William J. Lee is a Doctor of Law and Scientific Director who supports Kershaw Talley Barlow’s mass tort and class action practices and leads its scientific consulting practice. William routinely works with experts to develop scientific and medical evidence and performs epidemiological and biostatistical analyses as an expert himself in support of state and federal trial, appellate, and Supreme Court litigations. William currently serves on court-appointed leadership committees in Acetaminophen – ASD/ADHD Products Liability Litigation (MDL No. 3043) and Gilead Tenofovir Cases (JCCP No. 5043), and has served on such committees in Essure Product Cases (JCCP No. 4887), with a focus on science and expert work, propounding discovery and third-party discovery, developing trial themes, briefing legal issues, and document review. In each litigation, William has played an integral role in shaping leadership's pre-trial and trial strategies regarding causation, liability, and notice.
In recent years, William has worked with leading epidemiologists and biostatisticians to employ well-controlled, frequentist and Bayesian disproportionality methods to analyze post-market adverse events and develop new lines of evidence that many courts have not previously considered. For his significant and sustained contributions to the field of epidemiology and its application to the law, William has been elected to membership in the prestigious American College of Epidemiology and the International Epidemiological Association. William has also been named a leading American scientist by Marquis Who’s Who in America, which has published biographies of leading professionals since 1898.
After nearly a decade working in biomedical research, clinical research, epidemiology, and biostatistics, William attended Emory University School of Law for his legal education where he graduated with honors near the top of his class and was inducted into the Phi Delta Phi International Legal Honor Society. Prior to law school, William received his Master of Science Secundi Honoris Academici in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University and his Bachelor of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology from Duke University. William has worked at a number of high-profile universities and federal scientific agencies including Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the National Center for Patient Safety, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. William has published and presented his original research a number of times. This includes publishing a national, peer-reviewed study on critical quality of care outcomes from a novel patient safety intervention implemented across the Veterans Health Administration and presenting to the CDC Law and Science Advisory Group on biochemical and pharmacological challenges to synthetic drug laws.
In his spare time, William teaches English to schoolchildren in China and volunteers through his church and alumni networks to give back to the community. William currently serves as the Sacramento Chair of the Emory Alumni Board and is a member of the Duke Law Club of Northern California.
