Biography - Dorothy Clay Sims
Ms Sims is the senior partner in the law firm of Sims, Stakenborg & Henry, P.A. with offices in Gainesville and Ocala, Florida.
Dorothy Clay Sims grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky, moving to Florida when she was 15. She attended the University of Florida and helped pay for her schooling with student loans and monies saved from waitressing at Steak & Shake and packing fruit.
She ultimately studied international law at Oxford University and received her B.A. and J. D. from the University of Florida.
Growing up she saw how others treated her brother who suffers from Downs's syndrome. While some people were kind, others were judgmental and mean spirited.
Early on, she knew she wanted to go into law representing the disabled. She represented coalmine workers in the 80's and then began to represent injured workers, which she continued to do for over 20 years.
Ms. Sims founded her law firm based upon the premise that the disabled deserved respect and help.
She was the first woman to be elected Chair of the Florida Bar Worker's Compensation Section in its 25-year history. She was also the President of the Marion County Bar Association 2003-2004 and past President of Florida Worker's Advocate.
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.) were injured but had been cured, or C.) were exaggerating. She knew this was not the case and decided to change the focus of her career.
Ms. Sims stopped representing injured workers and set about to understand the methods of the defense medical experts.
She wanted to understand the physical and psychological tests administered to her clients. She retained a psychologist who tested her using the same instruments given to her clients. She traveled around the country meeting the creators of the various tests asking them how doctors were able to falsely manipulate the tests.
She had physical examinations performed on her by medical doctors in an effort to understand how defense medical doctors were reaching their conclusions and learned how many of them were ignoring true science and objective findings.
Ms. Sims began to learn how the defense experts were manipulating the data and she began to publish on the subject in various legal journals, first in Florida Journals, then national journals and ultimately in international journals, in an effort to teach lawyers what to look for and how to deal with it and how to spot it.
She has lectured extensively on medical/legal issues with focus on direct and cross-examination of medical experts hired by the defense. She has lectured throughout the U.S., Japan and India on legal/psychiatric issues giving over 175 speeches to doctors and lawyers.
She also teaches at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
She authored the disability chapter for Emedicine.com. as well as publications for Worker's Injury Litigation Group and the Association for Trial Lawyers of America. Ms. Sims is a Martindale-Hubbell AV rated attorney.
In an effort to help other lawyers, Ms. Sims created www.mdinabox.com. This company is the first of its kind to offer medical doctors from developing nations to lawyers in the U.S. to help them analyze complicated medical aspects of a lawsuit. She and her husband, a medical doctor, traveled to India to train medical doctors to assist lawyers in the U.S. in understanding how science was manipulated in the name of forensic medicine. Since clients are responsible ultimately for their own costs, she was also pleased to find a way to reduce those costs by using medical doctors who charged 1/4th to 1/6th of what doctors in the U.S. would charge to assist on a case...assuming the lawyer could even find one. Most treating doctors wanted to practice medicine and were not interested in spending hours going through medical records, doing medical research. They, quite understandably, wanted to treat patients. She found that the doctors in developing nations were eager to help...and inexpensive. After announcing on the record that there was another doctor in attendance, Ms. Sims began to cross-examine defense medical experts with doctors from her company listening in on line, and instant messaging her suggested questions or issues of anatomy. It became harder and harder for the defense medical expert to justify and support the unscientific positions that had so easily been claimed in the past.
After cross-examining doctors for other lawyers in her firm, she came to the attention of lawyers throughout Florida and the U.S. and has also been consulted in international cases involving medicine.
Her practice is now limited to cross-examining physicians in cases involving a medical or psychological component throughout the U.S. She provides many sample depositions and motions including motions to permit videotaping and motions to demand all raw data to plaintiff's lawyers on a daily basis at no cost. She also prepares notebooks for lawyers who need to cross-examine doctors and she teaches them techniques to research the backgrounds of witnesses as well.
Ms. Sims and her husband have five children. She never forgot those years growing up in Kentucky and made sure her children understood the concept of giving back to those less fortunate. All five children have spent many hours volunteering. Her oldest son returned recently from Nepal where he spent 3 months volunteering at an abused women's shelter; another child volunteered for an organization which cleans up trail heads requiring him to live in the woods for 5 weeks with no amenities. The remaining children volunteered for Habitat for Humanity as well as a local homeless shelter and the spouse abuse center.
When she and her husband travel, they try to work in time volunteering in local shelters or with programs feeding the poor.
Her firm also employs an ethicist, who acts as a corporate "conscience" to make certain that a system of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct guides her work.
Her book, "Sworn to Lie" which chronicles some of the abuses visited upon the disabled by defense oriented and unscrupulous doctors and what to do about them, is scheduled for release in June, 2008.
Ms. Sims spends a minimum of 8 hours per week doing volunteer work for other lawyers who are handling pro bono cases.
Her quote?
"Volunteer. It's a simple way of infusing joy in your life."
