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May 4, 2021 News

E. Michelle Drake Named a 2021 Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Trailblazer by the National Law Journal

Berger Montague is proud to announce that the National Law Journal has named Managing Shareholder E. Michelle Drake a 2021 Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Trailblazer.

The National Law Journal’s Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Trailblazers list honors legal professionals who have made significant marks on the practice, policy, and technological advancements in their sector.

Ms. Drake has spent her career forging her own path through the legal field and has been committed to helping “the little guy” since she was a student at Harvard Law. During her years as a law student, she interned with the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, took a class with death penalty expert Roger Hood at the University of Oxford, and worked as a law clerk for a former nurse’s trial defense team on a death penalty appeal.

After Ms. Drake graduated cum laude from Harvard Law, she moved to Atlanta to begin her career as a public defender before joining the team that opened the Georgia Capital Defender Office as a junior attorney. She worked as a public defender for 6 years before transitioning to private practice and becoming partner at a class action firm in Minnesota. While there, Ms. Drake built the firm’s consumer department from the ground up.

Ms. Drake joined Berger Montague in 2016 and opened its Minneapolis office, the Firm’s first office outside of Philadelphia. She and her Minneapolis team started the Firm’s Fair Credit Reporting Act department to great success. Ms. Drake’s work has resulted in one of the largest FCRA settlements to date ($15 million), groundbreaking injunctive relief and uncapped mediation programs with the Big 3 Credit Bureaus for millions of consumers, and multi-million-dollar settlements for data security breach victims.

In the National Law Journal’s profile on Ms. Drake, she discusses the rise in fair credit reporting litigation due to business incentives favoring cost-effective reporting over accuracy: “Big data is big business, and the three big credit reporting agencies will continue to make mistakes. And more companies are selling data, so the Fair Credit Reporting Act is becoming more important to change the incentives and make sure consumers are treated fairly.”

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