The Legal Field with Britt Cramer

Britt Cramer is a litigation lawyer in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis. She has worked on a variety of cases after graduating from Harvard Law School regarding the False Claims Act, product liability, and commercial disputes. At HLS, she was editor of the Harvard Law Review. Cramer emphasizes the value of hearing about other people’s experiences to determine the path one wants to take. HULR is grateful to be able to speak with Ms. Cramer about her background, current job, and some casework. The two case highlights are Teva Pharmaceuticals v. United Healthcare and Doe v. Macleod. Both have different problems and ways of addressing a solution, showing that business litigation lawyers have to be prepared for any type of case they may work on.

The interview below was conducted in Fall 2023. It has been edited for brevity and clarity. **

Sanjana Jain (SJ):** Can you please talk about your background and what shaped your desire to become a litigator?

Britt Cramer (BC) : As a litigator, I handle companies suing other big companies. Business or commercial litigation happens when something has already gone wrong such as a product liability case. For example, I made one case about the drug Humira which is used to treat autoimmune diseases. Some people may claim that Humira caused their disease to get worse and because of that, they are going to sue the company for not having adequate warnings.

SJ: If you are working on a case when someone is suing another company, would you be going against a business litigation lawyer?

BC: It depends on the case. A lot of the time, the bigger companies with the money will often sign a development deal with a smaller company that has a great invention. A lot of the time, these deals don’t work out and the larger company gets sued by the smaller company by blaming them for being the reason the product didn’t work. In this instance, it would be two companies against each other and two business litigators against each other. In the product liability cases there’ll be an individual or class of individuals suing a company which is a different type of plaintiff’s lawyer.

SJ: What in your background or undergraduate experience led you to want to be a business litigation lawyer or just a lawyer in general?

BC: I think it's what ruled out my other ideas. I went to Georgetown for undergrad and being in DC, there are a lot of opportunities to work in politics. I went to college to be a speech writer so I was a double major in English and Government. Instead of studying abroad my junior year, I took a leave of absence and I worked on a gubernatorial campaign in their communications office. I'm a big believer in got to try it before you buy it. This was a field I just didn't like. I didn’t want to be around performatively cynical people and the hours are brutal. The next thing I thought was that I’ll be a journalist so I got an internship with This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I didn't like that either that much. I realized it would be very difficult to be the on-camera person if you were going down the TV route. I became stumped so I took a year and worked as a paralegal at the Department of Justice’s antitrust division right after I graduated. I ended up liking what was happening there. I thought the job was interesting, I liked the people I met, the hours were more humane, and the career path was more certain. I decided to take the LSAT and went to law school.

SJ: That sounds so cool! So would you agree that your internship at the Department of Justice’s office pushed you to law school?

BC: Yeah, pretty much. It was one of those things where I wanted to try career stuff and see what it was like to work there as a young person. I knew that I didn’t want to go to law school just because “you’re supposed to.” So after I ruled out politics and journalism, I thought that I was going to rule out law next and then ended up liking it. I tell everyone that you guys are so young and it’s so much better to figure out what you want to do before heading down the path. I also think everyone should work after college for at least a year or two years because it just puts your head on the straight before you go right to grad school.

SJ: That makes sense. Do you think the law field has changed over the past decade or so and would you say that it's for the better or the worse?

BC: One thing that I do think has been interesting is that there is so much more you can find out about people just from Googling and social media. When you encounter a witness from the other side, they have been prepped for your questions within an inch of their life. They have met with everyone at the other law firm who tells them how to tell the truth in a certain way. However, social media has people’s unguarded opinions as people can anonymously talk about their workplace on websites such as Glassdoor. It's not that hard to figure out who wrote what. I do all kinds of litigation including people who are suing saying they were hired for retaliatory reasons. A lot of times, you can see that they went on a long rant before talking to a lawyer and modifying their story.

SJ: It’s intriguing to hear that even though it is an anonymous website, in the end, you can always tell who is writing these posts. BC: Yeah you really can. We are not doing anything shady such as tracing down their IP address. The amount of information discoverable now on the internet and when they’re not being careful is very different from when I started.

SJ: I feel that this is a never-ending growing field that will become more and more prominent in our lives.

BC: For sure. To be honest I’m worried for people who are younger than me. I think it’ll be interesting going forward to see how much social media impacts young generations entering the business world.

SJ: The next question I have for you is what was the most interesting part of working as a law clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and how do you think that experience helped you become the lawyer you are today?

BC: With the DC Circuit Court, I clerked for Judge Judith Rogers and at that time, she was one of eleven federal judges who were black women. She went to law school with RGB and was there when there weren’t women's bathrooms on the Harvard Law campus because there just weren’t women. She remembers going to a dinner at the Dean’s office and he said to her and the other women that they should be proud of themselves for being at the school because they were taking away spots from their future leaders aka men. It was interesting to be with someone who had seen so much of how the law had changed in terms of the composition of the Bar with starting to become more prominent in the legal field. Substantively, one thing that I find interesting about being a clerk is you just get to see so many different kinds of lawyers doing the job. I would go to arguments even if they weren’t my case just because it was interesting. You end up learning that there are a lot of ways to be successful and to not be successful but it is unique to each lawyer.

SJ: For sure, and that is where a person can add in their interpretation.

BC: I also would say that there is value when I went to my firm to see how so many different lawyers could skin the cat in all these unique ways. I made it a priority to work with lots of different people with various styles. I say this to everyone but the only way to be successful if one is doing jury trials is to be genuine. They can smell fake on you a mile away. For me, that means being a bubbly, blonde woman. You just have to know how to do it professionally. I think that my real benefit of working before going to law school is that I saw people who had different styles and abilities that can be equally affected by using one’s style.

SJ: That is amazing and now your lifestyle can be only yours and people can learn from it.

BC: I hope so. I work with a lot of different folks and I like working with younger attorneys. At my firm, we do a type of internal mock trial. I always tell my associates who are going through it to try on some stuff and take a big swing because, in the end, it does not matter. You can see what feels good and works well for you. If someone imitates me, then they will just come off as an imitation of someone else.

SJ: That is amazing advice, thank you. Knowing that corporate firms have such a large influence that schools like Harvard Law, do you ever believe that corporate law is kind of like a prerequisite for going to other fields such as government litigation, or if you want to start a private practice?

BC: That is a good question and I'm not sure what I think because I have only been at one. I felt I didn’t have an option because I had six figures in loans when I came out of law school. If you want to go to big corporate law firms, that is the fastest way to pay off your debt, and at the same time, they have exceptional resources for training. My attitude when I was graduating was ‘I don't know if this is where I want to be forever. I'll see if I like it, but I'm going to hustle and pay down my debt as soon as I can.’ I think if you're somebody who doesn't quite know what you want to do, it is helpful to approach it this way. I arrived at the job and I liked it then and love it now.

SJ: I read about one of your cases, Teva Pharmaceuticals v. United Healthcare. What was your approach when you first received them as a client and what were some of the biggest challenges you faced?

BC: Teva was a pharmaceutical company that often made generic versions of drugs. They had been sued in a different lawsuit by an antitrust class and negotiated a settlement with United Healthcare to settle United out of the case. Then United hired new lawyers who advised them to sue and they tried to back out of the settlement. That case became about settling a different case. It was a very unusual set of facts. One thing we had to decide early on was where we were going to draw the line for attorney-client privilege. We had to take a discovery strategy and I had to read all their emails. In a normal case, something has happened, you hire lawyers, and prepare for the litigation, etc. Here, the way the lawyers were thinking also became the case.

SJ: That is interesting. I also read about Doe v. MacLeod which I found very interesting because it brings up many issues like sexual abuse and unfair treatment. How do you think this case brought change toward these issues in general or in the workplace? Do you think that there's any way of preventing this type of behavior before it's brought to court?

BC: That was honestly one of the hardest things I have done. The facts are just so brutal and it is hard trying to take stressful, personal facts about someone’s life and figure out how to present them to a jury. Usually, when it is just company versus company as much as I care about the outcome, it is not someone’s trauma. I learned a lot about our prison system through that case. I do think that if we can keep having verdicts like this then something is going to have to change. Our case is the largest single plaintiff 1983 sexual assault verdict in history. I think a lot of people think these people are criminals and they should be in there, but no one deserves to be treated like this.

SJ: I agree because if someone is in prison, they have made a mistake but they are also trying to make up for it by serving their time. They don’t go there for something like this to happen.

BC: That is what we hope. My client had an especially tragic satisfaction in that case. She was in a minimum security designation so there was no thought that she was violent. She was sentenced for a crime called Drug-Induced Homicide. She and her best friend were using heroin together and it turned out to be contaminated so when she woke up, her friend had died. When she called the ambulance, she was charged because she purchased the heroin. It truly does seem inhumane to me. She also became separated from her daughter and her daughter's father tried to cut off her access and sever that relationship. She fought for nine months for court-mandated access to speak to her daughter through another program. When she got her Women and Family Services counselor, the person who had to facilitate and supervise the phone call with her daughter began sexually assaulting her. It was just one bad thing after another. I think it's the work I'm the most proud of because it just became so personal and important to me.

SJ: I feel like this is an issue that we see in so many areas.

BC: It’s terrible. The warden of the prison still holds herself as an expert in prison reform. The investigator had failed to investigate this and was planning on using her as bait. Instead of being charged, he got promoted and now is training other investigators at other prisons. The actual abuser himself served in that same function for 18 months after the reports about my client had come out. Eventually, he was moved to admin duty so he was locked out of the facility but still paid by the state. He left the prison system to work for Family Protective Services. It is so gross and insane. None of them have been criminally charged. Until we start holding individuals accountable, I don't think the system can change because their instinct is to point up and down and sideways.

SJ: I enjoyed reading about this case because like you said, it brought up so many details about the prison system which I never would have thought about.

BC: I was shocked. I think the real problem stems from the fact that there is a dehumanization of the people in prison. It’s easier to just think of them not as people but as cattle. I only really know about Logan, but I understand from speaking with other folks in this space, that it is a pretty common problem. Plaintiffs win these cases less than half the time. It is not even that they are not winning a big dollar value. More than 50% of the time, they don’t even get anything, not even in front of a jury. When they do, most of the time they lose or receive a small monetary value. I’m so fortunate to work in a place that has so many resources. Hopefully, we can kind of help signal boost a little bit and get some more good results in these kinds of cases.

SJ: That's amazing. One of the last questions I have for you is do you think that the growth of technology and artificial intelligence is an advantage or a disadvantage in the legal field? Do you think it's going to affect the legal field at all?

BC: For sure, it's gonna affect the legal field and basically every field. My father-in-law is a lawyer and I remember he told me about the day the website ‘Legal forms.com’ launched. Before that time, you had to call a lawyer to write out everything in your name and then one day, there's a template online. Just like that, a lot of people whose whole practice was writing or doing this kind of thing went out of business. I think we're gonna see that happen again with AI. I can't quite tell where it's kind of going but I think if there's a way to do things cheaper and faster, folks are going to find a way to do that.

SJ: And like you said before, this is literally in every single field. It is crazy to see the amount technology has grown and how many jobs it takes away from people but that has also been seen from the beginning.

BC: Yeah. I think some groups were just completely against all technology and there was one group against the loom because they were handweavers. They would weave rugs and clothes by hand. When the loom was invented, they began to protest and say ‘We're going to lose jobs because this machine can do more than we can and faster’. They were right. Honestly, it makes me nervous that we don’t know what AI is capable of.

SJ: Lastly, for more of a fun question, what was your favorite part about being at Harvard Law School or on the Harvard Law Review?

BC: Well I met my husband at the law school so that was a pretty good part of it. I had a great time because I had worked first. People who came right out of college to law school could not believe how much work it was. People like me who had a 9-5 job beforehand felt school was great. Unfortunately, the first year matters the most. Your grades are the ones that matter the most for your next career. It can become difficult and stressful.

SJ: Those are all of my questions for today. Thank you so much for meeting with me and speaking about your background and current job. It was very eye-opening and I'm excited to read about more of your cases.