Goldberg & Goldberg, LLC: A Medical Malpractice Firm and the Verdict It Still Advertises

Attorney advertising. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by the firm before publication. Awesome Attorneys is not a lawyer referral service and does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm. Results described below are attributed to their published source; past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Nothing here is legal advice.

At a Glance

Firm	Goldberg & Goldberg, LLC
Founded	1967, by brothers Jerome and Barth Goldberg, joined shortly after by Barth’s twin, Barry
Office	33 N. Dearborn Street, Suite 1930, Chicago, IL 60602 — single office, no suburban locations
Focus	Medical malpractice, particularly obstetrical and birth injury; product liability; general personal injury and wrongful death
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only
Size	Five practicing attorneys (four litigators plus one of-counsel corporate lawyer)
Best-corroborated result	$13,890,000 verdict, Estate of Sabanovic v. City of Chicago, Cook County, May 2016
Most-advertised result	$127,700,000, Proctor v. Upjohn — remitted on appeal to roughly $9.34 million. See Section V.
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No public discipline on file with the Illinois ARDC for any attorney, current or historical

A note on which firm this is. “Goldberg” is a crowded name in Chicago law, and one trap is worth clearing at the top: goldberglawfirm.net is not this firm. It resolves to a solo personal injury practice in Lexington, Massachusetts. This firm has no Goldberg-branded domain at all — it operates at chicagomedicalmalpracticefirm.com, which tells you what it actually does.

I. Two Brothers, a Twin, and a Railroad

Barry and Barth Goldberg were twins. They grew up on Chicago’s North Side and worked from the age of thirteen. After their father died the family moved to Miami Beach, and both took their law degrees at the University of Miami. Barry came back to Chicago in 1965 as in-house counsel for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; Jerome and Barth opened the firm in 1967, and Barry joined them shortly after.

A railroad lawyer became a plaintiff’s lawyer, which is the same crossing that shows up in half the good origin stories in this business. What makes it specific is the age — thirteen — and the road out and back through Miami Beach.

The harder fact about this firm today is that none of them is still here. Barth H. Goldberg died in 2015; Barry D. Goldberg died in 2025 at 85; Peter A. Nicholson, a longtime partner, died in 2021. The ARDC confirms all three as deceased. No living Goldberg practices personal injury at Goldberg & Goldberg. The name on the door is now purely historical, and the practice is run by Ian R. Alexander, admitted in 1995, with Michael J. Cox (1992) and the Preisers, Martin (1975) and Joseph (2009).

We would rather the firm said so. All three deceased attorneys still appear on the live “Attorney Profiles” page alongside the living, under the same heading, with no “In Memoriam” label — only bare life-date ranges that a reader scanning for a lawyer to call will not necessarily parse.

II. The Mechanism: A Four-Lawyer Firm That Only Does Hard Medicine

The firm does not own a Goldberg-branded domain. Its website lives at chicagomedicalmalpracticefirm.com, and that is not an accident of registration — it is an accurate statement of the practice. This is not a general injury firm with a malpractice page. The verdict list is dominated by obstetrical and medical negligence, there is no workers’ compensation practice, no Social Security disability practice, and no volume intake operation.

Four litigators is a genuine constraint and a genuine mechanism at once. Medical malpractice in Illinois is the most expert-dependent, most capital-intensive plaintiff’s work there is — a birth-injury case can require six-figure expert outlays years before any recovery, and the firm’s own results show it has been funding that since the 1970s. A firm this size cannot carry many such cases at once, which means the ones it takes get tried by the partner whose name is on the pleading, because there is nobody else.

III. Practice Areas

• Medical malpractice, with a concentration in obstetrical and birth injury
• Failure to diagnose and surgical error
• Product liability, including pharmaceutical
• General personal injury
• Wrongful death

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Each figure below is identified by its source. Where a figure did not survive appeal, we give the number that actually stood.

$13,890,000	Estate of Sabanovic v. City of Chicago, Cook County verdict, May 2016 — roadway defect. Independently corroborated, and matching the firm’s own “$13,900,000 roadway defect” entry. Tried by Joseph Preiser, Ian Alexander and Katrina Taraska.
$127,700,000 advertised — approximately $9,340,000 actually entered	Proctor v. Upjohn Co. / Proctor v. Davis. See Section V. The firm’s most-advertised number, cut by roughly 93% on appeal.
“More than 175 verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million each”	Firm-sourced aggregate, on which the “Over $1 Billion Recovered” banner rests. The arithmetic is plausible on its face; the individual results are not published in a form that lets anyone check it.

V. The Number on the Banner, and What the Appellate Court Did to It

This is the section that matters most in this profile, and we are going to lay it out in full because a reader choosing a firm by its headline verdict is entitled to the whole sequence.

In 1991 a Cook County jury returned, in Proctor v. Upjohn Co., No. 84 L 3213:

• $3,147,819.76 compensatory to Meyer Proctor
• $100,000 to Marjorie Proctor
• $124,573,750 in punitive damages

That sums to the $127.7 million the firm advertises. What happened next:

1. The trial court remitted the punitive award to $35,000,000.
2. The Illinois Supreme Court, Proctor v. Upjohn Co., 175 Ill. 2d 394 (1997), dismissed an appeal because the appellate opinion was constitutionally invalid — a participating judge had retired before it was filed — and remanded.
3. The Appellate Court, First District, Fifth Division, in Proctor v. Davis, 291 Ill. App. 3d 265, 682 N.E.2d 1203 (July 11, 1997), affirmed liability but entered a further remittitur reducing punitive damages to $6,095,639.52, holding that the award “far outruns the justification for imposing punitive damages.”

The final enforceable judgment was approximately $9.34 million — compensatory plus the remitted punitive award. That is roughly 93% less than the figure on the banner.

We checked every page on the firm’s site where the number appears — homepage, verdicts page, firm history, and the bios of both Barry and Barth Goldberg — for any of the words “remittitur,” “reduced,” “on appeal,” “affirmed,” or “punitive.” There are no disclosures. Not one, on any page.

Two further problems attach to the same claim. The superlative is not true in the present tense. The firm’s banner reads “The Largest Personal Injury Verdict in Illinois History: $127,000,000,” and its verdicts page calls it “the current largest product liability, and the largest personal injury verdict in the history of Illinois.” In September 2022 a Cook County jury returned $363 million in Kamuda v. Sterigenics — nearly triple the Proctor gross figure and roughly thirty-nine times what Proctor actually became. The firm’s own history page is more careful, calling it a “one-time” largest verdict; three other pages are not.

And the firm contradicts itself on the number and the category. The banner says $127,000,000; the verdicts page says $127,700,000. The banner calls it a personal injury verdict; the homepage tagline calls it the largest product liability verdict. These appear on the same website.

None of this is bar discipline — the ARDC record is clean, and we will say that as plainly as we have said the rest. But a firm’s most-advertised figure is the thing a prospective client weighs first, and this one has been carrying a number the Illinois Appellate Court took apart in 1997.

One smaller item in the same register: the podcast episode documenting the $13.89 million Sabanovic verdict bills three trial lawyers — Joseph Preiser, Katrina Taraska and Ian Alexander. The firm’s own “In the Media” page credits it to “Joseph Preiser & Ian Alexander.” Taraska has since left the firm and practices under the name Katrina Taraska Simon.

VI. Client Voice

There is no client review record for this firm, and we are not going to imply one.

No Google rating or review count was discoverable. Justia’s firm page carries no ratings. The firm’s own site runs a “Client Reviews” widget showing a single unverifiable testimonial. For a four-lawyer boutique that takes a small number of expert-heavy cases, an absent review corpus is the expected pattern rather than a warning — firms like this do not generate hundreds of reviews because they do not have hundreds of clients. But it does mean there is nothing independent to read, and a prospective client will need to ask for references directly.

VII. Beyond the Courtroom

Almost nothing is published, and the pages that would carry it — /community/ and /about/ — both return 404. The one specific, verifiable item we found is that Ian R. Alexander is a past board member of the Jewish Council for Youth Services. Beyond that, no firm-level charitable, pro bono or civic activity surfaced anywhere.

VIII. Credentials and Recognition

Peer-reviewed or genuinely selective:

• Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, Board of Managers — Ian R. Alexander.
• Fellow, National Civil Justice Institute — Alexander.
• Super Lawyers, Alexander, 2013–2026 — research plus peer nomination, with the usual caveat that the publisher sells marketing to those it selects.
• Leading Lawyers, Alexander, 2013–2026 — peer-survey based.

Paid membership badges, which should not be read as honors: The National Trial Lawyers, and in particular “Seven, Eight, and Nine Figure Litigators,” which is a purchased designation rather than a credential.

One claim we could not place: Alexander’s bio cites service on a steering committee for the “Hinkley Air Disaster.” No aviation event by that name exists in the record — Hinkley, California is the groundwater contamination matter — so this is likely a garbled reference. We flag it as unverified rather than repeat it.

IX. What We Checked and Did Not Find

All five practicing attorneys plus all three deceased partners were run through the Illinois ARDC. Every one returned no public record of discipline or pending proceedings. No bar discipline, no malpractice suits, no sanctions, no ethics findings against any attorney at this firm, in any year. We validated our search method against a control surname returning a known disbarment before relying on any null result, and re-queried by first name where the ten-row pagination could have hidden a common surname.

One roster note: Robert Goldberg, listed as “Of Counsel,” is a corporate lawyer rather than a personal injury litigator, is admitted in Illinois only since 2019, and is registered by the ARDC not to this firm but to a separate entity at the same suite. He is of no relation of record to the founders.

Readers checking this firm independently should know how crowded the name is. Besides the Massachusetts firm noted at the top, Chicago has Jeffrey M. Goldberg Law Offices (also plaintiff-side personal injury — the nearest confusion risk), the Law Offices of Darryl A. Goldberg (criminal defense, also 60602), Goldberg Law Group (family law), Goldberg Segalla (a national defense firm — the opposite side of the docket), and GWC Injury Lawyers, formerly Goldberg Weisman Cairo, which is a different firm entirely and also profiled on this site.

X. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified against the Illinois General Assembly, the Illinois Courts, or the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as noted; deadlines turn on facts a lawyer has to look at.

Illinois does not recognize legal specialists. Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4(b) states that “The Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize certifications of specialties in the practice of law, nor does it recognize certifications of expertise in any phase of the practice of law by any agency, governmental or private, or by any group, organization or association.” Rule 7.4(c) bars a lawyer from using “certified,” “specialist” or “expert” to describe their qualifications, except to identify an actual certificate or award — and then only with a disclaimer stating that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not a requirement to practice law in Illinois. Registered patent attorneys are the single carve-out. No lawyer at this firm is described as a specialist anywhere in this profile, however concentrated its medical practice is.

Medical malpractice runs on its own clock, and it is the one that matters most here. Under 735 ILCS 5/13-212, a claim against a physician, dentist, registered nurse or hospital must be brought within two years of the date the claimant knew, or through reasonable diligence should have known, of the injury — and in no event more than four years after the act or omission occurred. That outer four-year bar is a statute of repose, and it can extinguish a claim before the patient ever learns of it. For a person under 18, the period runs eight years from the act, but the action must be brought before the person’s twenty-second birthday — which is why birth-injury cases are often filed many years after the delivery, and why waiting past that birthday forecloses them entirely.

Two years for ordinary injury. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 gives two years from accrual to file a personal injury action.

Fifty-one percent ends the case. Under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, a plaintiff more than 50% at fault recovers nothing. At 50% or below, damages are reduced by the plaintiff’s share. No contributory fault may be attributed to a plaintiff suing over childhood sexual abuse.

Children get the clock back on ordinary injury claims. 735 ILCS 5/13-211 gives a person injured before turning 18 two years from their eighteenth birthday.

Public bodies are far shorter. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a), a claim against a local public entity or its employee — the City of Chicago, a park district, a school district — must be filed within one year. Subsection (b) gives two years, with a four-year repose, only for claims arising out of patient care. The Sabanovic roadway case above was against the City, and one year is how long that claim had.

The CTA is one year, and there is no longer a notice requirement. 70 ILCS 3605/41 gives one year from accrual to sue the Chicago Transit Authority. The six-month written notice requirement that older articles still describe was repealed effective June 1, 2009 by P.A. 96-12. It is not current law.

Wrongful death. Under 740 ILCS 180/1 and 180/2, the action is brought by the decedent’s personal representative for the exclusive benefit of the surviving spouse and next of kin, generally within two years of death — five years where the death resulted from violent intentional conduct, or one year after final disposition of a related criminal case for certain charged offenses.

XI. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

Goldberg & Goldberg is a four-lawyer medical negligence practice that has been doing only that, from one Loop office, since 1967. It does not run a volume intake operation, it does not have a comp department, and its website is named after what it does rather than after the family. Every attorney who has ever practiced there — five living, three dead — has a clean ARDC record, and its best-documented recent result, the $13.89 million Sabanovic verdict, corroborates independently. For an obstetrical injury or a failure-to-diagnose case, that is a real and narrow competence.

The trade-off is unusually sharp and we are not going to soften it. The number this firm advertises above all others is one an Illinois appellate court cut by roughly 93% in 1997, and the firm discloses that nowhere on its website. It compounds this by calling the figure the largest personal injury verdict in Illinois history in the present tense, which a $363 million Cook County verdict in 2022 has made untrue, and by giving two different amounts and two different case categories for it across its own pages. Separately, both name partners are dead, a third partner is dead, and all three remain on the live attorney roster without an In Memoriam label — so a reader may well be choosing the firm on the strength of lawyers who cannot take the case. There is also no independent review record at all.

Every one of those facts is sourced and none of them is misconduct. But taken together they mean this firm has to be evaluated on what it is now — four litigators led by Ian Alexander, with one verified eight-figure verdict in the last decade — rather than on the banner. A prospective client should ask, directly and before signing: what did Proctor actually pay, which lawyer here will try my case, and what have you recovered in the last five years?

This firm is right for a claimant with a genuine, hard medical negligence case — particularly a birth injury, where the eight-years-to-age-22 window gives room to build — who wants a small firm where a senior lawyer handles the file personally. It is the wrong choice for anyone who needs a deep bench, for anyone with an ordinary injury claim that four expert-heavy litigators have no reason to prioritize, and for anyone who takes an advertised verdict at face value.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 14, 2026. Attorney admission dates, registered addresses, deceased status and disciplinary records were taken from Illinois ARDC registration records for all five practicing and three deceased attorneys, using a query method validated against a control surname returning a known disbarment before any null result was relied upon. The address was confirmed on the firm’s own contact page and corroborated by four independent ARDC registrations. The Proctor appellate history — the 1991 jury award and its components, the trial court’s remittitur to $35,000,000, the Illinois Supreme Court’s 1997 dismissal and remand at 175 Ill. 2d 394, and the First District’s further remittitur to $6,095,639.52 at Proctor v. Davis, 291 Ill. App. 3d 265, 682 N.E.2d 1203 — was verified against the published opinions. The $363 million Kamuda v. Sterigenics verdict was verified against contemporaneous news reporting. The Sabanovic verdict and its trial team were corroborated against independent podcast coverage of the case. The founding narrative is from the firm’s own history page and is identified as firm-sourced. The Lexington, Massachusetts firm at goldberglawfirm.net was checked directly and excluded. Statutes were verified against the Illinois General Assembly (735 ILCS 5/13-202, 5/2-1116, 5/13-211), the Illinois Courts’ official rule text (Ill. R. Prof’l Conduct 7.4), and the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as published by secondary repositories carrying the governing Public Act notes (735 ILCS 5/13-212, source note P.A. 98-1077; 745 ILCS 10/8-101; 70 ILCS 3605/41; 740 ILCS 180/1–2), the Illinois General Assembly’s own site being unavailable on the research date. Claims we could not verify are marked as unverified rather than softened or omitted.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm profiled on this site. Inclusion is not paid placement, and no firm pays to appear, to be positioned, or to have material removed. “Awesome Attorneys” is a brand name only; it is not a rating, ranking, certification or assessment of any lawyer’s ability. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Facts are current only as of the research date above, and firm addresses, rosters, credentials and case outcomes change. Verify anything you intend to rely on directly with the firm and with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.