Kimberly O. Branscome

Branscome earned a biomedical and chemical engineering degree before going to law school. With auspicious timing, she graduated from Harvard Law School just as firms began looking for attorneys with technical degrees.

While her scientific degree may not bear direct relevance to the cases she handles now, she said it is a clear advantage.

“It adds a certain comfort level in working with experts, many who have technical degrees, and also being able to jump into new scientific concepts, to read the literature and articles and be able to digest them,” she said. “Given what I do, that’s critical in almost every case I work on.”

Branscome, a trial lawyer with an emphasis in mass tort and products liability litigation, has served in a number of high-profile cases such as the Deepwater Horizon litigation on behalf of BP and multi-state ignition switch litigation on behalf of General Motors. She has handled environmental and toxic tort, product and professional liability and securities matters.

She obtained an important trial victory for Johnson & Johnson in a suit alleging that the consumer health care giant’s baby powder was contaminated with asbestos and caused the plaintiff’s mesothelioma Carla Allen v. Brenntag North America Inc., et al., DR180132 (Humboldt Sup. Ct., filed March 2, 2018).

The plaintiff’s counsel asked the jury to return a compensatory verdict of nearly $40 million and to find the company liable for punitive damages. The jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Johnson & Johnson, finding that the company’s baby powder performed safely and did not cause the plaintiff’s disease.

“One of the strategies we focused on in that case was to expose the shortcomings and biases, quite frankly, in the plaintiff’s presentation of evidence,” Branscome said. “Their experts ignored what in our view and our experts’ view were clear explanations for this woman’s disease. We wanted the jury to understand there was a bigger picture at play here. We gave other explanations for what might have caused the mesothelioma, and also presented evidence on all of the testing Johnson & Johnson, government agencies and independent laboratories at universities had done decade after decade of Johnson’s Baby Powder showing it’s safe.”

— Jennifer Chung Klam