Results Built on Preparation

A longtime grocery-store customer was walking into the store he had patronized for years when an employee restocking flyers knocked a broom onto the walkway. He tripped, fell into the metal handle of the automatic door, and suffered a devastating eye injury — a ruptured globe, corneal perforation, and uveal tissue damage requiring emergency surgery and a multi-day hospital admission. He was left permanently blind in that eye. The toll reached into every part of his life: ongoing balance and spatial problems, an inability to drive or cook, reliance on a walker and an installed stair railing, and the daily emotional weight of permanent disfigurement.

The store’s carrier opened low, treating it as a routine fall, and a large share of the surgical bill had been written down by the health plan — handing the defense an argument that the economic damages were modest. The real case was the permanent vision loss and its human cost, which had to be proven and made vivid.

Kalikhman & Rayz worked the case up in litigation as a major jury matter — obtaining the store’s own surveillance video showing the employee created the hazard, retaining an expert to tie the permanent blindness to the fall, and building the damages story around the client’s changed daily life, with family prepared to testify. The case was resolved during active litigation, settling for $750,000.

A young woman with her future ahead of her was injured by an at-fault driver. Beyond the injuries treated through orthopedic care and rehabilitation, she was left needing plastic surgery — the kind of permanent harm that hits a young person especially hard.

The at-fault driver’s coverage was only part of the picture. Making her whole required pursuing a second, separate claim under her own underinsured-motorist (UIM) coverage — a path that is easy to overlook or undervalue. Kalikhman & Rayz litigated the third-party claim while separately building and resolving the UIM claim, treating them as two distinct sources of recovery rather than settling once and walking away.

The third-party claim resolved for $25,000 — but the UIM claim the firm pursued separately delivered another $600,000, for a combined $625,000 recovery. The overwhelming majority of her result came from the claim a less thorough firm might never have chased. The recovery supports her education and her future.

A man was struck in a serious collision involving a commercial ambulance company’s vehicle. He was taken to a university ER and underwent a full CT workup. His injuries included facial lacerations that left permanent scarring, a nasal bone fracture, cervical radiculopathy, and lumbar injury, followed by months of treatment, pain management, imaging, and a plastic-surgery consultation — along with lost wages and lasting limits on daily activities and sleep.

The defendant was a commercial entity, the client faced a language barrier, and the visible, permanent facial scarring on an otherwise working adult had to be presented in a way that conveyed its lasting impact. Rather than file suit, Kalikhman & Rayz negotiated for resolution through alternative dispute resolution, building a thorough damages package — ER and CT findings, the full treatment course, scarring documented photographically over time, the plastic-surgery consult, and a lost-wage claim.

The carrier’s initial offer was $250,000. The firm rejected it, pushed to $350,000, and then took the case to ADR — where it brought the other side all the way up to a $600,000 final decision, more than doubling the opening number. The firm then aggressively reduced the medical liens so the client kept the maximum possible share.

A man in his early thirties was seriously injured in a motor-vehicle collision while working. After an ambulance to the ER came a long course of care: imaging documented disc herniation and protrusion in the neck, multiple bulging lumbar discs, a shoulder injury, and complex tears in both knees. He went through orthopedic treatment, physical therapy, an EMG, and spinal injections, and was left with chronic pain, functional limits, disrupted sleep, and anxiety.

Three claims had to be coordinated at once — workers’ compensation, a third-party claim against the at-fault driver, and an underinsured-motorist claim. The comp carrier had paid heavily and asserted a lien of roughly $286,000 that threatened to swallow the recovery.

Kalikhman & Rayz documented the medicine exhaustively, pursued every source of money, and fought the workers’ compensation lien down from about $286,000 to $183,000 — putting roughly $100,000 back in the client’s pocket that would otherwise have gone straight to the comp carrier. The client netted $183,000. The win wasn’t just the gross recovery; it was keeping the carrier from consuming it.

A woman in her early twenties was hurt in a collision in which the other driver’s liability was accepted. The lasting harm was a facial scar — the kind of permanent, visible injury that changes how a young person feels in the world every day.

Insurers routinely undervalue these cases early, and the first offer reflected exactly that: $29,000. Kalikhman & Rayz had the client evaluated by a plastic surgeon, whose consult shifted the entire focus of the damages onto the permanent scarring, and obtained professional, updated photographs that documented the scar properly — turning an undervalued claim into a serious scarring case.

That reframing took the offer from $29,000 to a $185,000 gross settlement — more than six times the opening number — resolved before filing suit, with the client netting approximately $110,000.

A woman was a passenger in a Lyft rideshare vehicle when it was struck. The lasting harm was permanent scarring to her face and the area around her mouth, along with a head injury and neck, shoulder, and back pain. She treated in the ER and through follow-up care and consulted a plastic surgeon, with the scarring documented in before-and-after photographs.

Permanent facial scarring on a young woman was the core of the damages, and the firm had to overcome a health-insurer’s non-coverage position on some of the treatment while building the scarring case. Kalikhman & Rayz assembled a focused damages package centered on the permanent scarring and pressed the third-party carrier to the wall.

The at-fault driver’s carrier tendered its full available policy limits of $100,000 — the most the claim could yield.

A young child was attacked by a pit bull and badly injured. After emergency treatment at a community hospital, the child needed multiple surgeries at a major children’s hospital — three surgical dates over several months — plus pediatric and plastic-surgery follow-up. Because the client was a minor, the resolution required court oversight to protect the child’s interests.

Beyond proving liability and damages, Kalikhman & Rayz had to shepherd the matter through the minor’s-compromise process — a petition, a court hearing, and a judge’s approval of the settlement and how the funds would be safeguarded for the child — and resolve a government health-benefits lien.

The initial offer was $150,000. The firm pushed the recovery up by more than $100,000, to a $260,000 court-approved settlement, with roughly $192,000 preserved for the child.

A man was told by an auto-tow yard to come retrieve some of his belongings from his vehicle after an accident. Following the yard’s instructions, he went out to his car — and was attacked by a pit bull on a long leash. The dog grabbed his left arm and dragged him to the ground. He fought the dog off as it bit his arm and leg, and managed to escape. When he reached the office, the staff admitted they had failed to tell him to come to the office first rather than head straight out to the vehicle. The same dog was known to have bitten someone before.

The injuries were serious enough to require surgery, but the bigger obstacle was the defendants themselves — they would not respond. Establishing who was responsible and getting them into a case at all took real work. When the defendants went silent, Kalikhman & Rayz dug in with deep research and investigation to identify and locate the responsible parties and institute legal action, then litigated the case through to a strong result.

The result was a six-figure settlement of $245,000 — against defendants who initially tried to avoid the claim entirely.

A woman suffered a serious lower-leg injury — ankle and knee, with lasting scarring — in a September 2024 collision. Liability was accepted, but she faced the prospect of a long fight over the full value of her injury, with both a third-party claim and an underinsured-motorist claim in play and limited coverage on the at-fault driver.

Kalikhman & Rayz moved quickly, assembling the orthopedic report, imaging, and injury photographs to press both claims in parallel. The third-party claim settled in January for its full policy limits of $100,000 — putting the first $100,000 in the client’s hands within about three months of starting the case. The UIM claim followed shortly after.

In less than six months from intake, the firm secured the client a combined recovery of almost $300,000, with minimal liens.

A maintenance worker tripped and fell on an uneven loading-dock ramp at a major commercial property while doing his job. He tore his rotator cuff, requiring surgery, and suffered hip and lower-back injuries with radiculopathy.

The case was hard on both liability and causation. The fall happened at a place the client knew well and worked in regularly, which the defense used to argue he should have avoided the hazard.

And because he had prior injuries, the defense had a real argument that his complaints predated the fall. Either issue could have sunk the case.

Kalikhman & Rayz worked it up hard regardless — establishing liability with a professional engineering expert who showed the ramp was uneven and lacked a code-required handrail, using the property’s own CCTV footage of the fall, developing the surgical case, and pushing the matter through discovery and a pre-trial memo to the courthouse steps before settling at mediation just ahead of trial. The firm then negotiated the workers’ comp lien down from roughly $133,000 to $50,000.

The result was a $225,000 settlement despite the liability and causation defenses — a strong outcome on a genuinely difficult case.

A woman came to a complete stop at a stop sign when a pickup truck — an F-250 — slammed into the back of her Honda Accord at full speed. She developed ear fullness, pressure, and pain with tinnitus, along with cervical disc problems, layered on a complicated medical history. Her ear injury was treated through otolaryngology and related procedures.

The defense moved to take the case out of Philadelphia — where venue was favorable — on forum non conveniens grounds, arguing it belonged where the client lived and the crash occurred. The tangled medical history also made it harder to isolate what the crash caused.

Kalikhman & Rayz fought and won the forum motion to keep the case in Philadelphia, then worked through the complicated medical record to tie the injuries to the collision. The case settled for $100,000 — a result that turned on procedural skill as much as the medicine.

A man was seriously injured when struck by another vehicle. His injury was severe enough to require a complete knee replacement — a permanent, life-altering surgery and exactly the kind of catastrophic orthopedic injury where getting full value matters for the rest of a client’s life.

Kalikhman & Rayz worked the claim up and resolved it before filing suit, then handled a Medicare-Advantage reimbursement issue on the back end so the client kept the bulk of the funds. The carrier’s initial offer was $155,000; the firm pushed it to a $200,000 pre-suit resolution.

A home caregiver, on her way to do a client’s laundry, fell on a defective staircase leading into the laundry room and was injured badly enough to require surgery. The case proceeded to litigation.

The case went through ADR but did not settle there. Afterward, the defense obtained surveillance footage and tried to introduce it to claim the client was faking or uninjured — an aggressive defense tactic meant to torpedo a legitimate injury claim. Kalikhman & Rayz pushed past the ADR impasse, litigated through the surveillance attack, and ultimately resolved the case for the client for $395,000.

— was killed in a transport crash. Kalikhman & Rayz represented her estate and family, moving fast on evidence preservation, pursuing scene and surveillance video and accident-reconstruction support, and pressing claims against multiple responsible parties — a transport operation, the driver, and a related commercial entity and its insurer — including theories of negligent hiring and failure to train.

The initial offer was $100,000. Through the firm’s work-up of liability and damages, the case settled for slightly over $1.1 million — an increase of more than a million dollars over that first offer.