Murphy, Falcon & Murphy

Focus and practice areas

Injury and civil litigation fill most of the docket at this Baltimore, Maryland firm. Murphy, Falcon & Murphy sets out its work on a practice page that runs to medical malpractice, car accidents, trucking accidents, motorcycle accidents, bicycle accidents, products liability, wrongful death and police brutality. That set points to a firm that spends much of its time on physical harm and the question of who is answerable for it.

The wider site fills in more of the picture. The firm also names birth injuries, motor vehicle injuries, civil rights, class actions, commercial litigation, environmental torts and criminal defense. Its personal injury pages go further, into brain and spinal injuries, premises liability, and slip and fall accidents. Wrongful death sits on the same list, which is the claim a family brings when an injury proves fatal.

Two kinds of question in one case

Two threads run through all of it. One is bodily injury and the medical facts behind it. The other is legal responsibility, whether it lands on a driver, a hospital, a manufacturer or a police department. In my opinion the presence of police brutality and civil rights next to the traffic and medical work is the detail worth marking, because claims against public bodies follow rules that ordinary injury claims do not.

The spread of practice areas also says something about intake. A firm that lists this range takes the call before it knows which box a case belongs in. A car crash can turn into a product case if a part failed. A hospital stay can turn into a malpractice case. Keeping several of those areas in house means one firm can follow a matter as its legal shape becomes clear.

Working both sides of the docket

A firm that defends injury claims sees how insurers and companies build a case from the inside. Murphy, Falcon & Murphy represents plaintiffs and defendants, so both of those vantage points sit within the same firm. When it sues, its lawyers can read the defense that is coming. When it defends, they know the pressure points a plaintiff's lawyer will look for.

That two sided practice widens the kind of client the firm can act for. An injured person and the business or professional facing a claim both have a place on the roster. The commercial litigation and class action work on the site fits the same pattern, since those matters put the firm on whichever side has hired it.

There is a practical benefit for a client in this. A lawyer who has argued a motion to dismiss from the defense table has a sharper sense of how to write a complaint that survives one. The firm's willingness to take either role means that experience is earned first hand, case after case.

What the mix means for a client

For someone deciding whether to hire the firm, the two sided record is a signal about method. A lawyer who has stood in both chairs tends to value a case realistically, since inflated demands and thin defenses both fall apart the same way in front of a jury. The firm's pages present that balance as ordinary work, part of the daily practice.

How the team is built

The attorneys page names eight lawyers, each with a title. William H. "Billy" Murphy, Jr. holds the roles of senior and founding partner. Hassan Murphy is the managing partner. Richard V. Falcon, Nicholas Szokoly and Andrew K. O'Connell are the other partners. Jason Foster, Malcolm P. Ruff and Paris J. Holmes are the associates.

Eight is a lean number for a firm that lists this many practice areas. It points to lawyers who each carry several kinds of matter at once. Two Murphys appear on the page, one as founding partner and one as managing partner, which shows a family name carried into a working second generation.

The structure reads as five senior lawyers over three associates. That ratio means a client's matter is likely to have a partner close to it rather than parked with a junior lawyer. It also gives the associates room to learn from partners who have run trials, which is how a firm passes its methods down.

The experience the firm claims

The firm describes the background behind those titles. It says its team includes a former trial judge, former prosecutors, law school professors and judicial law clerks. A former prosecutor has taken cases to verdict. A former judge has decided the motions that shape how a trial runs. As a reviewer I read those credentials as a roster assembled with courtroom work in mind.

Credentials of that kind matter most at the moments a case turns: a cross examination, a closing argument, a ruling on whether evidence comes in. A firm with judges and former prosecutors in its own ranks brings that instinct to the table on a client's behalf. The site presents these categories at the level of the whole team, and it does not attach each credential to a named lawyer, so the strength is described as the group's.

How these matters generally proceed

Injury and malpractice

Medical malpractice claims turn on expert testimony. A plaintiff has to show that a provider fell below the accepted standard of care, and that the failure caused the harm. In Maryland that case usually begins with a certificate from a qualified expert before it can move forward. The medicine and the law advance together, which is part of why these matters take time.

Car, truck and motorcycle cases start closer to the ground, with the crash, the injuries and the insurance behind each driver. Trucking claims often bring in federal safety rules that a standard car case never reaches, and they can hold a trucking company liable as well as the driver. Product liability asks whether an item was defective in its design, its manufacture or its warnings, and proving that often means testing the product itself and reading the records behind it.

Premises liability and slip and fall claims turn on what a property owner knew and when. Wrongful death claims sit on top of an injury case, brought by the family the death leaves behind, and Maryland sets who may bring them and within what window. Each of these fields carries its own proof and its own timeline, which is the work a firm takes on when it lists them together.

Civil rights claims

Police brutality and civil rights suits move through a separate body of law. They often run in federal court and test the limits of what a public official may do. That puts them in a different procedural setting from a private injury claim, with its own deadlines and its own defenses. The firm lists both the injury tracks and the civil rights track, which asks a broad range of a roster of eight.

Group and business disputes

Class actions gather many people with the same complaint into one case, and a court has to certify the group before it can move as one. Commercial litigation runs between businesses over contracts, money and conduct, and it often turns on documents more than on injuries. Environmental torts, another field the firm names, join injury proof to questions of what a company released and where it went.

A firm that runs class actions and commercial cases alongside single injury claims works at two speeds. One case may involve a single client and a single crash. Another may involve many claimants and years of document review before trial. Holding both means the firm keeps staff who can shift between a fast intake and a long haul dispute.

Baltimore roots and a family name

The firm ties its identity to one city. It states that the Murphy name has provided legal services in Baltimore for more than 70 years, and it describes itself as African American owned and founded in Baltimore City. The site does not give a founding year, so that 70 year figure is the clearest marker of how far the name reaches back.

Longevity like that carries weight in legal work, where clients arrive by referral and a reputation travels through courthouses. Seven decades of one family name in a single city means judges, opposing counsel and former clients who already know it. That kind of standing is hard to build quickly and hard to buy, and it is the asset the firm leans on most plainly.

The firm puts that history and its African American ownership at the front of how it presents itself, on both its home and about pages. For a client choosing a firm, those are concrete markers: a family name on the door and a stated stretch of years in one city. The 70 year claim is the fact the firm returns to across its pages.