David Boswell | Lewes Accident & Injury Lawyer

David A. Boswell (Dave) is a graduate of Dover High School (1984), the College of William and Mary in Virginia (B.A. 1988, with Honors in English), and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law (J.D. 1992, Class Officer, Editor of the Comparative Labor Law Journal). He resides in Rehoboth Beach with his wife and son.

Dave has an all-litigation practice in Kent and Sussex Counties, with his main office in Lewes. Dave’s practice focuses on workers’ compensation, serious personal injuries, and wrongful deaths. A member of the American Association for Justice, the Delaware Trial Lawyers’ Association, the Delaware State Bar Association, and the Terry-Carey Inns of Court, Dave has tried cases before the Superior Court of Delaware in every county, before the Industrial Accident Board, and before the United States Federal Court for the District of Delaware, and has handled appellate work before the Delaware Supreme Court and the United States Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. He also practices before the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Many seriously injured workers with lifelong injuries have been cut off from their proper benefits by workers’ compensation carriers, and forced to rely upon Social Security Disability Income or Medicare. Dave has secured compensation for injured workers both through contested hearings before the Industrial Accident Board and in private settlements, that help both his clients and the taxpayers in this manner. In a case where a young boy lost his mother to a drunk drive in a head-on collision, Dave not only made a substantial insurance recovery for his client, but also pursued the personal assets of the defendant driver’s family business. Dave filed a fraudulent transfer action in the Court of Chancery to unravel a shell game whereby the defendant driver’s family sought to hide valuable assets. He moved to amend the complaint to add state-law RICO counts, and finally secured for his client an additional seven-figure case recovery form the defendants’ personal assets.

In a state known for its trust-friendly laws, Dave enjoyed rare success in busting a trust in Kulp v. Timmons in 2002, on the way to collecting an old 1989 workers’ compensation award for his injured client, who had been turned away by several other lawyers who considered the award to be uncollectible. Though the defendant filed bankruptcy proceedings, Dave persevered, and finally secured a recovery of nearly a half-million dollars for his client in 2004.

Dave’s early career in Wilmington involved many civil rights, employment discrimination, and labor law cases, against defendants such as Chrysler, Fleet Bank, the Bank of New York, and the Department of Correction. He had one of the first Delaware cases brought under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, Testerman v. Chrysler. Dave will still accept the rare civil rights or employment discrimination case of exceptional merit, involving either substantial lost wages, or outrageous conduct by the defendant which creates an intolerable work environment.

In his very first Family Court case, Albanese v. Albanese, Dave went all the way to the Delaware Supreme Court, and secured a landmark decision reversing the Family Court. The Delaware Supreme Court held that a wife who bore several children during 11 years of marriage was not to be denied her equitable share of the home acquired through mortgage payments made throughout the marriage only because she had never worked outside the home, and because her husband had never placed her name on the deed. Dave saw the case not merely as one arising under the domestic laws, but also as a women’s civil rights case. The Delaware Supreme Court’s 1996 decision is taught in law school and in bar review classes, is known to every Family Law judge in Delaware, and has prevented countless women from economic disenfranchisement as the result of a divorce, simply because they chose to be mothers and homemakers. Dave received the 1998 Distinguished Pro Bono Publico Service Award for his efforts on this case.