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.

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.