Paul F. Oliveri proudly serves as Director Emeritus in the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, whose organizational mission is “to promote a safer and healthier society, to assure access to the civil justice system by those who are wrongfully injured and to advance representation of the public by ethical, well-trained lawyers. ”Mr. Oliveri has served on several of its committees, including the New York State Trial Lawyers Association’s Judicial Screening Committee. Mr. Oliveri has addressed legislators and lectured before citizen groups about issues facing accident victims, consumers, the civil justice system, and has actively fought to preserve the rights of the injured. He is also a member of the American Association for Justice, the National Crime Victims Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association and several other Bar groups and associations. Mr. Oliveri has been honored on various occasions by being featured in Who’s Who in American Law and has been recognized by the respected legal services company of LexisNexis® in its Martindale- Hubbell Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers™ with an “AV” rating in the practice areas of Motor Vehicle law, Premises Liability Law, Medical and Dental Malpractice law, Personal Injury Law. Less than 5% of all law firms qualify for this rating, making Oliveri & Schwartz, P.C. one of the most distinguished and respected law firms in the country.

Richard S. Gershman, the firm’s founder, has been practicing law for more than five decades. Over the past 50 years, Richard Gershman has won recoveries amounting in the millions of dollars for injured plaintiffs and their families. As most colleagues and clients already know, Richard Gershman is a tireless advocate for those injured through the negligence of others. Richard S. Gershman, born in Far Rockaway, New York 1946, attended Oklahoma City University earning a BS in business, and continued his education at Suffolk University Law School earning a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. Professionally, Richard S. Gershman specializes in Personal Injury beginning his career with the Law Firm Queller & Fisher. He then went on to form his own firm Bernstein & Gershman which handled real estate transactions along with oil & gas transactions. He now is the sole owner of Richard S. Gershman & Associates PC. Richard S. Gershman has formerly been a board member of Franklin General Hospital. He is the former president of the Woodmere Country Club. He has served as a board member of Fresh Meadow Country Club. He is currently a Board Member of Northwell Health and was named the outstanding Associate Trustee of the hospital in 2019. Over the past 35 years, he has headed up Golf tournaments for numerous charities including Northwell Health for Cohen’s Children’s Hospital, raising in excess of twenty-five million dollars.

I have devoted almost 30 years helping victims of personal injuries navigate a challenging maze called the legal system. It has always been my goal that every one of my clients feels respected and attended to. No client should ever pass through our doors and feel isolated or ignored. I lived the first half of my life near the beach in Far Rockaway, a small community in Southeastern Queens. Currently, I live in Long Beach, another beachfront community in the Southwestern part of Long Island. Obviously, I love living near the ocean. I have been very involved in the Long Island community and in 2000 was asked to join the Board of Directors of the Friedberg JCC and a few years later I was elected to the position of President of the Board. I always tried to stay active in the communities where I lived whether it was being involved in youth groups, working in the area or just keeping in touch with old friends or making new ones.

Stephen Cohen grew up in working-class Queens, where he learned about the importance of hard work from his family and neighbors. He also learned that bad things can happen to good people – and that when they do, they oftentimes need a helping hand. “I had an understanding that everyday people had accidents through no fault of their own,” he recalls. “I think that’s what pushed me into becoming a lawyer.” He has carried that commitment to helping everyday working people throughout his legal career. After receiving his B.S. degree at Bradley University in 1971, he enrolled at St. John’s University School of Law and got his J.D. there in 1974. He joined a small law firm for a time before venturing out to create his own solo law practice, which was located in a third-floor walkup in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Initially, Cohen handled a wide variety of cases. But early on, he realized that personal injury law was his passion and began to focus his practice in that area. In the ensuing years, that concentration has never wavered. For a time he moved his practice to lower Manhattan, but after he started a family and moved to Long Island he decided to set up shop closer to home. He opened an office in Great Neck and then moved to the firm’s current location in New Hyde Park. Over the years, his solo practice grew into a multi-lawyer firm that now has six attorneys and a support staff of more than 20. Cohen believes that the key to the firm’s success and growth has been its focus on providing the best possible service. “I take great pride that the firm is really people-related,” he says. “I want the firm to convey the idea that when they come in to see us, we’re no better than they are – that this is just what we do and that we respect what they do.” He has represented thousands of injured parties in automobile accidents, trip and fall cases, construction accidents, and the like. He divested the practice into No-Fault collection in both the arbitration and judicial forums, representing health care providers against insurance carriers for collection of bills relating to the treatment of individuals injured in automobile accidents.

Jason Zemsky is a practicing lawyer in the state of New York.

Byron was born and raised in Long Island, New York. He is a proud descendant of two working-class Guatemalan parents who arrived in the United States in the 1980s and went through the process of becoming legal United States citizens, wanting a better life for their family. Byron witnessed first-hand how complicated the immigration process can be and how the language barrier is a massive issue for many, miscommunications causing the individual to miss dates and not understand procedures or what to do next. Byron acknowledges that he wants to recompense his parent’s struggles to achieve the American Dream by serving as a voice and a gladiator in the courtroom on behalf of his clients. The struggles that his clients experience with the continuing complicated immigration process empowered Byron to gain a broad cultural awareness, which motivated Byron to help the same working-class Latino communities with their legal matters near and dear to his heart. Byron graduated from New York’s highly-ranked college Binghamton University and received his law degree from Florida Coastal School of Law. Byron volunteered his afternoons and evenings while attending college and law school to advocate on behalf of the client to resolve immigration related-matters and defend the client against deceptive and illegal consumer practices under the supervision of an attorney. In college, Byron volunteered with the New York Attorney General’s Office in Binghamton’s Bureau of Consumer Frauds and Protection unit, which is part of the Economic Justice Division, to advocate on behalf of consumers suffering fraudulent, misleading, and deceptive, and illegal consumer practices, and to prosecute businesses and individuals engaging in those deceptive practices. In law school, Byron volunteered at his law school’s immigration clinic, sponsored by the Vera Institute of Justice under Vera’s Unaccompanied Children Program to provide legal representation to immigrant children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and placed in immigration proceedings. Byron’s law school clinic appointed him as the go-to person to train and manage other law students participating in the immigration clinic to prepare asylum, family-based petitions, and citizenship immigration petitions on behalf of the clinic’s clients. Byron’s dedication to helping others is a testament to his work. Byron is fluent in Spanish, and he has appeared as a legal advisor to educate the Latino community on the continuing changes to the immigration laws, as they happen quickly and can significantly affect people’s lives, on monumental television networks, such as Telemundo, Univision, and other national Latino mornings programs such as Vision Latina and TV Azteca. Byron serves as the point of contact in his Great Neck community for non-native speakers and those who need legal representation, and he opens the door to clients who continue to struggle to access it. Byron’s clients chose to work with his boutique law firm because of his extreme diligence, keen eye for detail, commitment to his client’s needs, and confidence in his approach to solutions to his client’s matters.