John has long been driven by the desire to make a difference, to help ensure that people are treated fairly. As a lawyer, this led him to devoting his career to protecting the rights of consumers and employees wronged by unethical and unlawful business practices.
Early in his career, he represented consumers in individual cases against auto manufacturers, car dealers, mobile home companies and others who had caused them harm. Now he represents the same type of clients in class action suits, often involving thousands of victims of corporate lawbreaking, such as illegal telemarketing.
John joined Bailey & Glasser in 2005 and has played a leading role in expanding the firm’s successful class action and mass tort practice. “I happen to really like the people I practice with, and I enjoy supporting them however I can,” John said.
John concentrates in class actions and complex litigation. John is the President of the firm, and he also leads the firm’s contingent practice area, which litigates individual, class, and mass actions in fields ranging from ERISA, to antitrust violations, to consumer class actions and product liability class actions.
John is experienced in appellate and trial work, and has tried complex mass and class actions to juries in state and federal court. Most recently, John was co-lead trial counsel in a certified class action alleging TCPA violations against DISH Network in the Middle District of North Carolina. After a five-day trial in January 2017, the jury handed down a $20.5 million verdict, finding DISH liable for more than 51,000 telemarketing calls placed by a defunct DISH dealer to persons whose telephone numbers were on the National Do Not Call Registry. The presiding judge has since trebled the jury’s damages award, bringing the judgment to $61.5 million for all violations.
He has achieved an AV Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell, the highest possible rating for legal ability and ethical standards.
John chairs the Development Advisory Group for Legal Aid of West Virginia, where he helped devise and lead its successful “Just One” fundraising campaign, which encourages all Bar members to donate the cash equivalent of one billable hour to support legal services for low-income West Virginians. He is president of the board of Our Vote, Our Future, a nonprofit organization devoted to registering and empowering voters and working on issues affecting childhood poverty in West Virginia. He serves on the visiting committee of the West Virginia University College of Law, and on the board of the Childhood Language Center, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help children communicate and succeed by providing high-quality speech therapy services. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Charleston.
In 2018, he was named a Fellow of the West Virginia State Bar Foundation, an honor recognizing those lawyers whose professional, public, and private careers have demonstrated outstanding dedication to the welfare of their communities and honorable service to the legal profession.
