The Robertson Law Group will travel to St. Louis to recognize our founding partner, Susan Ford Robertson, as the 2020 Missouri Lawyer of the Year. We could not be more proud of Susan for her accomplishments, including her massive victories in the talc cases, where Susan was lead appellate counsel and trial strategist for one of the defendants in the cases. Not only did the winning opinion change the course of all the talc cases in Missouri Courts, but changed the landscape for all multi-party tort claims to follow in the state. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed with Susan’s argument that permissive joinder of separate claims could not be used to create venue in a county when, without joinder, venue in that county would not be proper for each claim. This opinion has had such an immediate and important impact that the Missouri legislature adopted the opinion language in enacting the new venue statute, going so far as to identify the case by name within the statute itself — a rarity in codified Missouri statutes. All of Susan’s hard work created a significant blow against improper forum shopping by plaintiffs in mass tort litigation, and certainly impacts Missouri’s mass tort litigation moving forward.
