FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Mark Gottlieb or Andrew Rainer 617-373-2026
“We are so pleased to be working with this outstanding group of lawyers to help some of tobacco’s victims in Massachusetts,” said Andrew Rainer, PHAI’s Litigation Director and Director of the Center for Public Health Litigation. Working together with PHAI will be:
- Lisa Arrowood, Kevin Peters, and Jed DeWick of Arrowood Peters, LLP
- Sam Perkins of Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten, LLP
- Neil Leifer, of Neil T. Leifer, LLC
- Leo Boyle, Michael Bogdanow, and Valerie Yarashus of Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow, PC
PHAI’s latest suit, filed today in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn together with Perkins and Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten, LLC, is brought on behalf of Linda Troupe and her husband Carleton against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Donelan’s Supermarkets, Inc. of Littleton, Massachusetts. Mrs. Troupe, who smoked Winston and Kool cigarettes for over 35 years, was diagnosed in 2013 with throat cancer. The suit alleges that, in order to treat Mrs. Troupe’s cancer, doctors had to remove her larynx, and she has lost most of her ability to speak with her four children and eleven grandchildren.
Arrowood, Peters, DeWick and Leifer will be working with PHAI on two cases previously filed in the Middlesex Court — the first brought for the family of James Flavin, Jr., a former executive of Filene’s and Staples, who died of lung cancer in 2012 after smoking Newport cigarettes for over 40 years, and the second brought for Patricia Greene, a Newton realtor, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013, even though she had stopped smoking Marlboro cigarettes 25 years earlier.
Arrowood is the current President of the Boston Bar Association, and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Perkins is a founding partner of Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten, and a previous Lawyer of the Year. Leifer, a former partner of Thornton & Naumes (now the Thornton firm), represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its successful litigation against the tobacco industry to recover the health care costs incurred by the state in caring for residents harmed by smoking. Boyle and Yarashus are past Presidents of the Massachusetts Bar Association. Boyle also served as President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (now the American Association for Justice), and is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.