Robert W. Munley, 1930-2019

Robert W. Munley, Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys’s founder, was a Pennsylvania legal legend and personal injury law pioneer.  He achieved record-setting verdicts and settlements on behalf of his clients in Pennsylvania and nationwide. He founded Munley Law Personal Injury Attorneys in 1959.

A Legal Pioneer

A United States Army veteran of the Korean War, Robert W. Munley graduated from the University of Scranton and Temple University School of Law, where he was a member of the Temple Law Review.

Bob, as he was known to his friends, family, and the legal community, was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1959. He served as an assistant district attorney in Lackawanna County for 10 years, during which time he prosecuted hundreds of cases.

In 1970, he embarked on full-time private practice with his brother, the late Senior U.S. District Judge James M. Munley, transitioning to civil practice in the mid-1970s. Together with his beloved wife Bernadine Munley, Bob built a legal practice devoted to the representation of the injured. Bob’s personal philosophy became his professional mission: that all people, regardless of power or wealth, should have equal access to the civil justice system.

Renowned for his courtroom rhetorical skills, Bob blazed new trails in emerging liability theories and trial techniques, and brought hundreds of cases to verdict. Bob’s pace-setting milestones included seven- and eight- figure recoveries before verdicts of such size were commonplace and occurred in cases ranging from simple automobile collisions to complex product liability litigation.

Bob’s body of work resulted in appellate decisions, some of which transformed American law in the area of the admissibility of trial evidence. For example: Mecca v. Lukasik, known locally as “the Mid-Valley Eight,” set the Pennsylvania standard for evidence of future earnings of children based on their stated career aspirations; O’Malley v. Peerless Petroleum also broke ground in the area of future wage loss recovery and use of hypothetical questions with experts. Madjic v. Cincinnati Machine Co., a product liability case, is regularly cited in court decisions around the United States for various evidentiary principles, and his case Bombar v. Upright Material Handling Inc. set nationally recognized standards in what constitutes bad faith in the handling of insurance claims.

Bob was elected and served as president of both the Lackawanna County Bar Association and the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association and served on the Board of Governors of the American Association for Justice. He was listed in the Best Lawyers in America every year since 1993, and was among the first lawyers in the United States to earn Board Certification by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. He was a Fellow of both the American Board of Trial Advocates and the International Society of Barristers, and was named to the Irish Voice newspaper’s Irish Legal 100, the top 100 American lawyers of Irish descent.

In recognition of Bob’s pioneering work in truck accident law, the American Association for Justice Trucking Litigation Group renamed its annual honor the Robert W. Munley Pursuit of Justice Award (formerly the “Chairman’s Award”) in 2020. The Robert W. Munley Pursuit of Justice Award is presented annually by the Chair of the Trucking Litigation Group to an attorney who has done extraordinary work to further the group’s objectives: educating other lawyers on trucking law matters and contributing to the improvement of highway safety through legal work and advocacy.