Before he became a lawyer, Dechert's James Figorski spent 25 years as a police officer in Philadelphia. That experience proved key, first in winning exoneration for Shaurn Thomas, who served 24 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, and now, in securing a $4.15 million civil settlement from the city of Philadelphia for wrongful conviction.

Moreover, the Dechert pro bono team, which also included civil rights counsel Stephen Brown and associates Tiffany Engsell and Stefanie Tubbs plus co-counsel Paul Messing and David Rudovsky of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin, did it all without the aid of DNA evidence. 

Instead, after eight years of work, they showed that the detectives involved in the case violated Thomas' Fourth and 14th amendment rights by coercing two witnesses to testify falsely against him, failing to fully investigate his alibi of which they were aware, and hiding exculpatory evidence showing that the two witnesses' coerced testimony was false.

The payout is the largest-ever by the city of Philadelphia in a non-DNA exoneration case.

Figorski, a senior staff attorney in Dechert's litigation department, said he grew interested in becoming a lawyer after spending so much time in court as a cop. "I thought I could do a better job" than many of the lawyers he saw practicing, he said. 

Going to school at night, he earned a J.D. from Temple University in 2005. Initially interested in criminal law, he said that "the more I saw in law school, the more interested I became in civil work."

While much of his practice now involves antitrust matters, Figorski has remained active in pro bono matters. When reviewing cases for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project in 2009, he came across Thomas' letter claiming he'd been wrongfully convicted. "It had a ring of truth because I knew the system," Figorski said. 

Thomas, who was 16 when Domingo Martinez was gunned down, had been arrested the night before the murder on suspicion of stealing a motorcycle. He claimed he was at Philadelphia's Youth Study Center—part of the city's juvenile justice system—at 9 a.m. the morning of the murder, which took place at 9:55 a.m., though it was difficult to find independent corroboration for his alibi.

Still, Figorski said, it didn't add up. "I had arrested juveniles before. I knew what the system was. It made me want to look deeper."

Once he got his hands of the case files, he was more convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice. "I knew what should have been there and wasn't, and what was there that was out of place."

Did it feel strange to go up against his old police department in court? "I don't view it as being on the opposite side. I view it as being about telling the truth," Figorski said. "No one is interested in putting an innocent person in prison."