Marie Napoli: Justice Begins with the People It Serves 

The law is often associated with courtrooms, statutes, and high-profile verdicts, but its true purpose is much more personal. At its best, it gives a voice to people who have been overlooked, challenges institutions that have caused harm, and creates a path toward accountability when no other path seems available. The legal profession demands persistence, empathy, and the willingness to keep fighting long after the headlines fade.  

Few careers demonstrate that more clearly than the work of Marie Napoli, founding partner of Napoli Shkolnik, who has spent more than three decades representing individuals, families, and communities in some of the most complex and consequential cases in the United States. 

Her career spans employment discrimination, civil rights, mass tort litigation, personal injury, medical malpractice, and pharmaceutical litigation, reflecting a commitment to using the law as a tool for justice rather than simply a profession. Marie earned her J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law, followed by an LL.M. from NYU School of Law and an LL.M. in Environmental Law from Lewis & Clark Law School. She has also served with the New York Appellate Division, Second Department, and taught Continuing Legal Education courses on Tort and Civil Procedure at St. John’s University School of Law. Throughout her career, she has combined legal excellence with a deep sense of public purpose, building a legacy that extends far beyond the courtroom. 

Showing Up When It Matters Most 

The legal profession taught Marie something no law school could. Behind every settlement figure, courtroom argument, and stack of legal briefs is a person or a community that needed someone in their corner during one of the hardest moments of their lives. That understanding became the foundation of her career and remains the principle that guides her work today. 

Her journey began in New York, where her father, John, practiced law. Before earning her law degree, she worked at his firm, Kaiser & Hirsch, and learned lessons that shaped her far more deeply than any classroom could. He believed every job deserved to be done well and that talent should be shared generously. Those values became the foundation of her own approach to the law. 

After earning her J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law, she returned to the firm as a practicing attorney alongside her brother. Her late husband, Paul, later joined them, and together they built what would become Napoli Shkolnik. Marie speaks of that chapter with deep gratitude, acknowledging that Paul was central to the firm they created together. 

She later earned an LL.M. from NYU School of Law and an LL.M. in Environmental Law from Lewis & Clark Law School, which expanded the scope of her work. Yet the origin of everything she has built can still be traced back to her father’s office and the belief that the law, at its best, is an act of generosity. 

The Moments That Shaped Her Leadership 

Despite leading some of the largest environmental and mass tort cases in the country, the moments that shaped Marie most were not the dramatic courtroom victories. They were often quieter and deeply personal. 

The client with nowhere else to turn. The case that could only move forward through persistence. Those experiences shaped her understanding of leadership far more than public recognition ever could. 

Recognition itself has come to mean something different over time. What matters most to her now is what her career may represent to someone just beginning theirs. The legal profession needs more women willing to take on complex and consequential cases, and any recognition that makes that path feel more attainable has real value. 

Fighting for Communities That Were Overlooked 

Marie’s work has always been driven by a pattern she could not ignore. Pharmaceutical cases that disproportionately affected women. Communities whose water had been contaminated for years. More than ten thousand first responders who became ill after cleaning up Ground Zero and spent years fighting for justice. 

The pattern was consistent. An institution or corporation made a decision that harmed people, and those people needed the legal system to help restore what had been taken from them. 

That purpose is reflected in some of the firm’s landmark outcomes, including the $12.5 billion settlement with 3M over PFAS contamination in public drinking water, the more than $600 million settlement for the people of Flint, Michigan, and the billion-dollar-plus settlement for World Trade Center workers. Behind every number was a person or a community that had been injured while simply trying to live, work, or serve others. 

Keeping People at the Center of Every Case 

Managing high-stakes litigation has never required Marie to choose between legal precision and compassion. In her experience, the stakes themselves make the human dimension impossible to ignore. 

When an outcome determines how families rebuild their lives or whether a community can recover, the work stops feeling abstract. Precision and empathy are not competing values. They are both essential to doing the job well. 

Resilience, Leadership, and the Lessons That Last 

The legal profession has not always been welcoming to women. Marie encountered biases that were structural, overt, and sometimes quietly understood without ever being spoken aloud. 

Over time, she came to see that those attitudes reflected the limitations of others rather than her own abilities. That perspective became one of the most important sources of confidence in her leadership. 

Margaret Thatcher has long been one of her inspirations. She admired the way Thatcher demonstrated that strength, determination, grace, and dignity could exist together in leadership, particularly within male-dominated environments. 

Her understanding of resilience was shaped not only by her legal career but also by surviving breast cancer. That experience taught her that resilience is not about being unbreakable. It is the ability to keep making decisions that align with one’s values even when life becomes uncertain. More than any single verdict, that lesson has defined the way she leads. 

Next Generation of Environmental Justice Lawyers 

In 2025, Marie and Paul Napoli made the founding gift to establish the NYU Law Environmental Justice Laboratory. The initiative grew directly from decades of work on the Flint water crisis, PFAS contamination litigation, and other cases that revealed how low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often bear a disproportionate share of environmental harm. 

Her LL.M. in Environmental Law provided the academic foundation, but the cases themselves created the urgency to turn that knowledge into lasting advocacy. 

The Laboratory works with NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law and the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law. Students represent community-based organizations, engage in policy advocacy, and develop the litigation skills needed to pursue environmental justice throughout their careers. The goal is to build a generation of lawyers equipped to confront environmental racism and contribute to a more equitable future. 

A Life Guided by One Value System 

Marie does not think of purpose-driven leadership as a philosophy adopted from a book. She sees it as a value system expressed consistently across different parts of her life. 

Founding the Paul and Marie Napoli Foundation, running the New York City Marathon, and serving as an Associate Board Member while helping raise more than $50,000 for the Bone Marrow Foundation all reflect the same belief. Generosity cannot be separated into categories. Whether in the courtroom, in philanthropy, or in service to others, the responsibility remains the same: use what you have to help someone else move forward. 

A More Complex Legal Future 

Marie believes the legal landscape is entering a period that will shape the next decade of advocacy. Environmental harm and systemic inequity will remain central issues, but new areas of litigation are emerging just as rapidly. Cases involving social media addiction on behalf of school boards, price-fixing claims, and firearm industry liability for municipalities are already reshaping the boundaries of legal accountability, and Napoli Shkolnik is actively involved across these areas. 

What concerns her most is the widening gap between the speed at which new forms of harm appear and the legal system’s ability to respond. Closing that gap will require lawyers who understand science, public policy, and technology, and who are willing to build cases patiently over many years and across multiple jurisdictions, much like the AFFF multidistrict litigation demanded. 

A Firm That Invests in Women Leaders 

To women entering the legal profession, Marie offers advice rooted in experience rather than theory. She sees the profession as a marathon, not a sprint, and encourages young lawyers not to measure their progress against someone else’s timeline. The goal is to keep moving steadily toward the future they want to build. 

At Napoli Shkolnik, that philosophy is reflected in internships, mentoring programs, and a strong commitment to promoting from within. She points to leaders such as Coral Odiot-Rivera, who co-leads the firm’s environmental mass tort practice and was named a Law360 Rising Star in Environmental in 2024, while also serving as chair of the American Association for Justice Microplastics Litigation Group. She also highlights partner Shayna Sacks, whose work spans governmental affairs, pharmaceutical litigation, environmental litigation, and mass torts, and who was named a 500 Global Plaintiff Lawyer by Lawdragon in 2026. 

To Marie, they are not exceptions. They represent the culture the firm has intentionally built. Leadership is revealed by what an organization consistently invests in, not simply by what it claims to support. 

Measuring Success by the Doors Left Open 

Marie does not believe inspiration comes from titles or settlement figures alone. Those achievements matter, but they are not the measure she uses. 

What matters most is whether a person’s work creates opportunities that did not exist before they arrived. Whether colleagues, clients, and communities are able to achieve things they could not have achieved without that leadership. That is the standard she continues to hold herself to. 

The Legacy She Hopes Will Endure 

When Marie thinks about the future, she hopes the communities represented in Flint, at Ground Zero, and in pharmaceutical cases affecting women across the country will continue to experience real and lasting accountability. She hopes the NYU Environmental Justice Laboratory will produce generations of lawyers equipped to confront environmental injustice, and that younger women will look at what has been built at Napoli Shkolnik and see what a plaintiff’s firm can accomplish when women hold meaningful leadership roles. 

She also speaks openly about the legacy she built alongside her late husband, Paul. Much of the firm’s growth and identity was shaped by the two of them together, and she does not separate his legacy from the work that continues today. Her hope is that the firm will keep reflecting the way he practiced law and the way he gave to others. 

Above all, she hopes she has remained true to the lesson that began in her father’s office: to be generous with her talents, her opportunities, and her ability to help others move forward.