Ted Oshman on Four Decades of Standing Up for Injury Victims

Theodore “Ted” Oshman is a veteran trial attorney with more than 40 years of experience and the owner of The Oshman Firm, a plaintiff litigation practice based in New Jersey and New York City. He has represented thousands of clients in personal injury, medical malpractice, pharmaceutical, and toxic tort cases, recovering more than $500 million during his career. He has been recognized as a Super Lawyer for over a decade and admitted to the Million Dollar Advocates Forum. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, with his family. 

1. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and the work you do at The Oshman Firm?

Most of my career has been spent in one corner of the legal world. I represent people who've been hurt by something they didn't choose. A drug nobody warned them about, a procedure that went wrong, a workplace exposure their employer downplayed for years. My clients aren't usually litigious people. Most of them have never sued anyone in their lives and would prefer to never set foot in a lawyer's office. They end up in mine because something happened that they cannot walk away from. My job is to figure out who is actually responsible, build the case that proves it, and get them the resources they need to move forward. The day-to-day is a mix of medicine, science, document review, depositions, and a lot of conversations with people on what is often the worst chapter of their lives. It is not glamorous work, but I have never wanted to do anything else.

2. What first pulled you toward plaintiff-side personal injury and mass tort work?

It wasn't strategic. I came out of Brooklyn Law in the early 1980s and started representing people who had real problems caused by other people's choices. The work felt meaningful in a way that other practice areas didn't. I figured out pretty quickly that I'd rather spend my career standing next to someone in a hospital bed than across a conference table from another set of in-house lawyers.

3. After more than 40 years, what keeps you motivated to keep taking on these cases?

Honestly, the clients. Every case I take is somebody whose life got rearranged without their permission. A parent whose child has cerebral palsy because nobody watched the fetal monitor. A farmer with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma after spraying Roundup for decades. A woman dealing with chronic pain from a mesh implant that was rushed through approval. These are not abstract problems. They show up in your office, sit across from you, and ask whether you can help. After all these years, that part still hits the same way it did when I was 30. The legal system is slow and frustrating and weighted against people without resources, and watching it actually work for somebody who needed it is genuinely satisfying. The other piece is the legal craft itself. Mass tort litigation has gotten enormously more complex over the past two decades, and I still find it interesting to figure out how to build a case that holds up against companies with unlimited defense budgets. The day that stops being interesting is the day I retire.

4. The firm has secured over $500 million in recoveries. Are there cases that stand out?

A few. The transvaginal mesh cases were significant because they involved a product that thousands of women were told was safe, when the manufacturers had data suggesting otherwise. We recovered over $40 million across those cases, but more importantly, we helped push the FDA and the industry to reckon with how these devices were approved. The Roundup litigation was similar in scope. Over $55 million recovered, but the larger point was establishing that the company had known about cancer risks and chose not to warn anyone. On the medical malpractice side, one case that stays with me involved a baby who developed cerebral palsy because the labor team failed to recognize fetal distress. We secured $42 million in cash plus a structured annuity, which sounds like a large number until you understand what 24/7 care costs across an entire lifetime. None of these are wins in the way people imagine. Nobody's celebrating. The mesh cases didn't give those women their bodies back. The annuity doesn't give that family the healthy child they expected. What we do is the closest thing to justice the system can offer, and sometimes that has to be enough.

5. How has plaintiff litigation changed since you started practicing in 1984?

Three big shifts. First, discovery has exploded. In 1984, a case might have a few boxes of documents. Today a single mass tort can involve millions of pages of electronic records, internal emails, and chat logs. Second, the defense bar has gotten much more sophisticated about delay. Insurance companies and corporate defendants have figured out that time hurts plaintiffs more than it hurts them, so they drag everything out. Third, and this is the one I worry about, the financial barriers to filing these cases keep climbing. Expert witnesses cost more. Document review costs more. The kind of catastrophic injury case that a small firm could have handled in the 1990s now requires partnership with larger firms or significant capital reserves. That has consequences for which cases actually get filed and which clients get represented.

6. What advice would you give a young attorney considering this field?

Pick your cases carefully and pick your clients more carefully. The work will consume your time and your energy in ways you don't anticipate. If you're not genuinely invested in the people you represent, you won't last. The other piece of advice is to learn the medicine, the science, or the engineering behind whatever you're litigating. A good plaintiff's lawyer understands the underlying field nearly as well as the defendant's experts do.

7. How do you approach mass tort litigation differently than a single-plaintiff case?

The fundamental difference is scale and structure. A single-plaintiff case is built around one person's story, one set of damages, one fact pattern. Mass torts involve hundreds or thousands of plaintiffs whose injuries trace back to a common cause, like a defective drug or a contaminated water supply. The litigation infrastructure looks completely different. You're typically working alongside dozens of other firms, court-appointed leadership committees handle the science and the general causation arguments, and individual cases get worked up using shared discovery. That said, the work doesn't become any less personal. Each client still has their own injury, their own family situation, their own version of how this changed their life. Part of what I've tried to do at The Oshman Firm is keep individualized client attention at the center even when we're handling hundreds of cases in a single litigation. People deserve to feel like their lawyer knows their name, not just their case number.

8. What should people know before they hire a personal injury attorney?

Ask about case selection. The best personal injury attorneys turn down a lot more cases than they take, and they should be able to tell you honestly whether your situation is one they'd actually fight for. Be wary of any firm that signs everyone who walks through the door. That usually means they're running a volume practice and your case will get handled by paralegals and junior associates rather than the lawyer whose name is on the building. Ask who specifically will be working on your case, and ask whether you'll have direct access to them. Ask about results in cases similar to yours, not just headline numbers from the firm's biggest verdicts. Ask how the contingency fee works and what happens to case costs if you lose. And ask about communication. A lot of clients feel abandoned by their lawyers because nobody returns their calls or explains what's happening with their case. That's a process problem, not a personality problem, and it tells you something about how the firm is run. The right attorney for you is someone who treats your case like it matters, because to you, it does.

9. Beyond law, you've built ventures in real estate, venture capital, and clean energy. How do those connect?

They connect more than you'd think. The skills that work in trial work transfer pretty well to business. You're evaluating risk, reading people, making decisions with incomplete information, and committing to a position. My role at eMatrix Energy is around clean technology, which I care about both as a citizen and as someone who's spent decades litigating environmental cases. Sonaro and Naliboki are more traditional investment vehicles, but they've given me a different perspective on how businesses operate, which has actually made me a sharper litigator. Sitting only in courtrooms can narrow your view of the world.

10. Outside of work, what keeps you grounded?

Family, mostly. My wife Anne and I have three kids, and I've spent a lot of years coaching their teams and showing up at their events. I play tennis when my schedule allows, I bike, I hike when I can get out of the city. And I travel. Anne and I have made a point of seeing as much of the world as we can. Stepping outside your own context every so often is good for you. It keeps perspective.