Joshua Davis Wins the National Civil Justice Institute’s 2025 Appellate Advocacy Award

Berger Montague, the national plaintiffs’ law firm, is pleased to announce that Shareholder Joshua Davis has been awarded the National Civil Justice Institute’s 2025 Appellate Advocacy Award.

“This 9-0 decision was an important one,” said Davis. “At a time when the President is eliminating pay and firing our Federal Civil Servants without following the processes prescribed by Congress, this outstanding result has far-reaching implications,” said Mr. Davis.

Stuart Harrow was a longtime Department of Defense employee when he was given a six-day furlough. Mr. Harrow challenged the furlough at the Merit Systems Protection Board. During the five years the Board took to decide the case, Mr. Harrow’s email address changed, and so he never received notification of the Board’s final determination until the standard 60-day deadline to file petitions for review of Board decisions in federal court expired. The federal court dismissed Mr. Harrow’s appeal as untimely, finding that the typical 60-day deadline to petition for review was jurisdictional. Josh Davis and Scott Dodson took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Harrow v. Dept. of Defense, 601 U.S. 480 (2024), the Court unanimously reversed and found that the time limit was a claim-processing rule instead of a jurisdictional one.

Read more about the award here.

Berger Montague is one of the nation’s preeminent law firms focusing on complex civil litigation, class actions, and mass torts in federal and state courts throughout the United States. The firm is active in the fields of antitrust, commercial litigation, consumer protection, defective products, environmental law, employment law, securities, and whistleblower cases, among many other practice areas. For more than 50 years, Berger Montague has played lead roles in precedent-setting cases and has recovered over $50 billion for its clients and the classes they have represented. Berger Montague is headquartered in Philadelphia and has offices in Chicago, Malvern, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, DE.