Diane Fleming Averell

Diane Averell is a member of the firm's Management Committee. Diane strives to serve the best interests of her clients by understanding their business, products, and long-term goals. She works to understand the business environment behind the case in order to define what will constitute a “win” for her clients. Armed with this insight, Diane is a fearless advocate and works tirelessly to defend her clients while respecting their business objectives. 

Diane has handled business-to-business disputes and defended personal injury claims on behalf of publicly traded companies, privately held corporations, and family-owned enterprises. She has significant experience defending corporations in wide-ranging industries as national, regional, and local counsel in asbestos and other toxic tort related litigation in jurisdictions across the U.S. Representing manufacturing companies, she has also defended failure-to-warn product liability claims related to prescription and over-the-counter drugs, industrial chemicals and minerals, petroleum products, automotive parts, trucking equipment, industrial machinery, construction equipment, power tools, and tobacco products. Although she handles all aspects of complex litigation, her passion is working with toxicologists, epidemiologists, and physicians to defend her clients’ products on the issues of general and specific causation. Diane has tackled medical and scientific literature related to a wide range of human cancers  (bladder, liver, kidney, prostate, breast, ovarian, uterine, lung, leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) as well as stroke and cardiac disease. The culmination of her careful research and preparation is the strategic and surgical depositions of the plaintiffs and their experts, always with an eye towards summary judgment or eliminating the claims remaining for trial.