The Medical Malpractice Defender Inspired by Erin Brockovich

As a child, Sarah Cherry aspired to excel in the arts, medicine and the law. The Michigan-based medical malpractice defender saw the world as full of opportunity for an ambitious young person.

“I wanted to be an actress, I wanted to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer,” she says. “I had the impression I could do all those things at once.”

That impression remained in place until the day law took the lead in an unexpected way. Cherry was 13 years old when she saw Erin Brockovich—starring Julia Roberts as a legal secretary who builds a case against a company that is knowingly polluting a town’s water—and was forever changed.

“Lawyers used to be depicted as cold and soulless,” she says. “Erin Brockovich put a completely different spin on what a [person in the legal field] could be or what they look like. She showed that she wanted to make a difference in people’s lives and to show empathy.”

Cherry was born in Texas, and moved to Canada with her mother and sister when her parents separated. It was there that she homed in on her goals. But when she began telling adults around her about her plans to pursue the law, the response was often discouraging. It was in those moments, she recalls, that her mother’s support became crucial.

“Everybody said to me, ‘It’s OK if you change your mind, it’s really hard being a lawyer,’” Cherry says. “And that’s where my mom was my biggest cheerleader She was like, ‘If that’s what you want to do, I got your back.’”

Cherry received her bachelor’s from Laurentian University in Ontario then returned to the United States to attend law school at Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan. Since graduating, she has worked to defend individuals in the medical field from malpractice claims. What she notices, she says, is that plaintiffs often forget that health care providers are real people.

“In medical malpractice cases, these providers are accused of causing someone’s death or a serious injury of someone’s loved one, and they don’t take that lightly,” she says. “I don’t think people realize how difficult those accusations are on medical providers, and it weighs on them for years as these lawsuits go on.”

In that regard, Cherry sees her work as fighting for people she cares about. She recalls one scene in Erin Brockovich in which Brockovich reels off information about her clients, including their children’s names and ages, their birthdays, their phone numbers.

“The people I’m representing matter to me,” Cherry says. “Their lives matter, how this impacts them matters. So, I want to show them that I have their backs. I’m going to fight for them.”

Cherry also spends a good deal of time thinking about how to incorporate empathy into her practice. She believes that times are changing, and that the face of the law is changing with them.

“I think we’re finally getting to the point where empathy is valued in this profession, and it hasn’t been for a really long time,” she says.

Thinking back to what moved her so much about the movie, Cherry said she believes it had to do, in addition to seeing the possibility of empathy in the law, with being heard.

“It’s being able to say, ‘I’m going to speak, and people are going to listen to me,’” she says. “My opinion does matter. My voice matters.”