In 2025, 10 high school seniors across North and South Carolina received $5,000 scholarships through DeMayo Law Offices’ Arrive Alive® program. The initiative, in place for more than two decades, aims to prevent drunk and distracted driving by encouraging teens to create peer-targeted presentations that raise awareness around risky decisions behind the wheel. To date, the firm has awarded more than $875,000 in scholarships to high school seniors in the local community.
Michael DeMayo, the firm’s CEO and Managing Partner, says the goal is not only to support education but to spark conversations among young people about how easily a thoughtless decision can become a tragedy.
“This isn’t about branding or publicity; it’s personal,” says DeMayo. “When you’ve stood before grieving parents who lost their child in a crash that never should have happened, you stop wondering how to explain the value of prevention. You just need to do something.”
The Arrive Alive® program is one aspect of DeMayo Cares, the firm’s broader commitment to community service, which includes food drives, school supply donations and partnerships with local nonprofits. Though varied in form, these outreach efforts reflect the same instincts that guide the firm’s legal work: to intervene when something has gone wrong and to stand with people who need help navigating what comes next.
Headquartered in North Carolina and active throughout the Carolinas, DeMayo Law Offices has spent more than 30 years representing individuals who have been seriously injured or lost loved ones due to negligence. Through work that spans catastrophic injury, wrongful death, workers’ compensation and mass tort litigation, the firm remains singularly focused on helping people regain stability when their lives have been upended.
In 2025, the firm—which has secured more than $1 billion in judgments and settlements for its clients—achieved several notable results: $2.25 million for a 33-year-old who suffered a serious brain injury in an auto accident; $1.98 million for a client who can no longer live independently after being struck by a driver who ran a red light; $1.5 million for a 37-year-old motorcycle crash victim who sustained multiple leg fractures, underwent seven surgeries and faces permanent disfigurement; $1 million for the family of a man killed on the job; and $816,000 for an 87-year-old woman seriously injured in a bus accident while being transported from a senior living facility.
Still, numbers alone cannot capture what these results mean for the firm’s clients; they mark the difference between facing the aftermath alone and having the means to start rebuilding. “Many of the families who come to us are facing the worst moment of their lives; they’ve lost a spouse or buried a child, and they want to know that someone is going to fight for them,” DeMayo says. "My job is to listen, take in the full weight of what they’re facing and then determine the best way to make meaningful progress.”
This commitment extends beyond individual cases to large-scale harm, with the firm handling complex mass torts across the country. Currently, one of its most intensive undertakings involves representing thousands of individuals impacted by toxic water exposure at Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base located in North Carolina. DeMayo assumed a leading role in this litigation after the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, passed in 2022, finally gave veterans and their families a legal path forward following decades of government inaction.
“We’re talking about people who served their country, who were drinking, bathing and cooking with water the government knew was contaminated,” DeMayo says. “The government has failed these families for decades, and we feel a duty to represent them.”
To meet the demands of this effort—and to ensure every affected person receives the legal support they deserve—DeMayo Law Offices built a dedicated internal team and partnered with other experienced firms across the country. Indeed, whether a case involves large-scale toxic exposure or an individual accident, clients can expect the highest level of service at DeMayo’s firm. From the outset, expectations are clearly communicated, and each case is assigned both an attorney and a liaison to maintain consistent, personalized support.
“We place a real emphasis on clear communication and honest assessment,” DeMayo says. “Some lawyers will tell clients what they want to hear to retain or even sign a case, but our job is to be completely transparent and to provide them with reasonable expectations and benchmarks based on past experiences in similar cases.”
It’s an approach that has earned DeMayo national recognition. In addition to being AV Preeminent™ rated by Martindale-Hubbell, he has been named one of the Top 100 Trial Lawyers by The National Trial Lawyers for 12 consecutive years, and is a past recipient of the Nation’s Top One Percent distinction from the National Association of Distinguished Counsel. He also is the co-author of Carolina Injury Law: A Reference for Accident Victims, a resource for individuals navigating the personal injury process, and a frequent speaker at legal conferences hosted by AAJ, NCAJ, Trial Lawyers Summit, M&L and MMG Seminar Co. for attorneys.
“Recognition is meaningful, but more importantly, it reflects that we’re doing something right,” DeMayo says. “If what we do in the courtroom helps someone rebuild, and what we do in the community helps prevent another loss, then we’ve done our job.”
