Lawrie Demorest focuses her practice on complex litigation, including mass torts, class actions and commercial matters. Ms. Demorest has served as lead counsel on several national trial and litigation teams, including multidistrict litigation and class actions, and has tried more than 60 cases to juries with a highly favorable success rate. She has extensive experience defending toxic tort, medical device, pharmaceutical and consumer products cases in a variety of jurisdictions around the country, all of which involve extensive work with expert witnesses in various fields of science and medicine.
Ms. Demorest is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in the area of product liability litigation. Her representation encompasses prelitigation counseling, crisis management, developing and implementing strategies to shut down pending and potential individual and class actions, managing local counsel and mass trial dockets, and effecting settlements through various forms of alternative dispute resolution and non-litigation solutions.
Ms. Demorest is a former co-chair of the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign. She has also served on the faculty of the Atlanta Institute of Trial Advocacy and on the editorial board of the journal Medical Malpractice Law and Strategy. She is a lecturer on topics common to product liability litigation.
- National trial counsel (1st chair) for a Fortune 50 major supplier of asbestos. Has served as lead trial counsel on over a dozen such teams in the last three years, taking several cases to jury trial.
- National trial team (1st chair) for a major friction supplier’s asbestos litigation.
- National counsel team for a tissue bank in multijurisdictional human allograft litigation.
- National counsel to a large national REIT in its class action mold litigation. Also litigation counsel for the owner of a large apartment complex in the first multiparty, mold litigation filed in Atlanta.
- Lead counsel in lead paint litigation for a major national retailer, which resulted in its early dismissal from a multiparty action in Mississippi, a dangerous jurisdiction.
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One hundred and forty-seven Alston & Bird attorneys have been selected for inclusion in the 2013 edition of The Best Lawyers in America. The publication is universally regarded as among the few definitive guides to legal excellence, and its rankings are based on an exhaustive peer-review survey in which more than 36,000 leading attorneys cast almost 4.4 million votes on the legal abilities of other lawyers in their practice areas.
September 18, 2012
In the Press
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April 25, 2012
In the Press
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September 12, 2011
In the Press
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October 20, 2008
Publications
- Board of Directors Human Rights Campaign Foundation
- Board of Directors National LGBT Bar Foundation
- Defense Research Institute
- ABA Toxic Tort Subcommittee