MDLs Go Mainstream: Mass Torts Today

John H. Beisner is a partner in the Washington office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and leader of Skadden’s Mass Torts, Insurance and Consumer Litigation Group. John regularly handles appellate litigations and has appeared in matters before the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 35 years, he has defended major U.S. and international corporations in more than 600 purported class actions filed in federal courts and in 40 state courts at both the trial and appellate levels. Those class actions have involved a wide variety of subjects, including antitrust/unfair competition, consumer fraud, RICO, ERISA, employment discrimination, environmental issues, product-related matters and securities. He also has handled numerous matters before the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, as well as proceedings before various federal and state administrative agencies, particularly the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

John was elected to the ALI in 1994 and has served on ALI's Council since May 2009. He is an Adviser on the Restatement Third, Consumer Contracts project and was previously an Adviser on the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation project.

John has advised on numerous high-visibility corporate crisis situations, including congressional hearings, federal agency investigations, state attorneys general inquiries and General Accounting Office reviews. Among others, he represented Merck in its Vioxx litigation. He also negotiated a settlement with state attorneys general regarding the Countrywide Finance/Bank of America mortgage lending practices investigation, resulting in a creative loan modification program intended to help more than 400,000 families maintain ownership of their homes. He was named Litigator of the Week by The American Lawyer for his role in this case.

John is a frequent writer and lecturer on class action and complex litigation issues. In 2013, he received the Burton Award for Legal Achievement, which recognizes excellence in legal scholarship. Mr. Beisner also has been an active participant in litigation reform initiatives before Congress, state legislatures and judicial committees. He has testified numerous times on class action and claims aggregation issues before the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees (particularly with respect to the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005) and before state legislative committees. For his integral role in crafting the Class Action Fairness Act, Mr. Beisner was recognized with the 2011 Research and Policy Award by The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform.

John repeatedly has been selected for inclusion, and is in the top tier, in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business in the area of products liability, and he also is listed in The Best Lawyers in America, The Legal 500 U.S., Who’s Who Legal, Best of the Best USA and Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America. He was profiled in an article by The American Lawyer that named Skadden as a finalist in the products liability section of its Litigation Department of the Year contest (January 2012). John repeatedly has been named Best Lawyers’ Washington, D.C. Mass Tort Litigation / Class Actions - Defendants Lawyer of the Year, as well as a Star by LMG Life Sciences in the non-IP litigation and enforcement and products liability categories. He also was recognized as one of the 2013 BTI Client Service All-Stars by The BTI Consulting Group for providing outstanding client service. In addition, Mr. John was selected as one of Law360’s MVPs of 2019 and 2011 in the products liability category, which recognizes those who have raised the bar in corporate law throughout the year. In 2010, Law360 profiled John in two articles that named Skadden as a Product Liability Group of the Year and Class Action Group of the Year.

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law where her teaching and research interests include multidistrict litigation, class actions, and mass torts. She joined the School of Law faculty in 2011. She was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2015 and served as visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2017. After holding the Charles H. Kirbo Chair of Law for two years, she assumed the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law in 2019. She is the author of Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation (Cambridge University Press 2019) and her teaching and research interests include civil procedure, class actions and mass torts.  

Beth is an award-winning scholar whose groundbreaking work on multidistrict litigation and class actions won The American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal in 2015, the Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Professional Responsibility Scholarship in 2016, and the Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award in 2019. 

Beth has published over 30 articles and essays in respected journals such as the New York University Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston University Law Review and George Washington Law Review, among others. She co-authors a casebook titled The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation with the late Richard A. Nagareda, Robert G. Bone, Charles Silver, and Patrick Woolley. 

Beth has delivered over 70 lectures at research institutions across the United States and abroad to diverse audiences—from law professors at their annual meeting to federal judges at their judicial retreats, lawyers and jurists at the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association, and psychologists at the International Congress on the Psychology of Law. She was elected as a member of The American Law Institute in 2013, and she is a frequent commentator in various international and national news media such as National Public Radio’s Marketplace, BBC World News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The L.A. Times. 

Before joining the School of Law's faculty, she was an assistant professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she received the university-wide Graduate Teaching Award and was voted “Professor of the Year” by second- and third-year students. Burch began her academic career in 2006 at Cumberland School of Law, part of Samford University, where she received the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award and the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award. In 2014, she received the School of Law’s John C. O’Byrne Memorial Award for Significant Contributions Furthering Student-Faculty Relations.

Before entering the legal academy, Burch worked as an associate at Holland & Knight in Atlanta, where she practiced in the area of complex litigation, including securities class actions. She has served as the mass torts subcommittee chair for the American Bar Association's Class Action and Derivative Suits Committee, on the executive board for the Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarship Committee and as a co-editor of the Mass Tort Litigation Blog.

She earned her bachelor's degree cum laude from Vanderbilt University and her J.D. cum laude from Florida State University, where she served as the writing and research editor for the Florida State University Law Review.

Abbe R. Gluck is a Professor of Law and the founding Faculty Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. She is also Professor of Internal Medicine (General Medicine) at Yale Medical School and a Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. She is a member of the Affiliated Faculty of the Yale Program on Addiction Medicine, an Executive Committee member of Yale’s ISPS Health program and directs the Yale Law School Medical Legal Partnership Program.  Abbe joined Yale Law School in 2012, having previously served on the faculty of Columbia Law School. She is an expert on Congress and the political process, federalism, civil procedure, and health law, and is the chair emerita of Section on Legislation and the Law of the Political Process for the Association of American Law Schools.

Abbe has extensive experience working as a lawyer in all levels of government. Prior to joining Columbia, she served in the administration of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine as the special counsel and senior advisor to the New Jersey Attorney General; and in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as chief of staff and counsel to the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, senior counsel in the New York City Office of Legal Counsel, and deputy special counsel to the New York City Charter Revision Commission. Prior to law school, she worked in the U.S. Senate for Senator Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. Before returning to government work after law school, Abbe was associated with the Paul Weiss firm in New York. She earned her B.A. from Yale University, summa cum laude, and her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Following law school, she clerked for then-Chief Judge Ralph K. Winter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her latest book, The Trillion Dollar Revolution: How the Affordable Care Act Transformed Politics, Law, and Health Care in America, with Zeke Emanuel, was published in March 2020. Abbe’s scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and many other journals. Among her most recent work is the most extensive empirical study ever conducted about the realities of the congressional law-making process (published as two articles in the Stanford Law Review); the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court issue comment on King v. Burwell, the 2015 challenge to the Affordable Care Act; and a study, published in the Stanford Law Review,  of the state implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  She is co-author of a leading Legislation casebook, and has served as co-counsel on several major health-law cases, including filing influential amicus briefs in the 2019 constitutional challenge, Texas v. Azar,  King,  and the 2012 ACA challenge, NFIB v. Sebelius. In 2018, Abbe organized and convened the largest gathering of cancer experts in Connecticut history for a conference on The Policy, Politics and Law of Cancer.

She currently serves on numerous boards and commissions, including as an appointed member of both the Uniform Law Commission, where she serves as Chair of the Health Law Committee and the New York State Taskforce on Life and the Law, and as an elected member of the American Law Institute. She was elected to the leadership body of the ALI as a Council member in 2018. Abbe received the Law School’s teaching award in 2015.

Shanin Specter is founding partner of Kline & Specter, P.C. and a one of the premier trial lawyers in the U.S. He has obtained more than 200 jury verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million and more than 50 case resolutions—16 verdicts—greater than $10 million. Among his verdicts are $153 million against a major automaker and $109 million against an electric power company. Shanin's legal victories have included news making, industry-changing cases involving medical malpractice, defective products, medical devices, premises liability, motor vehicle accidents and general negligence.

Beyond winning substantial monetary compensation for his clients, many of Shanin's cases have prompted changes that provide a societal benefit, including improvements to vehicle safety, nursing and hospital procedures, the safe operation of police cars, training for the use of CPR at public institutions, and inspections, installation and maintenance of utility power lines. The Goretzka case even spurred the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to create a new Electric Safety Division to investigate reported electrical injuries. Similarly, his lawsuit—plus television appearances calling for action—on behalf of the victims of a fire escape collapse helped move the City of Philadelphia to enact an ordinance requiring all fire escapes to be regularly inspected by an independent structural engineer.

Shanin earned his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an LL.M. with First Honors from Cambridge University and has compiled a lengthy record of professional accomplishments and accolades. He is a member of the Inner Circle, a group of the best 100 trial lawyers in the country. He is a member of The American Law Institute. Shanin was featured on the cover of SuperLawyers magazine, in which the independent rating service called him one of the most celebrated and respected catastrophic injury litigators in the country.