With more than 25 years of experience representing victims of medical malpractice, Julia R. Arfaa has built one of Maryland’s most decorated plaintiff practices. Arfaa, a Baltimore attorney, focuses on injuries and wrongful death cases across Maryland and six additional jurisdictions.

Among her landmark verdicts: a $21 million award in 2012 for birth injury negligence and an $18.54 million verdict in 2017 that ranks as the second-largest in Baltimore County malpractice history. Arfaa holds lifetime membership in the Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, serves as an associate member of the American Board of Trial Advocates and lectures at the University of Maryland School of Law.

With more than four decades of courtroom experience, H. Kenneth Armstrong has tried over 200 cases to jury verdict, arbitration award or court decision as a senior partner focused on medical malpractice, personal injury and complex civil litigation.

Armstrong earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Clark University in 1976 and a Juris Doctorate from Washington College of Law, American University in 1979. For 20 years, he has returned to his alma mater as a clinical professor teaching trial advocacy. A fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Armstrong has appeared in Best Lawyers in America for more than 25 years.

Before co-founding Bertram & Murphy, Katie Bertram spent years as both a medical malpractice attorney and director of risk management at Georgetown University Hospital — giving her rare insight into how physicians and hospitals evaluate claims against them. She draws on that dual perspective to advocate for patients and families who have suffered harm.

Bertram earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986 and her law degree from Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in 1989. She was named 2026 DC Trial Lawyer of the Year and has appeared on Washingtonian Best Lawyers, Best Lawyers and Super Lawyers lists since 2014.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry today?

Healthcare is facing very difficult times, including provider burnout and staffing shortages as well as ineffective, duplicative and dangerous electronic medical record systems. These industry challenges are unfair to providers and place patients at increased risk of serious preventable harm. We are seeing more blatant systems issues that are foreseeable and should have been prevented that end of causing catastrophic harm and in some cases result in patient death.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Be yourself in trial.

How do you define success?

My goal in every case is to help the family obtain justice, which I define as answers, accountability and sufficient resources to try to balance the harms done by the wrongdoer.

Fellowship in the American College of Trial Lawyers, extended by invitation only to those who have demonstrated the highest standards of trial advocacy, reflects the depth of Christina N. Billiet’s courtroom record. Managing partner at Waranch & Brown LLC., Billiet has built her practice defending medical malpractice cases in state and federal courts, representing physicians, nurses and other healthcare providers in board of physician, guardianship and hospital privileging matters.

She has led trial teams to defense verdicts in multimillion-dollar cases. Billiet holds a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Maryland Honors Program and a law degree from the University of Baltimore School of Law.

A graduate of Tulane University School of Law, where he earned his Juris Doctorate in 1982, Bruce A. Blaylock focuses his practice on personal injury, accident and medical malpractice law, with an emphasis on catastrophic cases. Blaylock resolves more than 85% of his cases without going to court.

He serves on multiple committees of the Bar Association for Montgomery County, including as co-chair of the Community Relations Committee, and holds memberships in the Maryland State Bar Association, Maryland Association for Justice, American Association for Justice and the Trial Lawyers Association of Metropolitan Washington, D.C.

A partner at Brockstedt Mandalas Federico, Phil Federico leads the firm’s mass tort/class-action and environmental law practices after beginning his career in medical malpractice litigation.

He has served as co-lead counsel in landmark environmental settlements, including a $205 million resolution against poultry giant Mountaire and a $103 million settlement approved in 2024 involving a South Carolina paper mill. Federico currently leads PFAS-related class-action lawsuits targeting facilities in Salisbury and Elkton and represents nearly 80 school boards suing major social media companies over youth mental health harms.

He earned his law degree from the University of Baltimore.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry today?

The legal profession is navigating an era of profound disruption, from rapidly evolving technology to increasingly complex regulatory landscapes and shifting client expectations. Clients today demand greater efficiency, more transparency and faster results, even as the cases themselves grow more technically demanding. In plaintiff-side litigation, and particularly in mass torts and environmental law, there is the added challenge of confronting well-resourced corporate defendants with nearly unlimited legal budgets. For firms representing individuals and communities, the cost and complexity of competing at that level, with world-class expert witnesses, sophisticated data analysis and multi-jurisdictional coordination, requires constant innovation and discipline. At the same time, the rise of artificial intelligence presents both a challenge and an opportunity: Firms that thoughtfully integrate these tools will better serve their clients, but doing so responsibly, without compromising accuracy or ethics, requires real intentionality.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

My father was an attorney who practiced law for more than 60 years, and he was very much my mentor. His advice was simple: If you take care of your clients, you’ll make a good living. Don’t focus on the money; focus on the cases and take care of your clients. That has stayed with me through nearly four decades of practice. It was true when I was a medical malpractice lawyer helping one family at a time, and it’s just as true now that I’m representing hundreds of thousands of people in mass tort and environmental cases. The measure of success was never the verdict or the settlement figure. It was the hug you got from a client when the case was over.

How do you define success?

Success, to me, is measured by impact, not by the size of a verdict alone but by whether the outcome actually changed something for the people I represent. A settlement number matters, but so does whether a company is required to clean up a contaminated aquifer, whether a family gets answers about what happened to them and whether the precedent set in one case prevents another family from going through the same ordeal. After more than four decades in this work, I’ve come to believe that the cases worth taking are the ones where winning means something beyond the courtroom, where justice has a ripple effect on a community, public policy and corporate behavior. That is the standard I hold myself to.

A litigator whose entire 25-year career has unfolded at Goodell DeVries, Nikki Nesbitt has risen from summer associate to managing partner of the firm. Her practice centers on healthcare litigation, with particular depth in the defense of medical malpractice cases as well as civil rights disputes brought by employees, patients, guests and other claimants.

Nesbitt represents clients before administrative agencies, state and federal trial courts and appellate courts, and also handles employment matters for employers in the region and beyond. Her litigation background informs counsel she provides on claims prevention and the development of policies, guidelines and agreements.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry today?

Succession planning in the age of technological advancement is a tremendous challenge. Although each is a standalone puzzle, they happen to be occurring simultaneously in the legal industry (and others) as highly successful senior attorneys are retiring from a lower-tech practice, while others are coming up behind them and supporting clients in a higher-tech landscape. The clients, going through their own succession planning, have understandable but challenging expectations that their attorneys will implement technologies to help improve outcomes and reduce costs. What this means is that law firms and businesses must groom new leaders and client managers without being able to rely on the foundations built over many years. Instead, the new leadership must forge a new and unsettled path that involves risks and rewards not previously encountered.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

I always liked and identified with the guidance that “life is all about managing expectations.” In litigation and in leadership, it is critical to be up front with your clients or colleagues about what is on the horizon. If you expect a challenge ahead, explaining what it might be and how you plan to address it gives your audience a sense of calm and appreciation that instills trust and confidence in your leadership.

How do you define success?

Success happens when a goal is achieved, even if it was not the intended goal. Winning a case is unquestionably a success. But even in losing a case, a lawyer (and her client) can achieve goals that serve as their own successes, such as establishing stronger relationships through the tribulations of litigation, learning how to problem-solve in a way that will help in future cases and developing skills that can only be cultivated under challenging circumstances. Opportunities for success exist at all levels.

With more than 30 years focused on medical malpractice and catastrophic injury, Karl Protil has built a national reputation advocating for victims of surgical errors, misdiagnosis, stroke misdiagnosis and birth trauma. His cerebral palsy caseload spans the country, producing multimillion-dollar recoveries for families of infants harmed by medical negligence.

Protil also handles Federal Tort Claims Act and Military Claims Act cases against the United States. Peers regularly refer complex matters to him, and he contributes to the profession through continuing legal education instruction, published articles and service as a medical malpractice mediator. He chairs the board of The Menare Foundation, a nonprofit preserving Underground Railroad history.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry today?

The biggest challenge facing medical malpractice and personal injury law today is ensuring that damage caps and systemic barriers don’t prevent seriously injured clients from receiving the full measure of justice they deserve. Maryland’s cap on noneconomic damages continues to limit what juries can award. At the same time, the complexity and cost of litigating these cases continue to rise. For plaintiffs’ attorneys, the challenge is fighting for families who have already suffered immeasurably, while navigating a legal system that increasingly favors well-resourced defendants.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

To never forget that behind every case is a person or a family whose life has been turned upside down. It sounds simple, but it’s easy to get lost in the legal and medical complexity of these cases. Keeping the human being at the center of everything you do is what drives you to work harder, prepare more thoroughly and fight more relentlessly. That advice has guided me for more than 30 years.

How do you define success?

Success isn’t just a verdict or a settlement number. It’s the moment a family tells me that because of the outcome we achieved together, their child will have the resources, the care and the opportunities they need to live a full life, despite the injuries caused by someone else’s negligence. Success is knowing that the work I do provides real, lasting security for people at their most vulnerable.

A past president of the Maryland Association for Justice, George S. Tolley III teaches medical malpractice law at trial lawyer seminars and manages MAJ’s legislative advocacy efforts. Licensed in Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., he represents Maryland on the board of governors of the American Association for Justice and serves on the Maryland State Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Pattern Jury Instructions.

With partners Henry E. Dugan Jr. and Bruce J. Babij, Tolley was named MAJ Trial Lawyer of the Year for representing a child who suffered brain injuries from obstetrical negligence; he and Babij obtained a $20 million verdict in 2012 in a birth injury case.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry today?

The use and abuse of artificial intelligence is probably the biggest challenge to the practice of law today.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Treat every person you meet with dignity and respect.

How do you define success?

Public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimated that preventable medical errors kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, and millions more suffer serious nonfatal injuries. Unfortunately, Maryland law encourages malpractice by making it more affordable and easier to defend when providers cut corners on patient safety. In that context, when my clients can access the civil justice system in Maryland and secure a fair and just result, I count that as a success.

A native of Homer, Louisiana, Ryan K. Willis brings a public defender’s instincts to his work as an associate attorney at Smith Clinesmith LLP, where he focuses on medical malpractice. He previously served as an assistant public defender with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and has tried more than 50 bench and jury trials.

Willis serves as president of the Washington Bar Association Educational Foundation Inc. and vice president of the Washington Bar Association Inc. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Florida A&M University College of Law and a Master of Laws from American University Washington College of Law.