SHARE:
Law: For the Defense
Attorney Amy Furness is defending the opioid manufacturer of Percocet
As a college student, she majored in engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The engineering school follows a cooperative education model in which students alternate classroom studies with six months of full-time work in a career-related job. At one point, Furness worked for a large builder and designer of power plants and was part of a team involved in the sale of a nuclear facility. The legal aspects of the deal made her want to become a lawyer.
“Someone suggested to me that as a woman, it would be really great if I had a law degree to complement my science” education, she says.
Her first job out of law school was as an attorney in the environmental claims division of Reliance National Insurance near Philadelphia. She examined claims to determine if they were covered under the insurer’s policies and traveled around the country helping clients develop cleanup plans for contaminated sites.
Her future as an in-house lawyer was limited, however. She figured that to rise to a more senior-level position, such as general counsel, she’d have to get trial experience at a law firm.
In the mid-1990s, she joined the Miami office of Popham Haik, now Carlton Fields. She says she also had a personal reason to make the move: Her grandparents, with whom she was close, had retired to South Florida. (A one-time behemoth, Reliance Insurance later went bankrupt after losing more than $2 billion in the early 2000s and the environmental claims division was acquired by XL Capital.)
Her engineering background and insurance defense work made Furness a good fit for product liability litigation.
In May 1996, ValuJet flight 592 caught fire after takeoff from Miami and crashed into the Everglades, killing all 110 people on board. McDonnell Douglas, the manufacturer of the plane that crashed, hired Furness’ firm to represent it in litigation in state and federal courts. Furness remembers visiting the crash site as experts investigated the wreckage.
“The day I went, they brought out a big metal container filled with contents and dumped it out. The first thing that fell out toward me was a little teddy bear,” she says. “That’s when you realize the reality and severity of what you’re doing in your defense work.”
Ultimately, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that mechanics for SabreTech, a contractor that maintained ValuJet’s planes, had improperly stored dozens of oxygen containers in the cargo hold, igniting the fire that led to the crash. The NTSB also blamed ValuJet and the Federal Aviation Administration for lax oversight. The cases against McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) were dismissed or settled without an admission of wrongdoing.
Furness says she got to see how different lawyers operated and gravitated toward those who had “mastered the facts.”
“If there was a deposition or a hearing, and people were moving along and needed to confirm that something they recalled was or was not correct, there were certain lawyers they would always look to. And I saw the power and confidence in that,” she says.
Balancing act
Over time, Furness developed a niche defending pharmaceutical and medical device companies against product liability claims. Starting in the mid-2000s, she was national coordinating counsel for Indevus Pharmaceuticals in litigation filed by people claiming to have been injured by fen-phen diet pills. She coordinated local counsel in nearly every state across the U.S. and managed the resolution of more than 10,000 cases, she says.
“We didn’t ever take these cases to trial. This was all pretrial workup,” she says. “We’re down to two or three small cases at this point.” Indeed, her cases can take years to settle or resolve. “You’re never certain at what point things will be over,” she says. “As a type A personality, I’d love to complete something and mark it off and move on to the next thing, but it doesn’t work that way.”
Furness, who has an 11-year-old son, bemoans the fact that most of her female lawyer friends who started off with her no longer work at the firm. “They’re either in-house or permanent law clerks and stay-at-home moms. Some are law professors,” she says. “That’s not unique to Carlton Fields. It’s the profession.”
