The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Atria | One Signal Publishers, 352 pages
Barbara Shephard thought she was getting help. That belief, reasonable and human, is what powers everything that follows.
The pelvic mesh implanted during her surgery was causing pain. The implant — used to treat pelvic organ prolapse and incontinence, often after childbirth — was supposed to help. Instead, it hurt.
So when the call came from what seemed to be a medical advocate, she listened. After all, they had her medical records. They warned her that the mesh was dangerous, possibly carcinogenic. It needed to be removed immediately. They had a solution: fly to Florida, undergo surgery at a specialized clinic, and join a lawsuit against the original manufacturer. Insurance would not cover the procedure, but that was not a problem. She could take out a loan, and the money from the lawsuit would cover it.
What Barbara did not understand, as she added her electronic signature to a stack of DocuSign forms, was that she was stepping into a carefully engineered financial trap. Buried in the digital paperwork were interest rates that would follow her for years. And the entire operation — from the initial phone call to the explant surgery — was part of an elaborate scam designed to extract maximum profit from women who were already suffering.
A Scheme That Worked Because It Was Allowed To
The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory, exposes how human suffering becomes a profit center. Law professor Elizabeth Chamblee Burch transforms opaque mass tort litigation into gripping narrative, revealing an ecosystem of call centers, rogue clinics, predatory lenders, and lawyers who monetized women’s pain while keeping their stories out of public view.
Burch documents a scheme so elaborate it strains belief, yet it happened to thousands of women with pelvic mesh implants. It succeeded not because of one bad actor but because multiple systems aligned in exactly the wrong way. Women’s pain was minimized. Legal ethics were treated as flexible. Digital speed did the rest. This is true crime at its most unsettling: not a single villain, but an entire system that quietly reroutes justice when profit comes first.
At the center of the book are three women: Jerri Plummer, Sharon Gore, and Barbara Shepard. Burch, who teaches at the University of Georgia, studied creative writing in order to write this book. She renders the women profiled not as case studies but as people. And as Burch meticulously documents, it was made possible by a medical and legal system that too often views women’s bodies as revenue streams and dismisses their pain as insignificant.
Medical records were illegally obtained. Call center employees, none of them medical professionals, contacted women and read from scripts designed to terrify. The mesh is toxic. You need it removed now. We can help.
The women’s desperation was not incidental — it was the asset being exploited. The scammers understood what the legitimate medical system had long failed to grasp: women in chronic pain, dismissed repeatedly by doctors, would listen to anyone who spoke with promises of relief.
The Lawsuits That Were Never Meant to Win
After the surgeries came mass tort lawsuits, though not against the mesh manufacturers. Instead, the women sued their original doctors, often on dubious grounds. The cases rarely succeeded. That was beside the point. They generated fees.
The scammers hired McSweeney/Langevin, a Minneapolis law firm, to represent the women. Through a web of referral agreements, McSweeney/Langevin split fees with entities like Alpha Law. These were not law firms. They were shell companies controlled by the scammers themselves.
The numbers tell the story. In some arrangements, the actual lawyers received ten percent of the fees. Alpha Law took as much as eighty-five percent. Read that again. The women whose pain made the lawsuits possible were entitled to scraps, if anything at all.
When Lawyers Actually Lawyered
What rescues The Pain Brokers from despair is that it is also a book about the lawyers who refused to look away.
Barbara Binis, a white-shoe lawyer who had spent her career defending pharmaceutical companies, recognized the injustice at the heart of these cases and became an advocate for reform. The law itself is not the villain. Who controls it, and whose interests it serves at any given moment, is.
Another legal hero is J.R. Baxter, a newly minted small-town Arkansas attorney, took on Jerri’s case when larger firms would not. When he reviewed the agreements later, he was furious. A team of doctors, marketers, convicts, and financiers had convinced women they needed unnecessary surgery and financed it with predatory loans, all the while a “lawsuit machine could line their pockets while the poor women received nothing,” he noted.
The scammers, in Baxter’s view, “completely took advantage of Jerri’s lack of legal education and transactional experience to get her to agree to arbitration in Washington D.C., so they could keep their evil and selfish actions confidential.”
Baxter did his homework. He studied the Federal Arbitration Act. He understood that ethics rules forbid fee-sharing with non-lawyers. And he recognized that what had occurred was not merely exploitation but a corruption of the attorney-client relationship itself.
The Clause That Silenced Everything
These women did not believe they were signing away their chance to be heard. Neither would most of us. They thought they were signing medical consent forms and loan applications. Buried in the DocuSign paperwork was an arbitration clause — a legal minefield disguised as routine consent — that ensured their stories would never unfold in front of a jury. They had unknowingly agreed to mandatory arbitration in Washington, D.C., and consented to fee arrangements designed to enrich the very people exploiting them.
The clause did more than limit legal options. It erased accountability. Jury trials vanished. Public scrutiny disappeared. What remained was a private system optimized not for justice but for silence. The system depends on that assumption: speed over understanding, clicks over questions.
Meanwhile, and this is the part that tends to get lost in the paperwork, the women were left with surgical complications, crushing debt, and the dawning realization that every institution they had trusted had failed them.
What Burch Exposes
The gendered dimension makes the exploitation even more pointed. Pelvic mesh was approved with inadequate testing and harmed primarily women. When those women sought relief, they were vulnerable precisely because their pain had already been dismissed by the medical establishment. The scam worked by exploiting that long-standing indifference and layering legal and financial predation on top of it.
How many women remain vulnerable to similar schemes? What safeguards actually exist? And why did it take a small-town lawyer to challenge practices that flourished for years?
The Pain Brokers is rigorous investigative journalism wrapped in a page-turning narrative. Burch’s reporting is meticulous, her footnotes extensive, but her prose moves with urgency.
For readers who loved the way Empire of Pain exposed the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis, or how A Civil Action made environmental litigation gripping, The Pain Brokers offers the exposure of systemic corruption. The same patient unraveling of complex legal mechanisms that becomes clear through individual stories.
Barbara Shepard’s story should enrage anyone who believes the law is meant to function as a safeguard rather than a revenue stream. Burch has written a vital book — true crime, legal exposé, and a clear-eyed examination of how exploitation adapts to new tools. Jerri Plummer’s story, Sharon Gore’s story, Barbara Shepard’s story — they show what happens when every system that should protect people fails at once.
Thanks to Atria / One Signal Publishers for the prepublication galley. A version of this post was originally published on www.judicialjunkie.com.
“Thanks so much for reading and reviewing The Pain Brokers! I’m so happy to have these women’s stories out in the world.”
— Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Author