Ashley Burkett

Ashley Burkett is a member of the firm’s product liability and mass tort practice group but has advised a wide range of clients on some of their most challenging legal issues.

She has represented global pharmaceutical companies in nearly every aspect of litigation, including motion practice, discovery and case workup, trial, and appeals. She has extensive experience with legal and briefing strategy in product liability and other complex cases at the trial and appellate levels—including key dispositive issues like federal preemption and Federal Rule of Evidence 702’s standards governing the admission of expert testimony. She has also worked with company and expert witnesses on issues ranging from regulatory approval to pharmacovigilance to medical causation. She is an active member of Lawyers for Civil Justice, which advocates for improvements to procedural and evidentiary rules.

Ms. Burkett also has had the privilege to represent clients pro bono in high-stakes cases. She was a member of the team that persuaded the Florida Supreme Court to unanimously reverse a death-row inmate’s conviction and sentence in light of new DNA evidence and confessions by another suspect, which ultimately led to his exoneration. She represented a group of exonerees as amicus curiae in support a new trial for Charles McCrory, an Alabama inmate whose conviction rested on the same type of unscientific bite mark evidence that led to the wrongful convictions of the exonerees. And she was part of the team that advocated for the constitutional rights of Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was executed by the State of Alabama in January 2024 in the first known nitrogen hypoxia execution in the world.