Life & Work with Elizabeth Chamblee Burch of Athens, Georgia

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Chamblee Burch.

Hi Elizabeth Chamblee, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I am a lover of stories who always aspired to be a writer. When I was a child, I stayed up late with classic mysteries—Nancy Drew and anything by Agatha Christie. As an English major at Vanderbilt, I wrote short fiction under Tony Earley’s tutelage and admired Lorrie Moore’s darkly humorous essay collections.

Since completing my law degree, I’ve become a nationally known expert on mass torts and am the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. For twenty some-odd years I wrote law review articles that changed little. The critiques that I leveled in 2004 remain as true today as they did then in part because insiders profit mightily from the status quo.

Though I love academic work, I yearned to tell true stories that could help consumers, especially women, seize their own power and find justice in a system stacked against them. After decades of writing mostly legalese, I found the mentoring I needed to turn the injustices of mass-tort litigation into an irresistible story for general readers by joining the MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism. I graduated in 2023.

My debut book, The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2026), exposed an elaborate scheme in the pelvic mesh litigation that turned thousands of women into cash machines. It received stellar reviews. Booklist gave it a star and called it “as gripping and important as Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and Gardiner Harris’ No More Tears . . . a righteous bolt of reportage worthy of acclaim.” Publishers Weekly wrote, “rigorous and horrifying, this real-life tale of greed run amok will leave readers reeling.” Kirkus found it a “lively and meticulously researched work” that is a “clarion call for reform and change.” And The New Yorker dubbed me “the Jane Goodall of complex litigation.”

My unique strengths come together in The Pain Brokers. I’m a scholar who thrives on complexity and a writer who loves an action story where villains and heroes clash while the women in the eye of the storm hang on for dear life. Women’s health issues are in the headlines every day, and tensions are high between female consumers and the medical-industrial complex.

Even in a society where gender is not supposed to matter, this story is being told by a woman. At the heart of this con are devices that are implanted only in women, intended to address chronic health issues that women are afraid to discuss and men don’t want to hear about. “Girls’ trouble,” my Mimi would say. Women are silenced because they are horrified that others will see them as somehow unclean, untouchable. These are the women who have been hurt and exploited by the evildoers in the book and who know what it feels like to be silenced by shame.

I’m not silenced, however, and neither are the three women who spoke with me. We have stories to tell.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No road worth traveling is smooth. The publishing industry has been a huge learning curve for me as was learning how to interview and write for story. But I am surrounded by a wonderful community of writers who have helped to guide me through that turbulence.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I love teaching and talking with the public about mass torts, which affect so many lives.

A tort is a harm—a punch, a kick, a car accident. And a mass tort is where many people are harmed in similar ways by the same product, airplane crash, or toxic spill.

A mass tort is hundreds, thousands, and sometimes more than one hundred thousand people suing over life-changing physical harm from asbestos-laced baby powder, NFL concussions, pacemakers, hip implants, and other medical products. Mass torts don’t include a single fender-bender victim with whiplash out for a few thousand bucks. Nor do they include class actions over $3 ATM fees that alert consumers via junk mail.

Ordinarily, plaintiffs expect to file a lawsuit and have a suit-and-tie lawyer usher them through to trial where they can tell the jury how corporate wrongdoing wrecked their health. But in mass torts, a panel of seven judges decides which federal judge will handle all federal lawsuits with similar facts. Then, injured plaintiffs from Alaska to Maine find their cases shipped off to a single judge somewhere in the United States through the process known as multidistrict litigation, or MDL. With thousands of cases mushed into a scrum, trials disappear, and individuals can become numbers on a spreadsheet.

But at the center of these mass-tort cases are real people, people like Barb, Sharon, and Jerri, the women in The Pain Brokers, who seek justice from large corporations.

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Stay open to life’s twists and turns! Writing this book started with a fateful email from a whistleblower that I might’ve easily ignored had I not been in the MFA program at the time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.elizabethchambleeburch.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethcburch/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethcburch/
• Twitter: https://x.com/elizabethcburch
• Other: https://www.law.uga.edu/profile/elizabeth-chamblee-burch

Image Credits
Law Library Photo Credit: Peter Frey