Hildy Sastre of Shook, Hardy & Bacon says she feels like we’re at “an unprecedented moment” when it comes to anti-corporate sentiment among jurors across the country. 

Sastre, who is based in Miami and co-chairs the firm’s 250-lawyer product liability litigation practice alongside partners Katie Gates Calderon and Bill Geraghty, regularly defends the company at trial, often against individual plaintiffs. For example, she and partner Jon Strongman were runners-up for Litigator of the Week twice for winning defense verdicts for Sanofi-Aventis in the first two bellwether trials in multidistrict litigation targeting its chemo-therapy drug Taxotere with claims related to permanent hair loss. She was also part of a Shook team that won a defense verdict for Bayer in a Roundup case in Kansas City, Missouri last year during the company’s win streak, which preceded its recent string of trial losses on claims that exposure to the popular herbicide causes cancer.