In the Trenches with Melissa Scartelli – The Making of a Medical Malpractice Warrior

They offered $100,000. She demanded $450,000. They wouldn't budge — so she went to trial. The jury came back with $10 million. To this day, it remains the highest pain-and-suffering verdict in Luzerne County history. Meet Melissa Scartelli, the author of that verdict and many others. A 35-year trial veteran and founder of Scartelli Olszewski, Melissa has built her practice around medical malpractice, earning rare punitive damage verdicts against physicians and going to verdict in cases where she could not name a specific dollar amount to the jury. Host Dan Ambrose draws out stories behind Melissa's wins, including the way she anchors damages and the time she flipped a retrial in her favor by calling a defendant doctor first.

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2026 Programming

☑️ Training Witnesses to Transport Themselves and the Jury in Direct (Dan Ambrose), March 6-7, Hermosa Beach, CA

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☑️ Dark Arts Trial Craft Bootcamp (Dan Ambrose and David Clark), Huntington Beach

Episode Snapshot

• Melissa grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a middle-class family; her father nearly died of a heart attack when she was a freshman in high school, and her mother was later diagnosed with kidney disease — experiences that made her empathetic to people’s suffering.
• Melissa attended Dickinson College and Dickinson Law School, became captain of the trial advocacy team, and won the International Academy of Trial Lawyers Award in Advocacy at graduation.
• After clerking for a civil trial judge to study the best trial lawyers in the courtroom, Melissa joined Hourigan, Kluger and Quinn, becoming the first woman partner and trying cases nobody else wanted.
• Twelve years into her career, Melissa left the firm with no book of business, no clients, and no family connections in law to start Scartelli Olszewski. She was joined by her husband — a former judge — and her daughter Rachel.
• Melissa's first major med-mal win came in a misdiagnosis case involving a 16-year-old with a pilonidal abscess treated incorrectly with Preparation H for eight months; she obtained a $10 million verdict despite her client facing no wage loss and having no specifiable damages.
• In a second malpractice case, a doctor removed a patient's finger for cancer that didn't exist — then “just kind of blew him off” after the misdiagnosis was revealed. After a mistrial, Melissa retried the case to a $1.5 million verdict.
• At TLU Beach, Melissa will teach practical “do’s and don’ts” for med-mal trials.

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