David W. Skall

My interest in helping medical malpractice and personal injury victims started early in life.

My mother passed away from breast cancer during my childhood, and my family suspected that her doctor had made mistakes and should have detected her cancer earlier. Growing up, there wasn’t a minute when my family and I weren’t aware of my mother’s absence, and I spent a lot of time thinking about everything we lost from her doctor’s mistake.

Eventually, I wanted to know how the law worked and how it might be used to take care of people like my family – people whose lives had been changed because of the mistakes of others.

After receiving my Bachelor of Arts degrees from Indiana University in 1993, I attended the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. I served as a Judicial Extern for the Honorable John M. Manos, United States District Court, Ohio, and I received my Juris Doctor degree in 1997. That same year, I was admitted to the Ohio Bar and the following year I was admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

Following law school, I joined a small personal injury firm. I wanted to get immediate experience preparing and conducting trials, whether they were auto accident cases and/or involved medical errors. To improve my trial skills and better understand these cases from the defense perspective, I moved to a large Cleveland-area law firm, where I spent seven years defending hospitals, physicians, nursing homes and medical-device makers in cases of alleged malpractice. This work gave me a chance to gain expert trial training in matters involving the most severe injuries.

In 2003, I attended the American Bar Association’s National Trial Academy. In 2005, I was a guest presenter at the Fifth Annual Perinatal Medicine Conference at the MetroHealth Medical Center and in 2006, I was an Invited Delegate to the Eighth District Judicial Conference on Legal Policymaking in Ohio. In 2007, I presented at the Defense Counsel Annual Meeting, at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and I was selected for inclusion in Super Lawyers® Rising Stars?.

In 2008, I joined a firm in Virginia that represented railroad workers throughout the country who had either been killed or disabled from accidents while at work. While I had several trial successes in representing injured railroad workers, my family and I missed our hometown greatly and in 2012, we returned to Ohio and I joined The Becker Law Firm.

When I'm not working, you can usually find me working in my yard, tinkering with some repair, at a youth soccer game, or out at a park with my family walking our dog. I also enjoy grilling and preparing meals with my wife, Heather, who runs her own food service business and is an outstanding cook.

Litigation Percentage

• 100 percent of Practice Devoted to Litigation