Attorney Profiles

Robert F. Linton, Jr. has been a trial attorney since 1984. Bob is a former partner in one of Cleveland's premier defense firms, where he defended local hospitals, Fortune 500 companies, and insurance companies in wrongful death and personal injury cases. But he found his calling after he switched sides and left to start his own firm more than 25 years ago, to represent people harmed or killed by wrongful conduct.

As reported in Ohio Lawyers Weekly, in 1999, Bob obtained one of the state's top 20 verdicts of the year. In 2000, he negotiated one of Ohio's top ten reported settlements for that year. In 2002, he received a $7.5 million dollar verdict against the Cleveland Clinic Foundation for a patient severely brain damaged from experimental surgery. In 2004, Bob received an $8.9 million-dollar judgment for a chemical worker burned over half of his body as a result of unsafe work conditions and safety violations.

In 2006, Bob received the then largest reported wrongful verdict against the State in Ohio's Court of Claims. The verdict was for the family of an innocent driver killed by a state trooper during a high-speed chase.

In 2009, Bob received a $15.6 million-dollar verdict against MetroHealth Medical Center, one of the highest malpractice verdicts at that time in our county. The verdict was for an 18-year-old high school student left quadriplegic and blind due to numerous patient safety violations at the hospital.

Bob also won a precedent-setting case in the Ohio Supreme Court holding Cities responsible for drowning deaths in public pools. Cater v. City of Cleveland (1998), 83 Ohio St. 3d 24.

Bob has been named ten times to Ohio's Super Lawyers by Law & Politics Magazine, based on a blue-ribbon peer review panel, an award limited to the top 5% of lawyers in Ohio.

For more than 15 years, Bob has held the Martindale Hubbell's highest AV rating of "very high to superior" ability and its highest ethical rating based on confidential surveys of other lawyers and judges.

Bob is a summa cum laude graduate of Ohio University and received his law degree from Case Western Reserve University, where he served as a research, advocacy and writing instructor. He is a graduate of Gerry Spence's prestigious Trial Lawyers College in Dubois, WY, where he learned how to uncover and tell his client's stories with authenticity and brutal honesty.

Bob is a Past President of the Cleveland Academy of Trial Attorneys. He has taught CLE courses in litigation, deposition and trial skills to other lawyers and was invited to speak at the Cleveland Bar Association's Trial Superstars Series.

He served as Co-chair of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association's Judicial Qualifications Committee screening judicial appointments for the Governor; Co-chair of its Judicial Selection Committee, which interviews and rates judicial candidates for voters. www.judge4yourself.com; and Advisory Chair to MADD of Northern Ohio. http://www.madd.org.

Bob volunteers as a retreat leader for the St. Ignatius High School Community, for the Jesuit Retreat House, where he sits on its board of directors, and for recovering homeless men as part of the Ignatius Spirituality Project. http://www.ignatianspiritualityproject.org. He is a certified spiritual director through the Ignatius Spirituality Institute of John Carroll University. Through this work, Bob helps others find recovery, hope and healing – which is a mission of his practice.