Mr. Stephen C. Swain, Attorney

Stephen Swain grew up in Winton-Salem, North Carolina, played State championship football and other sports, worked as an iron worker while in school and graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1969 and its law school in 1972.

After law school, he moved to Norfolk, Virginia, where he practiced with the firm of Stant & Stant founded by Frederick “Bingo” Stant, and then with the merged firm of Clark & Stant from 1972 until 1999, when that firm merged with the Richmond, Virginia, firm of Williams Mullen. In 2000 he joined the firm of Shuttleworth, Ruloff, Swain, Haddad & Morecock, where he is a partner with lawyers who strive to serve seriously injured people and who pride themselves on success for those individuals.

Stephen Swain earned a reputation as a leading personal injury trial lawyer, winning several multimillion dollar verdicts early in his career. He has represented hundreds of severely injured people involving medical malpractice, brain injuries, birth injuries, nursing home negligence, auto and truck collisions, marine shipboard injuries, airplane crashes and product liability injuries in the workplace and defectively designed vehicles. He has also represented defendants in Federal and State courts accused of white-collar crime, including tax fraud, banking regulation violations and other crimes.

He has tried cases in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado and Washington, D.C. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America, a publication that calls upon lawyers nationally to identify approximately 3% of the colleagues they believe to be the best in a given area. He has an “A” rating, the highest awarded in the Martindale-Hubble Legal Directory.

His background, education and experience have enabled him to understand and present at trial the dynamics of an accident and the effect of catastrophic injuries on working people.

His top professional staff includes two registered nurses, a former insurance specialist and a former government prosecutor. He is a member of the law firm of Shuttleworth, Ruloff, Swain, Haddad & Morecock. [www.srgslaw.com]

Mr. Swain devotes a significant amount of time to free legal services to certain people without funds and community services. He has served on the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission, dedicated to improving the quality of human life, and donates time to take appointments from the Virginia Supreme Court on medical malpractice review panels. He has also served on the Virginia Beach Resort Advisory Commission, the Board of Directors for the Virginia Stage Company and is currently serving on an advisory board to a local bank.

He is married and has one child. He spends his recreational time with his family.

Cases by Stephen C. Swain

$5.2 million for a child with seizure disorder resulting from DPT vaccination

$12 million for a brain-damaged mother of 3 who was struck by a drunk driver

$5 million for a brain-injured teenage bicycler struck by a newspaper truck

$2 million to a man for the loss of an eye when assaulted

$9 million for 3 men burned in an SUV that had a defectively designed fuel tank that ignited when struck by a truck

$1.5 million for head injuries for a limo driver when an unsecured load propelled from a truck and through the limo driver’s windshield.

$2.75 million for a nurse who suffered oxygen deprivation and brain injury during surgery

$1.5 million for a head-injured man who was struck by a policeman’s flashlight

$1.7 million for a welder whose ankles were broken because a defective hydraulic lifter collapsed to the ground

$1.1 million for an inmate who sustained head injuries when a sheriff’s van that was transporting him to his work release location was struck by a truck.

$900,000 for a hairdresser pedestrian whose shoulder was broken by an out-of-control vehicle that was involved in an intersection crash.

$650,000 for a man whose leg was burned in a small private plane crash caused by the pilot’s failure to maintain an adequate glide path following loss of power after switching to an alternative fuel tank.

$650,000 for a woman who suffered an infection caused by a neurosurgeon who performed spinal surgery at the wrong level and had to repeat the surgery.

$350,000 for the death of an intoxicated man whose seizure was misdiagnosed by the emergency room doctor resulting in aspiration from failure to protect the man’s airway.

$450,000 for failure to diagnose bladder cancer in a timely fashion

$600,000 for failure to diagnose colon cancer by the internist

$450,000 for failure to diagnose breast cancer by the OB / GYN

$600,000 for failure to treat a heart attack appropriately in the emergency room resulting in death

$1 million for a shipworker who was suffocated as a result of the discharge of carbon dioxide into the hold of a ship during fire alarm repairs

$1.2 million for a family in a trust and estate dispute against the fiduciary.

$600,000 for a legal malpractice claim against a lawyer in a fiduciary position

$2.2 million in a product liability claim against a door manufacturer and the architect for negligent design of the electronic door that descended on a man at a manufacturing facility when the man rode a cargo tower through the door and the electronic device failed to detect him.

$900,000 against a manufacturer of a car-crusher conveyor belt component for failure to design an interlocking machine guard resulting in the loss of the man’s arm

$750,000 for a woman whose leg was damaged when it was caught in an unguarded cement conveyor belt on a highway construction crew because of poor engineering design of the machine

$600,000 for a woman’s family against a plastic surgeon and CRNA for failure to have an antidote on hand in the office surgical suite to counter the untoward effects of anesthesia resulting in malignant hyperthermia and for their failure to recognize the condition.

$450,000 for an elderly woman neglected in a nursing home who developed a bed sore.

$1,850,000 for a child with cerebral palsy in North Carolina caused by doctor’s and hospital’s negligence at birth. The obstetrician and labor and delivery nurses failed to recognize fetal monitoring signs of distress and did not resuscitate the baby nor proceed to Cesarean delivery, resulting in oxygen deprivation and brain injury.

$520,000 settlement for a South Carolina man for a below-the-knee amputation resulting from the failure of a podiatrist to obtain a vascular evaluation of a man's circulation prior to attempting toe surgery for a diabetic patient. Circulation was compromised, resulting in gangrene and leg loss.

$1,000,000 for death of an 18 year old passenger struck by a drunk driver on Corolla Beach, North Carolina.

$465,000 for the family of a 19-year-old kidney transplant recipient who sustained oxygen deprivation hypoxia that was unrecognized by a nurse anesthetist and transport team as patient was being transported from the operating room to the ICU for recovery.

$600,000 for a 78-year-old lady in North Carolina who sustained a ruptured disk in her lower spine. The neurosurgeon performed surgery at the wrong level and had to do a second surgery resulting in infection. Many months of rehabilitation were required.

$315,000 jury verdict in Spartanburg, South Carolina, resulting from emergency room physician's failure to properly protect an individual's airway after a seizure in the emergency room as a result of a small bowel obstruction.

$260,000 for a seamstress against a hospital for failure to remove a sponge left in her abdomen following hysterectomy. Follow-up surgery to remove the sponge resulted in scarring to her abdomen.

$360,000 for an infant with Erb’s Palsy, a shoulder impairment caused from birth injury from stretching of the shoulder nerves during delivery.

$1,200,000 jury verdict in Portsmouth resulting from a surgical towel that was left in the abdomen during an abdominal surgery. The nurses and doctor failed to keep a proper count of all the items used during the surgery and subsequent failure to remove them.