David J. Caputo is a founding partner of Youman & Caputo. A Harvard Law School graduate and former federal prosecutor, Caputo has achieved record-breaking results representing both whistleblowers and catastrophic injury victims.
Caputo has a national whistleblower law practice. He represents clients with information about a variety of schemes to defraud the government, particularly Medicare and Medicaid fraud. His accomplishments include representing the whistleblower in a $35 million United States False Claims Act settlement in Arizona, the largest in state history. Caputo and colleagues John Crutchlow and Joseph Trautwein have considerable experience in litigating whistleblower claims across the U.S.
Caputo has obtained equally impressive results for his catastrophic injury clients. He is a skilled and experienced trial lawyer who has represented more than 50 clients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey whose cases resulted in verdicts or settlements of $1 million or more. Among those results is his $21.8 million medical malpractice verdict in Delaware County, one of the largest verdicts in the court’s history and one of the 100 largest verdicts in the country in 2015.
Caputo has consistently been selected as among the top five percent of attorneys in Pennsylvania by the independent rating service Super Lawyers based on balloting of attorneys statewide and evaluation by a special blue-ribbon panel. Prior to co-founding Youman & Caputo in January 2017, Caputo was a partner at Kline & Specter, the largest plaintiffs’ firm in the state of Pennsylvania.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Caputo served as a judicial law clerk for The Honorable J. Curtis Joyner of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1996 to 1997. In 1997, Caputo joined Dechert, one of Philadelphia’s largest and most prestigious defense firms, as an associate. His practice included a broad range of civil and criminal litigation, including both defamation defense (representing The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in libel cases) and health care fraud litigation.
In 2002, Caputo joined Kline & Specter and, for the next six years, he worked on some of the firm’s most notable catastrophic injury cases, including the Pier 34, Village Green, White v. Ford, and Sprague v. Eskin cases.
In 2008, Caputo accepted a position in the Criminal Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and he was a member of the Government, Environmental and Health Care Fraud section. As an Assistant United States Attorney, Caputo was a member of the prosecution team in United States v. Synthes et al, in which a major medical device manufacturer and a subsidiary were charged with conducting an unauthorized clinical trial of a bone cement in violation of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. The companies later pleaded guilty and agreed to pay the maximum fine permitted under the law of $23.2 million. Caputo also handled cases involving schemes to defraud Medicare and Medicaid fraud and other federal programs and agencies.
Caputo returned to Kline & Specter as a partner in 2010. He returned to handling catastrophic injury cases, and he also started the firm’s whistleblower practice. Caputo continued both to litigate catastrophic injury cases and manage the firm’s whistleblower practice until January 2017, when he left with fellow Kline & Specter partner Andy Youman to start Youman & Caputo.
In recognition of his work in the Philadelphia catastrophic injury legal field, Caputo has been selected every year since 2011 as among the top five percent of attorneys in Pennsylvania by the independent rating service Super Lawyers based on balloting of attorneys statewide and evaluation by a special blue-ribbon panel. In several prior years selected by Pennsylvania Super Lawyers Rising Stars as among the top 2.5 percent of attorneys in the state 40 or younger.
Caputo is a frequent lecturer and has served on a number of significant committees and boards, including the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s Civil Procedural Rules Committee, the Board of Directors of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, and the Advisory Board for the Lexis Nexis Practice Guide: Pennsylvania Civil Trial Practice, edited by The Honorable Daniel J. Anders, Supervising Judge of the Civil Trial Division of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia. Caputo is also a former adjunct professor of law at Drexel Law School.
Caputo was born and raised in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where he lives now with his wife and three children. He is active in the community, particularly coaching youth baseball.
