Legal Limelight: Kevin Carnie Jr., The Simon Law Firm

Kevin Carnie Jr. didn’t start his career as a personal injury attorney, but that hasn’t stopped him from tackling some of the most-discussed cases in the region.

Carnie began his law career at a large defense firm specializing in mostly commercial litigation.

After three or four years as a commercial litigant, he decided to pursue personal injury law. Now at Simon Law, Carnie focuses on product liability, handling cases ranging from accidents to faulty medical devices and even civil rights cases.

Carnie recently wrapped up one of the most publicized personal injury cases in the St. Louis Area and just announced that he has taken on another.

In February, he announced he obtained a $450K settlement with the city of St. Louis in a notable case where a teen volleyball player lost both of her legs when she was struck by a car while crossing the street at an intersection downtown with her parents.

Now, he is the lead attorney in a wrongful death lawsuit against multiple subcontractors and St. Louis County following the drowning of Nancy Parisotto, a 63-year-old woman who was on her way to vote when she drove off a flooded bridge under construction that lacked proper signage.

Carnie obtained his law degree from Saint Louis University, where he served as an editor of the Saint Louis University Public Law Review.

What case has stood out to you the most over the span of your career?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good end result, but it was a civil rights case involving a man who was held in prone restraint and asphyxiated. And obviously, there’s been a lot of those cases, many that have been very public and even though that case ended up being dismissed, I think it still just brought a lot of awareness to the issue. Even in losing a case, even when the appellate courts say your … case can’t continue, you can still sort of elevate something through filing the lawsuit, through fighting it and then it makes changes around the world, around the country in how police tactics are used, for instance.

The Edmondson case you recently settled was a capped damages case. How often do you run into this issue?

It’s very frequent, for better or worse. Once you sort of start working in a particular area of the law, like cases against municipalities or the state, people tend to see that. People tend to recognize that, and they may call you when they have those issues come up. There’s two areas of the law primarily where these caps impact the cases I handle. It’s in those cases, anytime we’re suing a government entity and then also the medical malpractice context, we have those caps as well. So that’s something that we run into a lot and it’s always nice when that gets some attention, because most people, I don’t think, know about it.

Do you think reform is possible in Missouri for capped damages?

I hold out hope and I think I have so. I think I have to keep pushing and doing what I do and making more people know about it. But it’s definitely a tough climate right now. There’s a lot of people that have heard about this. There’s a lot of politicians that I know have heard about this as a result of Janae’s case and I know there’s people out there that want to make a change, to do something. So, I think there’s hope. I think the pendulum sort of swings pretty extremely one way and then it comes back to the other. I think that’s sort of the lesson of history. I think we find ourselves in a time right now where it may not be the best time for that kind of reform, but I think it’s possible. I think it can happen.

What are you able to share about the Nancy Parisotto case?

Nancy was 63 years old — I believe she was on her way to vote that morning, trying to get to her polling place — and the bridge that she was about to go over was under construction and half of the bridge had been removed. …  And unfortunately, she drove into the creek. It wasn’t a situation where she got swept away … she drove and it dropped off. So, it’s a really sad case and … we’re right at the beginning of it now, but … we will learn a lot more about what happened, why it happened and hopefully there are some big lessons learned from this case, not only for the county as it supervises and commissions all these projects, but also for the private contractors out there. Hopefully this is a case that we can sort of use to make sure that …construction safety is improved on all these projects, because projects like this are always going on in the area and something like this just shouldn’t happen.