Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
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eburch.bsky.social
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
@eburch.bsky.social

Callaway Chair of Law @universityofga.bsky.social. Author THE PAIN BROKERS: How Con Men, Call Centers & Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory.

Views are my own. Here for stories, civ pro, MDL, class actions, torts.

www.elizabethchambleeburch.com .. more

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is an American lawyer, currently the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at University of Georgia, and from 2017 to 2018, the Charles Hughes Kirbo Chair at the same university. In 2013, she was elected to the American Law Institute. She received her undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University, where she graduated cum laude. While obtaining her Juris Doctor degree from Florida State University, she was an editor for their Law Review. She has been called before Congress as an expert in complex litigation. .. more

Economics 29%
Business 29%

Kim Cross’s In Light of All Darkness taught me how a book can be both a page-turner and a field guide. Her precision + compassion shaped how I wrote The Pain Brokers.

Her book proposal was dissected by Nieman Storyboard:
niemanstoryboard.org/2023/11/17/b...

#ThePainBrokers #NarrativeNonfiction

Reposted by Valerie P. Hans

Happy 50th birthday to procedural justice! 🎉Thrilled to celebrate with so many brilliant scholars who’ve pushed this field forward.

Here’s to the next 50 years of asking harder questions, building fairer systems, and imagining a more just future.
#MassTorts #ProceduralJustice @jurygirl.bsky.social

Vulnerable plaintiffs were trapped in a mass-tort machine.
#WomenAndJustice #BookLaunch

Preorder: www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/...

Had women used insurance and a real hospital, it would have cost them somewhere between $600 and $1,000. A spin through the removal mill ran $69,000 to $120,000.

...The same doctors appeared in case after case.

Many women told they couldn’t use their insurance, which forced them to take out medical liens against their future settlement proceeds at strip-you-bare rates.
#TrueCrime

Women were targeted for profit.

#WomensHealth #womenfightforjustice

🧵1) Despite researching mass torts for over 20 years, what I uncovered in writing The Pain Brokers still shocked me:

Note to authors who are members of the Anthropic copyright #classaction - give this a read before opting out.

A federal judge accused a third-party law firm of attempting to “trick” authors out of their record $1.5 billion copyright class action settlement.
news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/judge...
Judge Flames Firm Luring Authors Out of $1.5 Billion AI Pact (2)
A federal judge accused a third-party law firm of attempting to “trick” authors out of their record $1.5 billion copyright class action settlement with Anthropic PBC.
news.bloomberglaw.com

Note to authors who are members of the Anthropic copyright #classaction - give this a read before opting out. 👀
www.bloomberglaw.com/product/blaw...
Internal documents and former company executives revealed how Cigna doctors rejected patients’ claims without opening their files.

“We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said.

(Published March 2023 w/ @capitolforum.bsky.social)
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them
Internal documents and former company executives reveal how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files. “We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said.
www.propublica.org

Want a quick craft tip? Read @praddenkeefe.bsky.social Empire of Pain! It’s a writing lesson in reporting without access.

What book taught you something about writing or reporting?

📚 Books Behind The Pain Brokers.

#EmpireOfPain #ThePainBrokers #NarrativeNonfiction #InvestigativeJournalism

3 different women. 3 different states. 1 devastating scheme.

This is their story. This is our story. This is THE PAIN BROKERS.
#ThePainBrokers #BookLaunch #MassTorts
@onesignal.bsky.social

Preorder link: www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pa...
The Pain Brokers
Selling the Dream meets Empire of Pain in this shocking, never-told-before story of three women caught in a web of telemarketing scammers, shady do...
www.simonandschuster.com

JERRI PLUMMER 45-year-old Arkansas grandmother in an abusive marriage. On Medicaid. When her granddaughter overheard a caller claim there was a ticking time bomb in Jerri, she was convinced her granny was about to die.

BARB SHEPARD A school bus driver from Claremont, New Hampshire, and mother of two grown boys, she thought she was getting help for her medical device. Instead, she got a plane ticket to Florida and a surgeon she’d never met. The scare tactics worked. The surgery didn’t.

SHARON GORE: School administrator. Master’s degree. Pillar of her South Carolina community. One phone call changed everything.

#WomensHealth #CivPro

Meet the brave women at the heart of a real-life legal thriller, THE PAIN BROKERS.

Each received eerily similar phone calls. The callers knew their names, birthdays, medical histories, even their doctors. They were told they had a "ticking time bomb" inside them.

#TrueCrime #torts
My new post about Adrienne Hines's book, Bankruptcy Magic, and how it might help encourage the people who will benefit from filing bankruptcy to file bankruptcy. Link to her book, www.theladylikelawyer.com/bankruptcy-m...

These aren’t just statistics—they’re stories of women like Jerri, Sharon, and Barb who were manipulated by predatory call centers into unnecessary surgeries while lawyers, funders, and doctors profited from their pain.
#ThePainBrokers #MassTorts #WomensHealth #InvestigativeJournalism #MDLReform

The real con? It’s what happens after you sign up.
In THE PAIN BROKERS, I expose a criminal conspiracy that preyed on over 100,000 women.

Yes, lawsuits can expose real wrongdoing—defective medical devices, dangerous drugs, corporate negligence. But the system meant to deliver justice has become what one woman called “America’s lawsuit factory.”

💰 Average pelvic mesh settlement: $40,000 BEFORE attorney fees.
📉 After fees and costs? Many women received pennies on the dollar.
🔍 Only 1.8% felt their lawsuits accomplished their goals.

A 🧵 on mass tort plaintiffs
1) After studying 217 MDL plaintiffs across 42 states, I discovered the reality behind those late-night lawyer commercials. The numbers are shocking:

Like Death in Mud Lick, The Pain Brokers exposes the human cost of profit-driven systems--this time in women's health and mass torts.

It's about greed, justice, and the women caught in between.

#LegalThrillers #ThePainBrokers #DeathInMudLick #TrueCrime
www.amazon.com/Death-Mud-Li...
Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic
Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic [Eyre, Eric] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic
www.amazon.com

Grateful to Eric Eyre for his powerful words about The Pain Brokers.

Eyre won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting and his book, Death in Mud Lick, is a riveting investigation into how corporate greed fueled the #opioid epidemic.

Alaska drops @motleyrice.bsky.social in opioid litigation, claiming the firm violated confidentiality and conflict-of-interest provisions. Utah terminated its contract with the firm on Oct. 16.
#MDL #MassTort #RepeatPlayers #LegalEthics @reuters.com www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...
Alaska fires law firm Motley Rice in opioid litigation, joining Utah
The state of Alaska has terminated a contract with a national plaintiffs law firm it hired eight years ago to pursue a lawsuit over opioid painkillers, claiming it violated confidentiality and conflict-of-interest provisions.
www.reuters.com

You have a “ticking time bomb" in you said the caller...

The Pain Brokers is a true story about 3 women who uncovered a con that turned their bodies into a business—and their fight for justice.
Want to read it first?
🎁 Enter this Goodreads Giveaway: www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...
#WomensHealth

5/ What comes next: The case is remanded for further proceedings. The district court will reconsider elements like proximate cause and abatement in light of this ruling.

Note: this opinion shows how common-law can adapt to mass torts if MDLs don't stifle the development of that law.

4/ Critically: The court rejected the notion that product-based harms like distributing a legal drug can never constitute a public nuisance under WV law. That closes one big defense argument. #PublicNuisance

3/ The 4th Circuit reasoned that West Virginia’s broad definition of public nuisance — “an act or condition that unlawfully operates to hurt or inconvenience an indefinite number of persons” — supports the City's claim.