The Pain Brokers by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
A Book Review
Dec 17, 2025
Pelvic mesh settlements were expected to total $11 billion. Lead attorneys would receive $366 million in common-benefit fees; nonlead lawyers stood to net between $3.6 billion and $4.95 billion. The injured women—hundreds of thousands who suffered chronic pain, incontinence, and ruined marriages from medical devices implanted to treat prolapsed organs and stress urinary incontinence—would average $40,000 before fees and costs. Some would end up owing money. In The Pain Brokers, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a University of Georgia law professor and one of the nation’s foremost experts on mass tort litigation, traces how a network of con men, call centers, fake law firms, predatory lenders, and rogue doctors exploited this gold rush by turning plaintiffs into raw material. Over two years, Burch conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed 209,000 pages of documentation—police reports, criminal records, trial transcripts, medical records—to reconstruct a scheme in which women weren’t seeking justice so much as being processed through what she calls “America’s lawsuit factory.”