She initially represented miners in Kentucky denied Black Lung Benefits. She went into the bowels of a mine in Eastern Kentucky at the face of the mine where dynamite was placed, and then felt the vibrations as the miners "shot coal" (exploded portions of the face to loosen the coal). Despite wearing a paper mask, she found herself coughing and sneezing coal dust for days and only then began to understand the potential for pneumoconiosis in miners who had spent decades in the mines.
After representing coalminers, she then began to represent wrongfully denied Social Security Disability benefits. She also began representing injured workers, which she continued to do for over 20 years. She co-founded the state's first organization devoted to serving as a watchdog for insurance abuses for the injured: Florida Worker's Advocates, and ultimately serving as president of this organization. She volunteered her time lobbying for over a decade on behalf of the injured and was the first woman to be elected Chair of the Florida Bar Worker's Compensation Section in its 25-year history. She served as President of the Marion County Bar Association.
While practicing worker's compensation law, she began to notice an alarming pattern. Defense medical experts were testifying against her clients and their conclusions were strikingly similar. Either her clients were:
a. not injured,
b. injured but had been cured, or
c. exaggerating.
She decided to change the focus of her career. She met with psychologists who explained how data could be manipulated. She spent over ten years, nights and weekends, studying the process, having physicals performed upon her to learn how defense doctors hid or mislead the evidence. She traveled the nation at her own expense meeting authors of various psychological tests and interviewing them about examples of how their tests were abused in the wrong hands.
))))..but she has obviously taken on a more active roll from what I have seen in the past few hearings...
raying: LET IT PLEASE BE TOMMY BAHAMA C. Mason ! 