Ms. Downs is one of the founding partners of the firm. She has extensive experience in the defense of professional negligence, products liability and a myriad of personal injury claims. She has been honored by elections as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Mary Alane Downs has been awarded membership in the American Board of Trial Advocates. Ms. Downs was named as one of the Top 25 Women Lawyers in Baltimore Magazine Super Lawyers, 2008. Ms. Downs represents hospitals, large specialty groups and multi-specialty groups and individual health care providers in a variety of medical and nursing specialties in professional malpractice claims before the Circuit Courts of Maryland and the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.

She also represents self-insured institutions and insurance companies including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, Inc., St. Mary’s Hospital, Princeton Insurance Company, Medical Protective, Preferred Professional Insurance Company and Professional Risk Management Services, Inc.

Ms. Downs is responsible for all aspects of defending a case from initial motions practice through discovery and ultimately to trial. Representative cases she has tried through verdict include maternal death; wrongful death caused by dialysis catheter insertion; brain damaged child from alleged inappropriate treatment of status epilepticus; wrongful birth of a Down Syndrome child following alleged negligent advice on an abnormal MSAFP; Plaintiff who developed pancreatis following an ERCP; wrongful death from undiagnosed PE; injury to knee from alleged negligent design of a knee brace; emotional and psychiatric injury from admitted sexual relationship with a psychiatrist and psychiatric and emotional injury from denied sexual relationship with psychiatrist.

Ms. Downs also has extensive experience representing insureds in a variety of personal injury claims including automobile negligence, slip and falls, products liabilities, defamation and false arrest/false imprisonment. She recently successfully defended a dump truck driver and his employer in a nighttime accident at a construction site where the dump truck ran over the construction worker. She has tried to verdict cases involving an alleged defective design of a knee brace, multi vehicle collisions, pedestrian accidents and slip and falls at commercial establishments. Ms. Downs has tried more that one hundred jury trials.

Ms. Downs lectures frequently to doctors and lawyers on issues relating to trial advocacy. She has organized and been defense counsel in several mock trials, including mock trials presented before the department of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, as well as the department of anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She has served on the faculty for Maryland Institute for Continuing Professional Education of Lawyers courses on trial advocacy, deposition training and Alternate Dispute Resolution. She has also lectured to law students in the advanced trial advocacy class.