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Shanin Specter (born 1957) is an American lawyer. He lives in Gladwyne, Pa. and his law firm, Kline & Specter, P.C., has offices in Philadelphia, Cherry Hill, NJ, Wilmington, Delaware, and New York City. Specter is a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only organization limited to the nation’s top 100 trial lawyers. [1]  He is a squash player who helped win a gold medal for the United States in team competition age 45-49 at the 2005 Maccabiah Games in Israel. Specter is the son of the late U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.)

Education: Specter earned his undergraduate degree in political science with honors in 1980 from Haverford College, where as a sophomore he won the Harry S Truman Scholarship Award given to one student from each state considered to have the best potential for a career in public service. Parade magazine profiled Specter on its cover for the award. Specter earned his law degree at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he now teaches “Trial Advocacy” and “Practice of Law” and where he and law partner Tom Kline in 2012 donated The Kline & Specter Courtroom. Specter earned his Masters in Law at Cambridge University, where he earned first honors.

Legal Career: Specter worked at The Beasley Firm in Philadelphia before opening his own law firm, Kline & Specter, with Tom Kline in 1995. Specter has made numerous media appearances, including spots on the ABC show 20/20 and the ESPN show E:60 as well being featured in many newspaper and magazine articles.

Specter has won more than 100 verdicts and settlements of more than $1 million each, including 13 eight- and nine-figure verdicts. The largest were a $152 million federal jury award against Ford Motor Co. in a defective parking brake case tried in Reno, Nevada, and a $109 million verdict in Pittsburgh in December 2012 in a fallen power line case against West Penn Power Co.

Six months after opening his firm, Specter won a $24.25 million verdict for a little girl brain damaged in a swimming pool accident, the largest-ever verdict in Pennsylvania at the time. Two years later, in 1997, he established a Delaware record with a $19.9 million verdict for a teenage patient accosted in a hospital, suffering catastrophic nerve damage. He followed that with a $49.6 million verdict, then the largest medical malpractice verdict in Pennsylvania history, for a young man left in a near-vegetative state after receiving negligent care at a Philadelphia hospital. In a highly publicized case, Specter in 2001 won a large confidential settlement against Daisy Manufacturing Co. over a defective BB gun that led to the death of a teenage boy. That case prompted an exposé on ABC’s 20/20 and was featured in a book titled Two Boys. Other Specter legal victories: $20 million verdict for a teenager severely injured when nurses failed to respond in time to his blocked airway; $19.1 million verdict for a woman struck by a careless driver while she was working on a road crew (McManamon); $20 million verdict for a child who went blind because of improper hospital care as a newborn; $35 million settlement with 16 defendants involving a fire that  destroyed a business center in Bridgeport, Pa.; $52 million verdict in a retrial of the Ford brake case and an $8.75 million verdict years later in a another trial involving a defective Ford parking brake, with both cases documented in a book titled Bad Brake; $21.6 million verdict against a hospital in a birth injury case; $17.5 million verdict for a former U.S. Marine in a medical malpractice case against the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center. Additionally, Specter played a critical role in the Vioxx case, taking the depositions of Merck & Co. executives as part of the national litigation that resulted in $4.85 billion settlement over the withdrawn pain medication.

Awards and Recognition: Specter in 2007 received the Milton D. Rosenberg Award given by the Pennsylvania Association for Justice as its highest honor, and in 2008 he won the Michael A. Musmanno Award, given annually as the top honor conferred by the Philadelphia Trial Lawyer's Association. The National Law Journal selected Specter as one of the top ten litigators in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was also chosen as among Pennsylvania’s Top 10 lawyers by Super Lawyers and was listed in Best Lawyers in America every year since 1995. He was named a “pre-eminent practitioner” by the World's Leading Product Liability Lawyers. Specter is AV-rated in Martindale-Hubbell and is a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers.