I am a May 2010 graduate of Penn State University, Dickinson School of Law.  Following law school, I sat for and passed the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bar examinations, and I have maintained my bar license in those states to the present.  I currently live in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Since January 2011, I have practiced workers’ compensation defense litigation at Del Collo & Mazzanti LLP, in Paoli, PA.  I handle a case load of approximately 60 cases from initiation to completion of the litigation, including attending hearings before Workers’ Compensation Judges, conducting depositions, engaging in Discovery, drafting Briefs, filing appeals, and conducting Oral Argument before the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board and the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.

In October 2011, I argued and won an appellate court reversal of the underlying trial court decision before the Commonwealth Court in School District of Philadelphia v. WCAB (Davis), 38 A.3d 992 (Pa. Commw. Ct. 2011).  This case makes the important ruling that workers’ compensation claimants who contest pension benefit offsets are required to present some credible evidence to counter an employer’s expert actuarial testimony.

Previously, the loophole existed whereby claimants who wanted to contest pension benefit offsets, or WC Judges who wanted to deny them, could simply argue that the employer’s actuary was not credible.  Thus, the burden remained solely on the employers’ side: employers had to hire an actuary to prove they were entitled to take an offset, but claimants did not have to hire any expert and risk expending money to contest an offset.

The Commonwealth Court recognized this imbalance and now prevents claimants from merely sniping from afar at employers trying to take a statutorily-mandated pension offset.

Now, claimants who wish to contest pension offsets must present their own actuarial evidence to counter an employer’s.  Moreover, WC Judges must now base their decisions regarding pension offsets on the weight of the evidence that each side presents.  That is, WC Judges may no longer simply discredit an employer’s actuary in the absence of credited testimony by a claimant’s actuary.

In law school, I served as the Casenote/Symposium Editor on the Penn State International Law Review (PSILR).  This was a dual position: as Casenote Editor, I organized and ran the annual Casenote Competition, from which the law reviews would select new members; and as Symposium Editor, I acted as editor-in chief for PSILR’s annual Symposium issue.  This year’s topic was comparative constitutional law, and we are publishing articles written by faculty from law schools such as Yale and Georgetown, and from various countries such as Turkey and Malaysia.  The Symposium issue is currently in print.

Community service is also very important to me.  In law school, I served for three years (including serving as a coordinator in my third year) at Dickinson’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program.  VITA offers free income tax return service to low-income community members; Dickinson’s VITA program has been nationally recognized for excellence and has been in operation for over 20 years.  In the 2009-10 academic year, I also interned at Dickinson’s Art, Sports, and Entertainment Law Clinic, which provides free legal advice and representation to artists and athletes in Pennsylvania and the surrounding states.  For my public interest service in law school, I was named a Certified Public Interest Advocate by Dickinson’s Miller Center for Public Interest Advocacy.

Prior to law school, I completed my Masters of Liberal Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where I wrote my cross-disciplinary thesis on the ethics of patenting genetically modified organisms.  I studied and attended evening classes; during the day, I worked as a research associate at the Patent Board, an intellectual property consulting firm in Westmont, NJ.  For undergrad, I studied English and Philosophy at the University of Michigan.  There, I was a member of the club Ultimate Frisbee team, and I still play Ultimate today in the Philadelphia area.  I am also an avid runner, currently training for a marathon.

For more information, please see my resume here.