluation across American health care, including in the evaluation of kidney disease, obstetrics, and neuropsychology.

Smith has regularly spoken out on issues related to football and head injuries, including through testimony delivered before the U.S. Congress in 2007 about the Webster case and its implications. He has also written opinion articles for USA Today, ESPN, CBS News, Sports Business Journal, and other outlets.

Beyond sports-related cases, Smith has represented other individuals in high-stakes cases, including the son of real estate mogul and corporate raider Victor Posner in a multimillion-dollar settlement in one of the largest will contests in U.S. history and an accountant in the Manila office of a global construction firm, who was kidnapped and tortured after the employer refused to pay his ransom or permit his family to do so.

Smith was selected by the Alabama federal district court to serve on the five-person Plaintiffs' Steering Committee in the consolidated national class action antitrust proceedings against the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurers, directing the litigation on behalf of health insurance subscribers. The settlement in that case, which received final approval in 2022 and was affirmed on appeal in 2023, requires the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurers to pay $2.67 billion to insureds and to undertake sweeping changes in the ways the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurers compete in the national health insurance market.

Awards and honors

 * Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business, Litigation: General Commercial (Maryland)
 * Law360 Benefits MVP of the Year (2022)
 * The National Law Journal, Plaintiffs' Lawyer Trailblazer (2023 and 2017 )
 * The Daily Record, Leadership in Law Award (2009)