Inside Knapp & Roberts Phoenix, the Scottsdale boutique that built one of Arizona’s most consequential catastrophic-injury dockets — with two founding partners, nurses on the case team, and a pro bono tradition it publishes like a case report.
BY THE AWESOME ATTORNEYS EDITORIAL TEAM · PHOENIX & SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA · JULY 2026
KNAPP & ROBERTS — AT A GLANCE
| FOUNDED BY | Trial lawyers Craig A. Knapp and Dana R. Roberts, who earned their J.D.s in the same 1990 class at Saint Louis University School of Law (per the firm) |
|---|---|
| FOCUS | Exclusively plaintiff-side catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death |
| OFFICES | Scottsdale (8777 N. Gainey Center Dr., Ste. 165) and Phoenix (850 N. Second Ave.) |
| SIGNATURE RESULTS | $150M wrongful-death judgment; $45.5M and $11M jury verdicts (all as reported by the firm — see Track Record) |
| DISTINCTIVE EDGE | Registered nurses on the legal team, including a dual-credentialed R.N., J.D. |
| FEE MODEL | Contingency only — no fee unless the firm wins; the firm advances all case costs (per the firm) |
| KNOWN FOR | Nursing home, assisted-living and group-home abuse; medical malpractice; wrongful death; an annual firm-funded pro bono case (per the firm) |
Sources: knappandroberts.com (firm website), Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, Avvo. Compiled June–July 2026.
ORIGIN
Two Classmates, One Conviction
Phoenix’s personal injury market is dominated by scale: high-volume firms with large intake operations and advertising budgets to match. Knapp & Roberts Phoenix built its reputation on the opposite premise. The Scottsdale firm has spent more than two decades doing one thing — representing families through the worst events of their lives, catastrophic injuries and wrongful deaths — and, in its own telling, preparing every one of those cases as though a jury will ultimately hear it.
The partnership behind the nameplate goes back further than the firm itself. Craig A. Knapp and Dana R. Roberts earned their law degrees in the same 1990 class at Saint Louis University School of Law before building their careers in Arizona. Knapp — born in Detroit in 1964 and raised in East Lansing, Michigan — took an unusually commercial route into trial law, pairing his Arizona State undergraduate degree (B.S., 1986) and his law degree with an M.B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1992. Roberts, a St. Louis native and University of Missouri graduate (1987), was admitted to the Arizona bar in 1991 and the Missouri bar in 1992, and remains licensed in both states.
That grounding shows in how the firm divides its labor. Knapp serves as lead trial counsel, with a practice the firm describes as dedicated solely to wrongful death and catastrophic personal injury — a caseload that has ranged from nursing home neglect and medical malpractice to birth injuries, pharmaceutical litigation, vehicle collisions, sexual assault, and product liability. Roberts concentrates her practice in medical malpractice, nursing home litigation, serious personal injury, and products liability, and is a member of the American Association for Justice’s Nursing Home Litigation Group, the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association, and the Maricopa County Bar Association.
Knapp’s standing in the Arizona plaintiffs’ bar extends beyond his own docket: he has been a guest lecturer on mass tort litigation at Arizona State University’s law school and has taught continuing legal education courses sponsored by the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association and the Maricopa County Bar Association, according to his firm biography.
THE MODEL
Small by Design
In a market where the largest injury firms count their attorneys in the dozens and their Google reviews in the thousands, Knapp & Roberts is conspicuously, deliberately small. The firm operates from two offices — its Scottsdale headquarters on North Gainey Center Drive and a downtown Phoenix location on North Second Avenue — and keeps its roster tight. Alongside the founders is partner David Friedman, who earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law in 2012 and whose firm biography reports that he was named Outstanding Trial Lawyer of the Year for 2025 by the Arizona Association for Justice, the state’s plaintiffs’ bar organization.
Rounding out the team page is something few competitors can claim: nursing expertise inside the building. The firm lists Suzanne Ogden, R.N., J.D. — a dual-credentialed nurse-attorney — and Susan Sova, R.N. In catastrophic injury work, where cases frequently turn on thousands of pages of medical records, standards of care, and the testimony of medical experts, having registered nurses read the file before the lawyers argue it is a structural advantage rather than a marketing line. As a nursing home abuse lawyer and medical malpractice attorney in Arizona, the firm’s edge is particularly potent in its signature territory — nursing home neglect, assisted-living failures, and medical malpractice — where the central question is almost always whether care fell below a professional standard.
The economics follow the model. The firm represents clients on a pure contingency basis — no fee unless it wins — and states that it advances all case expenses itself, assuming the financial risk of litigation that can require years of expert work before any recovery. For families weighing whether they can afford to take on a hospital, an insurance carrier, or a national eldercare chain, that risk-shifting is the difference between having a case and having a grievance.
PRACTICE
Where Knapp & Roberts Phoenix Concentrates
Knapp & Roberts Phoenix describes its practice as devoted exclusively to people who have suffered catastrophic injury or lost a family member to another party’s negligence. Within that mandate, the firm’s website identifies concentrations in: wrongful death; medical malpractice, including birth injuries and failure-to-diagnose claims; nursing home abuse and neglect, assisted-living and memory-care failures, group home abuse, and elder abuse; car, truck, and motorcycle collisions; dangerous pharmaceuticals and defective medical devices; product liability; premises liability; brain injuries; and sexual assault civil claims. The firm has also stated that it accepts Camp Lejeune water-contamination cases in both Arizona and Missouri, where Roberts is also licensed.
The through-line is severity. This is not a volume practice built on soft-tissue settlements; it is a firm whose public case list is dominated by deaths, permanent disabilities, and institutional failures — and whose opponents, the firm reports, have included major corporations, state agencies, hospitals, and trucking companies.
TRACK RECORD
The Results Board
The results below are drawn from the firm’s published verdicts and settlements. Consistent with Arizona’s rules on attorney advertising, they are reported here with attribution and a necessary caution: every case is unique, and past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter.
| RESULT | TYPE | MATTER (AS REPORTED BY THE FIRM) |
|---|---|---|
| $150M | Judgment | Wrongful death arising from a nightclub shooting. |
| $45.5M | Jury verdict | Solomon v. DSI (Maricopa County, 2004) — a 26-year-old woman with severe developmental delays drowned after being left unsupervised in group home care. |
| $11M | Jury verdict | Scherrer v. Liberty Manor (2009) — wrongful death of a 36-year-old traumatic brain injury patient whose assisted-living facility failed to supervise him. |
| $7.9M | Jury verdict | Shoulder and neck surgery injuries in a case involving the over-serving of alcohol. |
| $7M | Settlement | Brain damage caused by hospital negligence. |
| $5M | Settlement | Wrongful death in a memory care unit. |
| $4M | Settlement | Medical malpractice — cerebral palsy and birth injuries. |
| $3.5M | Settlement | Neglect and wrongful death of a nursing home resident. |
| $3M | Settlement | Nursing home abuse — pressure sore death. |
| $2.5M | Settlement | Wrongful death of a 27-year-old from cervical cancer following a misread Pap smear. |
| $1.6M | Jury verdict | Garcia v. Adcock (Cochise County) — DUI wrongful death, tried pro bono by the firm. |
Source: knappandroberts.com, Verdicts & Settlements and homepage results, retrieved June–July 2026. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Two entries deserve context. The $45.5 million Solomon verdict, returned by a Maricopa County jury in 2004, is the firm’s most prominent published result and the anchor of its vulnerable-adult practice — a case the firm still features more than two decades later. And the firm’s complex-litigation experience extends to mass torts: its site reports that it recovered millions for the 300 clients it represented in breast-implant litigation involving connective-tissue disease and related claims — the kind of expert-heavy work most small firms avoid.
CLIENT VOICE
What Families Report
Awesome Attorneys reviewed client testimonials published on the firm’s website alongside independent reviews on Avvo, where Craig Knapp holds 27 client reviews at the time of writing. Because review counts and ratings vary across platforms and change over time, we summarize sentiment rather than tally stars — and every account below is a real, published client statement, paraphrased or quoted in brief with attribution.
The pattern across dozens of published accounts is unusually consistent for a plaintiffs’ firm. Families describe Knapp personally taking first phone calls — in one account, returning a weekend website inquiry within the hour on a matter that became an assisted-living wrongful death case. One reviewer, a commercial attorney who says he has known Knapp for more than twenty years and referred several serious cases to the firm in that time, writes that defense counsel understand Knapp will take a case to a jury if a settlement is not fair — and credits that reputation for a settlement reached on the eve of trial in a wrongful death matter he referred. Clients in institutional-neglect cases repeatedly describe multi-year commitments — one family recounts a four-year effort that included a jury trial — and communication habits (returned calls, direct cell access, plain-language updates) that they contrast with experiences elsewhere.
One published client account describes a nursing home defense tactic that led to arguments before the Arizona Supreme Court — arguments the client says the firm won, setting a new precedent, before the matter resolved in settlement. Awesome Attorneys has not independently verified the underlying docket and presents this as the client’s published account.
“A fearless ethical leader, compassionate, brilliant…”
— Client testimonial describing Craig Knapp, published on knappandroberts.com
COMMUNITY
One Pro Bono Case a Year
Plenty of firms describe community commitment. Knapp & Roberts publishes the case files. Each year, per the firm, Craig Knapp accepts one case entirely pro bono — no attorney’s fees, with the firm paying all case expenses without reimbursement — chosen for its potential to leave a lasting mark on the community or the legal system.
The published examples are not symbolic. In one, the firm represented the parents of Jesus Chavez, a 47-year-old pedestrian killed at a Phoenix bus stop in 2013 by a driver who, per the firm’s account, admitted to methamphetamine use and falling asleep at the wheel while driving on a suspended license. Knapp litigated the case for more than two years on behalf of Chavez’s parents, who live in Mexico and wanted the case to warn the public about drugged driving; on March 30, 2016, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury returned a $3 million wrongful-death verdict. In another, Garcia v. Adcock, the firm won a $1.6 million verdict in rural Cochise County for the widow of a man killed by an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign — again with the firm providing free representation and absorbing all expenses.
The firm’s stated tagline — making a difference, one case at a time — is the kind of language that usually invites skepticism. Here it is footnoted.
RECOGNITION
Peer Standing
Craig Knapp is currently listed by Super Lawyers in personal injury — general and medical malpractice — a peer-influenced, research-driven selection its publisher says reaches the top five percent of attorneys in a state. The firm also maintains a profile with Best Lawyers, whose directory notes Knapp’s more than thirty years handling complex personal injury matters. On its own site, the firm states that Knapp’s honors include a listing in The Best Lawyers in America for personal injury litigation and recognition as a Southwest Super Lawyer. The firm’s most recent addition is Friedman’s: his biography reports that the Arizona Association for Justice named him Outstanding Trial Lawyer of the Year for 2025.
THE LAW
The Arizona Backdrop, in Plain English
Readers weighing a serious injury or wrongful death claim in Arizona should understand the ground rules that shape every case a firm like Knapp & Roberts handles. What follows is general information, not legal advice.
The two-year clock. Arizona’s statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death claims is generally two years (A.R.S. § 12-542). Miss it, and even a strong case is usually barred.
Suing the government is faster and stricter. Claims against Arizona public entities — a state agency, a county hospital, a city — require a formal notice of claim within 180 days (A.R.S. § 12-821.01) and suit within one year (A.R.S. § 12-821). This matters in this firm’s territory: the firm itself reports having brought cases against state agencies.
Fault is shared, not all-or-nothing. Arizona follows pure comparative negligence (A.R.S. § 12-2505): an injured person’s recovery is reduced by their percentage of fault but is not eliminated even if they were mostly at fault.
Minors and incapacitated adults get more time. The limitations clock is generally paused — “tolled” — for minors and people of unsound mind until the disability ends (A.R.S. § 12-502), a rule with obvious weight in birth injury and vulnerable-adult cases.
Vulnerable adults have their own statute. Arizona’s Adult Protective Services Act (A.R.S. § 46-451 et seq.) protects vulnerable adults from abuse, neglect, and exploitation, and provides a civil cause of action (A.R.S. § 46-455) — the statutory backbone of much of the nursing home, assisted-living, and group home litigation at the center of this firm’s practice.
Medical malpractice has extra hurdles. Claims against health care providers are governed by Arizona’s medical malpractice framework (A.R.S. § 12-561 et seq.), including expert-witness requirements: a preliminary expert opinion affidavit is generally required (A.R.S. § 12-2603), and a testifying standard-of-care expert must generally match the defendant’s specialty (A.R.S. § 12-2604). This is precisely where in-house nursing expertise earns its keep.
ASSESSMENT
The Awesome Attorneys View
Every market has firms built for volume and firms built for weight. Knapp & Roberts Phoenix is unambiguously the latter. Its public results skew toward the hardest categories in plaintiffs’ work — institutional neglect, medical negligence, and wrongful death, the territory of an Arizona wrongful death lawyer and catastrophic injury attorney — where cases take years, demand heavy expense outlays, and hinge on expert testimony. The firm’s structural answers to those demands are coherent: a deliberately small roster, nurses inside the case team, dual-state licensure, and a lead trial lawyer whose willingness to try cases is attested not only by the firm but by a referring attorney’s published account — and by jury verdicts won as far afield as rural Cochise County.
The honest trade-offs are the mirror image. Families seeking a fast, formulaic settlement operation will not find one here, and not every caller becomes a client: one published reviewer describes a ten-minute call in which a firm attorney candidly explained, at no charge, why a case he asked about — a friend’s — was not one the firm would pursue, an answer the reviewer says saved him considerable time. For the matters the firm does take, the record — as reported by the firm and echoed in client accounts — suggests a practice that treats a trial date as leverage rather than a threat.
For families facing a nursing home death, a birth injury, or a catastrophic loss anywhere in Arizona, Knapp & Roberts belongs on the short list of firms to interview — and its free consultation model means that interview costs nothing.
METHODOLOGY & INDEPENDENCE
This profile was researched and written independently by Awesome Attorneys’ editorial team between June and July 2026. Primary source: the firm’s own published website (knappandroberts.com), including its verdicts and settlements, attorney biography, testimonial, and pro bono pages. Secondary sources: Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, Avvo, and the Better Business Bureau. Where sources conflicted or could not be confirmed against the primary source, we either omitted the claim or flagged it in-line. Knapp & Roberts did not commission, pay for, or pre-approve this article. All case results are attributed to the firm’s own reporting; past results do not guarantee or predict future outcomes. This article is general information, not legal advice.
© 2026 Awesome Attorneys. Independent editorial. Sponsored placements on Awesome Attorneys are always clearly labeled; this is not one.
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