A Cake Designer’s Thumb, a Bankrupt Defendant and the Fort Lee Lawyer Who Kept Looking

The client made sugar roses for a living. She worked for a local supermarket in Bergen County, and her specialty was the decorative flowers on wedding cakes, the petals piped one at a time with a bag in one hand and the cake or flower nail steadied in the other. Then she went to visit a friend who had taken in a rescue dog on a temporary basis. The dog bit her on the leg and on her non-dominant hand, and she lost her thumb.

When the case reached Michael Maggiano at Maggiano, DiGirolamo & Lizzi in Fort Lee, the defense thought it had an easy argument. She had never missed a day of work. There were no lost wages and nothing on a pay stub to point to. Maggiano saw it differently. Floral work on a cake is fine motor work, and without that thumb, the thing she was best at and known for was badly compromised.

“Our job was to make sure everyone on the other side understood that, in detail, the same way she lived it every morning at the bench,” he says.

Then the case got harder. The friend who had been caring for the dog filed for bankruptcy, which would have left a lot of firms with nowhere to go. Maggiano’s team looked further up the chain, to the non-profit agency that had placed the dog with her, and built the claim against it. It took multiple rounds of mediation. The agency didn’t move until the eve of trial, and the case settled for $1.62 million.

There was no big crash and no headline. There was a woman whose craft had been taken from her, a defendant who went bankrupt, and a team that refused to accept that as the end of it.

Records, Not Speeches

His path to Fort Lee ran through Chicago. After finishing an economics degree at Fairleigh Dickinson in 1970, Maggiano went west to IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law on a scholarship from the Chicago Title Insurance Company. He graduated with honors in 1974, 17th in a class of 160.

The scholarship mattered to him, and so did what happened outside the classroom. As a student he interned with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, where he was put to work on political corruption and organized crime investigations.

“That’s where I learned how a case really gets made,” he says. “Not by somebody giving a great speech. By people going through records, matching documents, checking every fact against the next one until the picture holds up.”

He left that office knowing two things. He wanted to be in a courtroom, and he wanted to build cases the way investigators build them. He came home, opened a practice in Fort Lee and aimed that investigative habit at a different kind of wrongdoer: the trucking company that skipped maintenance, the contractor who cut corners, the insurer that wanted to pay a seriously injured person as little as possible. The firm’s website still puts it in plain terms. They represent the person next door.

Ten Times the Budget

The first obstacle was size. Insurance companies and big defense firms had ten times the people and ten times the money, and the new practice in Fort Lee had one lawyer.

“When I started, it was me. That was the firm,” Maggiano says.

What closed the gap was preparation. He made a habit of sitting with the engineering, the medicine and the methodology until he knew it as well as the other side’s expert did. He has a line for it that he repeats often: “There are no lions in the courtroom without first being the drudge in the library.”

The second obstacle was geography, and it’s one most lawyers never take on. Fort Lee sits at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. A crash on one side of the span can involve a New York driver, a New Jersey driver and insurance carriers in both states. The two states don’t play by the same rules. New Jersey uses modified comparative negligence, which bars recovery for anyone more than 50 percent at fault. New York uses pure comparative negligence. Both have no-fault systems with different thresholds for when an injured person can sue, and a defendant may still try to pull the whole case into federal court on diversity grounds.

Maggiano’s answer was to get admitted in every state and federal court in New Jersey and New York, and before the U.S. Supreme Court. Clients along that corridor needed someone who could handle both sides of the river.

The third obstacle came later, with the sheer scale of certain cases. The Tropicana parking garage collapse in Atlantic City and the litigation after the 2015 Amtrak derailment, in which he served as counsel, involved other firms, multiple jurisdictions and mountains of documents. He fell back on the discipline he’d picked up as a student.

“Get organized early, stay organized, and never let the size of a case make you sloppy,” he says.

The Rebar in the Drawings

The Tropicana case shows how that temperament plays out. In 2003, a parking garage under construction at the Tropicana Casino Resort collapsed. Four workers were killed and 20 more were hurt. By then Christopher DiGirolamo had been Maggiano’s partner for more than a decade, having joined him in 1992, and the two were on the trial team together.

Maggiano’s assignment was the engineering drawings. Going through them, he found the flaw. The rebar hadn’t been installed properly, so the floors weren’t tied into the walls. The structure was going to fail, and it was only a question of when.

Finding it was half the job. The other half was explaining it to people who aren’t engineers. He put together a visual demonstration that set the right way to build the garage next to the way it had actually been built. The case settled for $101 million for the injured workers and the families of the four men who died, and it remains one of the largest construction accident recoveries in New Jersey history.

The firm has now collected more than $300 million for clients. One of those results, a $10 million recovery, went to a government worker on assignment in South Africa who was thrown from a vehicle and suffered a severe brain injury. The defense argued he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. Maggiano’s team showed that a seatbelt wouldn’t have prevented injuries that severe in that crash.

Much of his reputation among other lawyers comes from teaching. He has lectured for the New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education for more than thirty years on cross-examination, expert testimony, forensic evidence and videotaped depositions. He also organized a program called Medicine for Lawyers, which brought in medical specialists to walk attorneys through the trauma medicine behind serious injury claims.

“You can’t stand in front of a room full of lawyers and judges and fake it,” he says. “Teaching keeps me sharp, and every client benefits from that.”

The Institute gave him its Alfred C. Clapp Award for Excellence in Continuing Legal Education in 2013. He has served as president of the New Jersey Association for Justice, which awarded him its Gold Medal for Distinguished Service, and as president of the Melvin M. Belli Society, which gave him the Mel Award for lifetime achievement in trial advocacy in 2015. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and is certified as a Civil Trial Attorney by both the Supreme Court of New Jersey and the National Board of Trial Advocacy.

Tuesday Nights in Fort Lee

People are sometimes surprised to learn he spent time in local government. From 1989 to 1991, Maggiano served on the Fort Lee Borough Council, dealing with zoning, budgets and neighbors at public meetings on Tuesday nights. It was a very different kind of work from trial law, but it taught him a great deal about the town and kept him close to the people the firm was built to serve. In 2004, Governor McGreevey appointed him, with the consent of the State Senate, as a commissioner for New Jersey Public Broadcasting.

He has also stayed close to UNICO National, the Italian American service organization, through its Cliffside Park chapter, where he served as vice president and scholarship chairman. He has sat on the national scholarship committee, too. That work connects straight back to Chicago Title and the scholarship that helped carry him through law school. Now he’s on the other side of it, reading applications from young people in the area, and he counts it among the more satisfying things he does outside the office.

The list goes on from there: the Fort Lee Chamber of Commerce, the United Homeowners of Fort Lee, the Columbus Citizens Foundation, the board of the Hemodialysis Foundation of New Jersey.

“None of that shows up in a verdict report,” he says. “It’s just what you do when you’ve lived and worked in one place for this long.”

A Short Walk to the Courthouse

The next move is to Hackensack. In 2025 the firm signed a lease for space a short walk from the Bergen County Courthouse, which handles one of the busiest civil calendars in northern New Jersey. In the first weeks after a serious crash, Maggiano says, being able to show up in person and quickly can shape the whole case. With Fort Lee and an office on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, the firm now covers both sides of the river.

Trucking cases are where he sees the work getting more technical. Federal hours-of-service rules, maintenance records, drug testing and electronic control module data all come into play, and carriers can overwrite that data on a routine schedule. The firm sends a spoliation letter within days of a crash so the carrier is legally required to preserve the evidence. “Wait two weeks and it may be gone,” he says.

Christopher DiGirolamo and Michael Lizzi now run a firm of more than thirty people. Maggiano wants it to stay a trial firm, one that prepares every case as if it’s going in front of a jury. And he’d like to keep teaching as long as they’ll have him.

“If a young lawyer in one of my seminars walks into a deposition better prepared than they would have been,” he says, “that’s a good day’s work.”