Selling the Dream meets Empire of Pain in this shocking, never-told-before story of three women caught in a web of telemarketing scammers, shady doctors, and profit-hungry lawyers who turned fears surrounding a faulty medical device affecting millions of women into a goldmine.

A Cappella Books and Georgia Center for the Book welcome author and Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law Elizabeth Chamblee Burch to discuss her new book, The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory. Burch will appear in conversation Don Samuel, nationally recognized criminal defense attorney and co-founder of Garland, Samuel & Loeb, P.C.


This event is free and open to the public. Registration requested, not required. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the venue.

About the Book
For decades, late-night television has blared a familiar refrain: If you or a loved one has been injured by X product…

But behind those ads lies a lesser-known world where elaborate scams revictimize the injured. Why else would thousands of women with health insurance take out loans with astronomical interest rates and fly to south Florida to have their pelvic mesh surgically removed at a chiropractor’s clinic?

The Pain Brokers, by law professor Elizabeth Burch, is a damning investigation of a scheme made possible by a medical and legal complex that too often views women’s bodies as cash machines and fails to take their pain seriously.

As Burch unfurls each level to the scheme, we meet an enthralling cast of characters, from a world class scam artist who reaped tens of millions of dollars at a south Florida call center, to the ultimate white shoe power lawyer who defended Big Pharma but became an unlikely hero, to a newly minted small-town Arkansas attorney who advocated for the unseen and unheard. But at the center are three women, Jerri, Barb, and Sharon, whose lives were upended by the very procedure they were told would save them.

A page-turning, urgently necessary work of public service journalism, The Pain Brokers is not only a chilling exposé of a legal system gone awry, but a wake-up call to the ways in which it harms those it is meant to help.

About the Author
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is an award-winning scholar and the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. A prolific author on mass tort lawsuits, she is also a frequent commentator in national news media such as NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA TODAY, and the Los Angeles Times.

About the Conversation Partner
Don Samuel is a nationally recognized criminal defense attorney and co-founder of Garland, Samuel & Loeb, P.C., with over 44 years of experience in high-profile cases that have captivated public attention—from defending Ray Lewis and Ben Roethlisberger to representing antique dealer Jim Williams, whose case inspired the bestselling book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A masterful storyteller who has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts across 22 states, Don was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2000 and has been ranked by Chambers International as a top white collar criminal defense attorney for the past 18 years. He has taught the White Collar Criminal Defense course as an adjunct law professor at Georgia State University and has authored multiple legal treatises including “Georgia Criminal Law Case Finder” and “Eleventh Circuit Criminal Handbook.” Married to acclaimed author Melissa Fay Greene (Praying for Sheetrock, The Temple Bombing), Don brings a literary sensibility to legal storytelling and understands how to make complex investigations come alive for general audiences.