Marie Napoli

Marie Napoli is a trial lawyer based in New York, New York, and a founding partner of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC. She represents plaintiffs in mass tort, personal injury, medical malpractice, pharmaceutical, and civil rights litigation, and has played a central role in several of the largest environmental and opioid settlements in the United States.

Napoli grew up in Manhasset, New York, one of eight children in a close Catholic family. Her father, John E. Kaiser, was a trial lawyer, and she began working in his law practice as a teenager, answering phones and handling filings before moving on to work as a paralegal, sitting in on depositions and court proceedings. She worked full time at the firm before deciding to attend law school, wanting to be certain that plaintiff’s work was the career she wanted. She earned her Juris Doctor from St. John’s University School of Law and went on to complete an LL.M. in Taxation at New York University School of Law and an LL.M. in Environmental Law at Lewis & Clark Law School. Early in her career she worked for the New York Appellate Division, Second Department, and she has taught continuing legal education courses on tort law and civil procedure at St. John’s University School of Law.

Admitted to the New York bar in 1994, Napoli has practiced as a plaintiff’s attorney for more than thirty years. As a founding partner of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC, she helps oversee a national practice whose lawyers have recovered more than $20 billion for clients in mass torts, environmental law, civil rights, pharmaceutical, opioid, and personal injury matters. She remains directly involved in case management, including depositions, and tries cases to verdict. In her earlier years she was frequently the only woman in the courtroom during arguments and jury selection, an experience she came to view as an advantage on the occasions when an adversary underestimated her.

Napoli has helped lead several of the most significant mass tort recoveries in recent years. She was part of the litigation team behind a $12.5 billion settlement with 3M Company and a $1.185 billion settlement with DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva over PFAS forever-chemical contamination of public drinking water systems, both part of the Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) multidistrict litigation. In the national opioid litigation, she contributed to a $1.1 billion settlement in the first New York opioid jury trial against distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson, a $3.1 billion settlement with Walmart, and a $650 million ruling against national pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart in federal court in Ohio. Her commitment to the opioid cases was shaped in part by watching addiction devastate families she knew, and she has described the firm’s mission as changing the behavior of large companies by holding them financially accountable.

She was also among the attorneys who took on the World Trade Center litigation, securing a $1 billion settlement for firefighters, police officers, Port Authority officers, and construction workers who fell ill after responding at Ground Zero. Many other firms had turned those cases away because of the daunting immunity and liability questions they raised, and Napoli has described the decision to take them on as a moral one as much as a legal one.

Napoli has been recognized repeatedly by peers and legal organizations. She has been named to New York Super Lawyers every year from 2018 through 2026, selected to Best Attorneys of America, honored in Best Lawyers: Business Edition among Women in Law, and included on The National Trial Lawyers for Women’s Rights – Top 10 list. She is a frequent legal commentator on networks including CNN, CBS News, ABC News, and Fox Business News, and has authored articles for the New York Law Journal and other publications on subjects ranging from the opioid crisis to the Adult Survivors Act.

She is a board member of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and a founding board member and past president of the Trial Lawyers of Puerto Rico. Alongside her late husband, Paul J. Napoli, she established the Marie and Paul Napoli Foundation in 2001 to support cancer research and other charitable causes, and she has raised funds for the Bone Marrow Foundation by running the New York City Marathon. Throughout her career she has framed her legal work in the same terms she applies to her philanthropy: a conviction that helping people who cannot help themselves, including those who may never be able to repay it, is the most meaningful measure of a career.