Hoffman, Peter D

I am an attorney with two sons with disabilities. Before I became a lawyer I worked as a manager in the freight business. Upon the diagnosis of my eldest son as a person with severe hemophilia in 1988,  during the Age of AIDS and the Hemophilia Holocaust, I knew that I had to seek justice for those less fortunate than myself and my son and that I had to do whatever legally possible to protect him from the scourge of AIDS and other viral diseases transmitted through the blood products that he and other persons with hemophilia were exposed. I entered law school in 1990 and started litigating hemophilia HIV cases in 1994.

As this journey started, I participated and represented several children with hemophilia and HIV in a successful mass tort litigation. During this effort, I learned that children with hemophilia could not receive life saving infusion services from public school nurses and that many private Montessori pre schools would not accept a child with hemophilia. This commenced my interest in children with disabilities and their right to a free and appropriate education.

Since 1996, I have been involved in litigating special education cases on behalf of parents and their special needs children. This has included attending Committee on Special Education (CSE), Meetings, working to develop Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), handling Impartial Hearings, writing and filing appeals to the Commissioner of Education's State Review Officer (SRO), and if necessary filing and litigating federal lawsuits to vindicate the rights of children with disabilities.

In this effort we routinely work with experts in the field of education and special education. These experts include but are not limited to audiologists, applied behavior analysis, (ABA), specialists, behaviorists, teach specialists, private special education therapeutic school placement specialists, developmental pediatricians, psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, reading specialists and more. We also have productive and cooperative relationships with several private therapeutic special education schools that provide programs and services for children with disabilities.

We have also worked with children who suffer from a wide variety of disabilities and multiple disabilities. Some of the special needs children we have worked with have been effected by the following disabilities: children within the Autistic Spectrum, Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified, (PDD-NOS), Aspergers Disease, Developmental Disorders, Dyslexia, Reading Disorders, Learning Disabilities, Speech and Language Disability, Audiological and Hearing Disabilities, Vision and Sight Disabilities, Emotional Disorders, Behavioral Disorders, Mental Retardation, Head and Brain Injuries, Mutism and Selective Mutism, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Schizophrenia, BiPolar Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, School Phobia, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, and others.

I and the lawyers that work in this firm are deeply committed to justice, in the form of a free and appropriate education, for children with disabilities. We believe that we can help parents of children with disabilities to find a free and appropriate education for their children with special needs. Please contact us to learn more about the rights of your special needs child.