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The Neuberger Firm, P.A. prides itself on fighting for the little guy, and helping the weak and helpless stand up to the strong and powerful. The Firm represents private citizens, public employees and servicemen and women who seek to expose wrongdoing and hold the government accountable for its misdeeds, as well as survivors of childhood sexual abuse as they seek to hold accountable their abusers and the institutions which enabled them.
Law partners and father/son duo Thomas S. Neuberger and Stephen J. Neuberger have dedicated their professional lives to living the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, “seek justice, correct oppression.”
Exposing Government Wrongdoing
The Firm has a long history of of exposing government misconduct and suing the State of Delaware and other public employers on behalf of dedicated public employees injured by the incompetence, neglect, purposeful ignorance or intentional wrongdoing of elected officials and their appointees in numerous government agencies. Clients have included brave Wilmington firefighters who gave their lives to rescue trapped civilians, correctional officers and union leaders within the Delaware Department of Correction, troopers within the Delaware State Police and physicians at the Delaware Psychiatric Center, among others. As a then member of the Wilmington News Journal Editorial Board once wrote, “attorneys Tom and Stephen Neuberger of Wilmington are flirting with becoming the first Delaware attorneys to sue every state agency and employee who works there.” (Ron Williams, Wilmington News Journal, May 14, 2004). The Firm’s 2017 case against the State of Delaware resulted in what the Delaware State News has called a “historic, record-breaking $7.55 million” settlement which is believed to be “the largest state-paid settlement in Delaware’s 230 year history.”
There, in Floyd, et al. v. Markell, et al.,C.A.No.17-431-RGA (D.Del.), the Firm represented the estate of Sgt. Steven R. Floyd as well as numerous Correctional Officer survivors of the February 2017 prison inmate uprising at Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna, DE. The April 2017 lawsuit, charged that former Delaware Governors Jack Markell and Ruth Ann Minner, as well as numerous former DOC Commissioners and Budget Directors, shocked the judicial conscience for more than 15 years by consciously ignoring numerous red flags, official reports and desperate Union pleas predicting that if the state continued to refuse to fill fully funded positions, decrease reliance on overtime and take other remedial measures, correctional officers would be killed. Tragically, on February 1st-2nd, COAD’s predictions came true. The case settled in December 2017, in what the Wilmington News Journal described as “Delaware’s largest payout to settle a civil lawsuit.”
Fighting for Abuse Survivors
In a similar abuse of power context, and in the words of the Wilmington News Journal’s Editorial Board, “Mr. Neuberger never gave up on his fight to receive justice for his abused clients” in the Diocese of Wilmington bankruptcy case. There the Firm successfully represented the “vast majority” of childhood sexual abuse survivors in the recovery of over $108,000,000 and numerous non-monetary terms against the Diocese of Wilmington and later the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales and others.
The Firm fought for nearly four years to defend and uphold the constitutionality of the landmark Delaware Child Victim’s Act of 2007, 10 Del.C. § 8145, which allowed childhood sexual abuse survivors to finally hold accountable those who abused them and their enablers.
The Firm has long represented abuse survivors in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania where the Philadelphia Inquirer has called Tom one of the “harshest critics” of the powerful Pennsylvania politician who actively sought to continue the cover up of decades of sexual crimes against young innocents.
Tom also is the author of the book, When Priests Become Predators: Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors (2012), which uses sworn testimony given in jury trials and documents taken from the public court docket to tell the stories of a number of brave abuse survivors in Delaware who for many years battled the Diocese, the Oblates and the Norbertines in an attempt to protect children today by exposing the institutional cover ups of the past and present.