About Peter Hoffman

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 lifesaving infusion services from public school nurses and that many private Montessori preschools 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.