Michelle Hart Yeary

Michelle Hart Yeary is Counsel in Dechert’s product liability and mass tort practice group and focuses on complex products liability and mass torts in federal multidistrict litigation and coordinated state court proceedings. She has served as national, discovery, and defense liaison counsel in numerous high-profile tort cases in the United States. 

Ms. Yeary represents pharmaceutical and medical device companies in product liability and mass tort litigation, from inception through trial and appeals. In addition to her role managing all aspects of discovery, Ms. Yeary has served on trial teams for bellwether pharmaceutical trials, briefed and argued motions in MDLs focusing on complicated e-discovery and case management issues, and has extensive experience administering mass tort settlements.

Most recently, Ms. Yeary has been overseeing discovery for a privately held global information technology company in connection with class action litigations and related matters. She also represented AbbVie as one of its lead nation counsel and settlement counsel in product liability litigation related to its product Androgel, a testosterone replacement therapy. This litigation comprises an MDL in Chicago and additional cases in state courts in Mississippi, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Missouri.

Ms. Yeary is deeply committed to the improvement of e-discovery processes and as such works on the Privilege Log Project for the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (“EDRM”) where she is involved in developing a set of best practices for efficient logging of privileged documents, including consideration of possible rule amendments. The project has published a Streamlined Privilege Log Protocol which has been well received and secured a 4/4 Judges’ Shark Tank vote at the 2020 Georgetown Global Advanced Ediscovery Institute at which Ms. Yeary presented. Ms. Yeary is also a regular contributor to the award winning Drug and Device Law Blog.

Ms. Yeary is a regular contributor to the product liability and mass torts group’s newsletter, Dechert Re:Torts.