Writing to Inform, Educate, and Inspire Action — Q&A with Top Thought Leader Brenda Fulmer
[ The latest in our ongoing series of discussions on successful thought leadership with recipients of JD Supra’s 2021 Readers’ Choice awards: ]
Brenda Fulmer, a medical device personal injury partner at Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley, P.A., wants to educate people about product liability law and to help them better understand their options when harmed by defective drugs, medical devices, and consumer products. “Writing is a natural extension of what I do day to day, and a very a good way to communicate with my clients…” Equally important, she hopes to motivate her audience to take action and help make meaningful change in a system that can be, as she puts it, ‘just not right.’ She’s proud to have had several clients inspired enough – and angry enough – to go to DC to lobby against limitations imposed by Congress on the rights of consumers and to testify before the FDA about its approval of dangerous products.
How did you get started writing?
I’ve been writing my whole life. I wrote a lot even before I went to law school. I was on law review. And then, early in my career, I was always the one who wrote the web content for the firm’s website and did the blogs.
Writing is a natural extension of what I do day to day, and a very a good way to communicate with my clients: I regularly send them articles, posts, and other things I write, and they also follow what I’m publishing online.
How do you decide what to write about?
A lot of my content has to do with drug and medical device safety, the type of cases I handle. I don’t write about those matters just because I’m working on them, however, but because – unfortunately – there are a lot of these cases that are not actionable in the court system due to limitations that have been imposed by Congress or the Supreme Court.
So I write a lot about those issues because, honestly, it’s a travesty when a medical device that someone puts into their body fails and they are unable to sue. This is not right, and a lot of the things that I’ve written over the years build on that theme.
In addition, I often write about defective products that can’t be addressed in the court system, but that people should still know about. That often includes discussions about preemption and other limitations on liability for drug and medical device companies, as well as the Food and Drug Administration and the role that it plays in approving or clearing products for sale.
I try to maintain a content calendar, although I’m not perfect at it. It’s basically there so that I can make certain that I’m writing about cases or subjects that I would like to cover and hitting topics that are important to my audience. “…a lot of companies that I write about are reading my articles.” Sometimes I write because I haven’t covered a particular topic […]
